Handling rejection in Jamaica
Mistakes that led to Innovation in the Company Registration application process.
In Jamaica, three out of four applications for new company registrations get rejected at the Companies Office as of 2015. This is primarily because 93% of the applicants are do-it-yourselfers.
According to the Companies Office, the main contributor to the rejection rate is incorrectly formatted information. That is information spelt differently from that provided in supporting documents, or spelt inconsistently throughout the application.
We have been developing solutions for Company registration for the last three years and have registered over a hundred entities. Here are a few things we tried to gain product/market fit:
- Launching an online form. Nobody filled it out. People wanted someone to help them. They believed that assistance should be part of customer service at the Companies Office.
- Launching a media campaign. The majority of our customers spent their money based on recommendations from friends and family who registered businesses before. No revenue came from newspaper ads.
- Informing clients at the end of each day what is happening with their documents. Even if we had the worst day at the Companies Office, clients wanted to know the next steps we took and getting updates each day was worth it to them.
- Reviewing documents without signatures. We asked our clients to fill out the company registration forms and send it to us online for us to review, and we made suggestions/edits without needing a signature on the document. We only recommended the printout and signature after we were satisfied with the document.
- We took payments online and used courier services to get documents from clients. These eliminated the need for them to go into the Companies Office.
- We provided help with finding a JP for our clients to get ID documents witnessed
We have learned that the solution is not automation but collaboration. Our team now develops tools facilitating that.
What we have also realised is amidst the collaboration and the community reviews, the systems that registration sits on top of are not controlled by us. So we also offer two products to help you get up and running fast:
- Fully compliant shelf companies with bank accounts that we pre-register and file for a name change and transfer ownership, once you reserved your desired name and buy the company from us. This allows you to invoice immediately with a generic name and a legitimate TRN number while we make the desired changes to your new company details.
- Registration interventions in case you are still going through rejections despite several resubmissions, and need someone more experienced to come in and take over for you. With our relationships we can get rejected registrations resolved in less than 3 days.
Learn more about your options at StartupRobot the next time you need to register a company in Jamaica.
