Investing and running businesses in Indonesia has been one of the toughest yet most exciting adventure I have been given to live so far.

After more than 3 years living here, I realized I have gone such a long way, from being scared of being caught by the immigration because I was working from my laptop on a tourist visa (yes, everybody does it, and yes it’s illegal and got me into troubles),

to being able to properly incorporate a foreign owned company in Indonesia, and now legally running my activities, paying my taxes, and investing in the country as an expat resident.

However, I am also well aware that what seems to me to be a very long way, is actually just the first step of a lifelong journey.

The lessons I share below aren’t here to preach, and I don’t pretend I know anything better than anyone.

These are some guidelines I follow myself to help me taking decisions.

I learned some of them from my own mistakes, but most of them came from other people’s experience.

People who are smarter than me, people who ran business in Indonesia for decades, and who, in spite of all their success, took some of their time to help, share, teach and guide me.

It would take a whole book to put in writing everything I would love to share with you, so I will focus here on 3 life-and-death lessons the most successful expat entrepreneurs apply in Indonesia.

1. DON’T TAKE SHORTCUTS WITH WHAT MATTERS. SHORTCUTS MAY TAKE LONGER.

Whatever you are trying to do, you always stumble upon agents who claim they can do it for you.

And because the Indonesian laws are so confusing, people like me work with agents to get things done quicker and better.

It’s a common practice here, and you can use it for things such as visa extensions, getting your driving license, and even to incorporate your business.

The thing is, competent (and honest) agents are harder to find than those who just want to get your money but run away after making you believe everything you want is possible, and that you absolutely need them to do it.

Because we all tend to always be so impatient in the west, we easily get taken advantage of here, by people who offer quick solutions to everything.

For things like visa extensions, where the amount of money involved is small, it’s easy to find someone who can get it done, and prices are usually well known.

But when it comes to incorporate a foreign investment company, working permits, land purchases, etc. Things can go very wrong real quick.

A friend of mine learned 2 years after running his business that his business never actually was registered in the first place, and the agent ran away with his money, sending him fake receipts/government licenses.

The agent then disappeared and the guy got deported for illegal work in Indonesia.

Another friend got his new resident permit declined after the immigration figured out one of his former permits was a fake one, which took him into a long, costly and painful process to legalize his situation from scratch.

Those are 2 examples amongst thousands that happen every year in Indonesia.

Nobody is immune to meeting and dealing with a scammy agent, but everybody is responsible for running their own due diligence, and learning how to be patient.

This works for almost everything related to running a business here.

For example, when you want to deal with a supplier or to buy a land/house, you can often get a better price or better conditions if you just take time to visit the seller, talk to him and create a genuine connection with him before dealing the price (and if you speak the language, more on this below).

Of course, you will always hear a story of someone who got something done in no time, just because he knew someone important and paid him to solve a situation.

It happens, a lot.

But when you arrive in a country without any situation, money or power whatsoever, the last of the things you want to do, is to owe something to people who are way more powerful than you are.

In 99% of the cases, and especially when you’re here to stay, you want to stay away from any shortcut that seems to good to be true.

Because as the saying goes, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. It very often is.

If I could start again from scratch, I would take more time comparing offers and understanding processes in general.

It would have saved me from some unexpected losses and delusions that I took some time to recover from.

2. THE MINDSET BEHIND THE LAW MATTERS MORE THAN THE LAW ITSELF.

This is the hardest lesson I am learning this year.

You will hear a lot of expats (and even locals) complaining about the laws in Indonesia.

Because they can be unclear, outdated, or even go against each other.

It can be very confusing, and the legend says that Indonesian laws are the reason why I lost all my hair at such a young age.

Especially when it comes to corporate laws, you will find that things that make perfect sense for us in Occident, just don’t seem to apply at all in Indonesia.

I used to feel extremely frustrated, and the idea of giving everything up, just because I couldn’t get to know what was the right way to do things, crossed my mind hundreds of times.

I was seeing so many people not even trying to do anything legally, who were doing just fine (or seemed to), and here I was, trying to follow every single law, trying to do the right thing, and everything seemed so impossible.

“No wonders why so many people run illegal businesses here. The legal way is such a nightmare!”, I used to think.

Truth is, indeed, doing business legally is way harder.

But everyone who’s here to stay and thrive should know that, most those who win on the long run are those who go legal.

And because it’s literally impossible to follow and respect every single law to the letter, I learned a different approach.

“What matters is not what the law actually says. You need to understand what was the intention of the government. You need to understand the mindset of the law, instead of focusing on its semantics.” – Paraphrasing an advice I got from Terje H Nilsen, from Harcourts Seven Stones.

It means that we need to understand what is the goal of the law, rather than trying to get frustrated by it’s literal meaning.

It doesn’t necessarily make things easy, but at least it makes them possible.

3. DON’T RESIST THE CULTURE, EMBRACE IT.

Indonesia doesn’t have one culture. It has an heritage of hundreds of cultures, carried by people coming from 17,000+ islands.

This is part of what makes this country so beautifully diverse.

And when expats intend to build and run businesses here, we all tend to start doing one mistake: resisting the culture.

I don’t talk about a militant act of resistance, but about dozens of little things that, when put together, create a gap between us and locals that is so wide that we can’t manage to build anything meaningful together.

This is a recurring point I keep seeing with expats who are here for a very long time and lead successful projects (personal, social, business..): they all embrace the local culture.

Now, it doesn’t mean they lose their own culture to adopt another one.

It means they are curious, and try to understand how things work from a local’s perspective.

Because people’s culture tells you how to deal with them in such a way that you can reach your goals, while they can thrive with their own ones.

It starts with things as simple as learning the language.

Communication is critical in every single business. So imagine if you’re French, and speak English to an Indonesian worker who barely learned it in high school.

You might end up thinking he is stupid and can’t understand anything.

Now try to learn Bahasa Indonesia, go back to your worker, and realize that he also can speak Balinese, Javanese and another language from his dad’s tribe who come from a remote island of Sulawesi.

Who is the one who feels stupid, now?

Well, me, back to when I kept feeling frustrated by people who couldn’t understand my instructions properly.

When I decided to learn the language and speak mostly in Bahasa, I took back the responsibility of communicating properly, and instead of being frustrated, I started to push myself to learn harder.

The language also helps to understand other aspects of the culture, such as their relation to the notion of time, their fear of conflict, and other behaviors.

I insist with the language, because I believe it’s the one single thing that matters the most here, but embracing the culture goes way beyond.

In my own case, I experienced things such as: eating local food, hanging out in their circles of friends, living in their village, talking with the elders, going to local ceremonies, praying with them, being invited to local weddings, learning skills from them, etc.

Opening my mind and experiencing the local way of living, at least to know how it feels, is one of the best things I have done.

And here, I guess I am not talking only about running a business, but more generally about living in Indonesia.

Not only embracing the culture will lead to more understanding of how things work in general, it will also eventually open doors you didn’t even know existed.

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Indonesia is recovering from a dark past of dictatorship and corruption. The current president, Joko Widodo, is doing an amazing job at elevating the people together with the country as a whole.

Now Indonesia opens its doors a bit wider to foreign investors, the country is on track for an incredible growth.

But growing businesses in Indonesia as a foreigner is still a very challenging way to take, and I hope that this article helped you a bit to understand how things work here.

Of course, a lot of those points would deserve their own stand alone article.

Also, please note that this is based on my personal experience and the one of those who took time to share theirs with me. It is not meant to be shared as an absolute truth.

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