A loss and a gain

We've lost our first employee today. Ravi decided to start something of his own, uncomfortably close to our location unfortunately. To be fair signs were there, and we did try to keep him. But we're happy that he's trying out something closer to his heart and wish him success.

However he provided us a very short notice. Since we've just started and are operating well below capacity, we can absorb his departure. However this could have put us in a spot in other circumstances. And its important to the continuity of the business that employees provide sufficient notice of their intention to quit so that planning a transition is possible. We did have an understanding to this respect with our employees, but nothing formal. So while there was nothing stopping Ravi from leaving on one day's notice, there was nothing stopping us from holding his salary back either.

It could be a dilemma. What do you do? Should you penalise your employee for not sticking to the terms of employment? Or should you accept the fact that employees are not bound to work for you and can quit when they please?

At this point it is a no brainer. He was not contractually obliged to work for us. So we have to pay him what is due to him.

And it is only fair to do so. There may be a counter argument that putting a penalty will deter othe employees from taking similar steps. However I don't think it holds much water. There must be better ways to make our employees loyal to us and ensure that the business' success is aligned with their well being. We need to find what these ways are, but we are certain that penalizing is counter productive in the long run. Soma says it best 'Kisi ka bura kar ke mera koi bhala nehi hone waala'. Besides, penalties need to be contractually binding, and at this point there is no contract between our employees and ourselves.

Anyway, so we lost Ravi today, but we do not have plans to replace him yet.

Also I've made a few changes to our website http://www.pinkandbluespa.com/. If you type the url or if you type 'pink and blue spa' it does come on top of google results. So there is some definite progress there.

I also tried to put some meta tags etc to the pages for SEO. The main reason is that it is important to have a better search ranking when searching for the hobby classes Soma conducts. Right now, we're nowhere in the search results, so that means we're not ranked yet. It could be because Google may have not crawled these pages on our site yet. However I am confident that once crawled, my work today should improve our Google ranking. So the first priority is ensuring Google continues to crawl our site. To effect this we're trying to leave a link to our site wherever possible (which basically means our blogs and facebook profiles). Don't know how far it will get us though. Any help from readers are welcome.

Pink and Blue Spa

Its been a long time since I've written. I'd almost forgotten that I had a blog:)

But yeah, today I decided to try some credentials out and try and access my blog again. And voila success. Not sure what to write though. There is so much to update since I've last posted.

One of the biggest things we've done however is to start a spa in Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore. Its called Pink and Blue. We've got a website as well for it http://www.pinkandbluespa.com/. Its been a month and a half since we've started. In addition to the spa Soma also conducts hobby classes there. She teaches soap making, candle making, terracotta making and other hobby classes in a workshop that we converted out of a room in our spa. To be fair the workshop/classes are much more popular than the spa has been so far. However occasionally we've had decent responses for our spa services as well.

It'll probably be nice to track the progress of the spa and hobby classes through this blog, if of course I keep posting regularly. I intend to, honestly. I don't know if anybody reads this blog anymore though. If you do, please drop a note.

Also a request, if you have a blog or some other website, could you please link/refer to our website http://www.pinkandbluespa.com/ in someway. Desperate to get this into google search results. Its a very crude website right now though, I'm updating it in whatever time I get between meetings and work in office. But its a challenge to drive traffic to this, since we intend to use this website to market/book our spa services, hobby classes as well as sell some stuff (good stuff if I may say so myself) through this website.

I intend to write to see how that progresses as well.