Businessman rishta for traders, dealers and self-employed professionals

What a businessman rishta actually involves

The man and the business are the same person

Start with the fact that changes everything else, because it is almost never said out loud in a rishta conversation. In a sole proprietorship there is no legal separation between the owner and the business. The proprietor is personally liable for all of its debts. A bad season, a customer who defaults, a consignment lost in transit or a guarantee called in does not stop at the shop door; it reaches whatever the man owns, including the house the family lives in.

A private limited company works differently in principle, which is one of the reasons concerns of any size eventually incorporate. But most of Pakistani commerce runs on proprietorships and always has, so this is not a reason to avoid the category. It is a reason to know which structure is in front of you. A family marrying a daughter into a trading household is accepting a share of that household’s risk, and it is entitled to understand the shape of it before the nikah rather than during a bad year.

Where a proprietorship actually exists on paper

Families are routinely told to check a business with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and for a shop or a trading concern that advice achieves nothing, because the Commission holds companies and nothing else. A sole proprietorship needs no registration with it at all. What it does have, if it is real, is a national tax number from the revenue authority, a sales tax registration where it supplies taxable goods or services, a bank account in the business name, and depending on the trade and the number of employees, registrations with the provincial labour department, the social security institution once there are five or more employees, and professional tax with excise and taxation.

That list is the useful one, because it is a ladder. A man with a tax number and nothing else has a small operation, which is perfectly respectable. A man with a sales tax registration, five employees on social security and professional tax paid has something substantially larger, and each of those is a document rather than a claim. Ask which rungs of the ladder he is on, and the answer describes the business without anybody having to quote a figure.

Three documents from three directions

The single most practical thing on this page: ask for three documents rather than one, and make sure they come from different places. A tax number with filer status, which can be confirmed publicly. Bank statements for the business account across several months, not one chosen month. And something that ties him to the premises, which is a lease, an ownership document or a utility bill in the business name.

Any single one of those can be explained, borrowed or arranged. Three of them, pointing in the same direction, are very difficult to assemble if the business is not what it is said to be. This approach also has the advantage of being unanswerable without rudeness: nobody has to accuse anybody of anything, and a genuine trader produces all three in a morning because he produces them routinely for banks and suppliers.

The cheques nobody mentions, and the law behind them

Post-dated cheques are the working currency of Pakistani trade. Suppliers take them as security, credit is extended against them, and a trader of any size has some in circulation at all times. Most families have no idea that there is a criminal provision attached.

Under the Penal Code, a person who dishonestly issues a cheque towards the repayment of a loan or the fulfilment of an obligation, where the cheque is then dishonoured on presentation, commits an offence punishable with imprisonment which may extend to three years, or with a fine, or with both. The available defence is narrow: that arrangements had been made with the bank for the cheque to be honoured and the bank was at fault in not honouring it, and the burden of establishing that falls on the accused.

So the question for a family is not whether he has issued cheques, because almost certainly he has and there is nothing wrong with it. The questions are how many are outstanding, to whom, and for what totals, and whether any has ever been returned. A trader who answers that calmly and with figures is running his business properly. Evasiveness on this particular subject is worth more attention than evasiveness on almost any other.

Twenty minutes at the premises, and what to look at

Go on an ordinary working day, unannounced if the relationship permits it, and resist being shown around. Four things are worth watching. Whether customers or orders are actually arriving, because a quiet hour means nothing and a quiet day means a great deal. How deep the stock goes behind the front, since a display can be filled for a season or taken on credit. Whether the staff treat him as the person in charge. And who else is plainly in charge, because an elder brother or a father at the desk answers the ownership question without anybody needing to raise it.

This is not subterfuge and should not feel like it. Both families are forming a judgement, and the business is the thing being judged. A visit is also the most respectful form of the enquiry: it replaces speculation with observation, and it is far harder to feel insulted by somebody who has come to see your shop than by somebody who has been asking about it elsewhere.

Owning a business and working in one

The commonest overstatement in this category is not invented turnover. It is the quiet slide between owning and working. A man who manages his father’s shop, draws from the till, is trusted completely and will inherit it one day describes himself as a businessman, and in every sense that matters socially he is one. On paper he owns nothing, draws no defined salary and holds no document. Nobody has lied. The proposal is simply a different one from the one the other family believes it is weighing.

One question settles it, and it should be asked gently and early: is the business in your name, your father’s, or shared, and what do you draw from it in a month. The follow-up matters too: is that figure fixed, or is it whatever the business allows after everybody else has been paid. A settled monthly amount is close to a salary and a household can be planned on it. An amount that moves with the trade means his wife will feel every turn of the market, and she is entitled to know that in advance.

The day somebody asks him to prove it

Self-employed income is real, and it is awkward to evidence at exactly the moments when evidence is demanded. A spouse visa application wants documented income. So does a bank considering a house loan, a landlord abroad, and sometimes a school. A salaried man produces three payslips. A trader produces an explanation.

The remedy is dull and it works, and it is worth raising in a rishta conversation because it takes years rather than weeks. File returns consistently. Bank the takings instead of holding them as cash. Keep the business account separate from the household account. A man who has done those three things for three years can evidence his income as convincingly as any employee. A man who has not may find himself unable to prove an income he genuinely earns, and a couple planning to move abroad should know which of the two they are starting from.

Writing a self-employed profile that gets taken seriously

Scale is the instinct and specificity is what works. Large business in Karachi tells a careful family nothing and attracts exactly the people a careful family does not want. The alternative costs two lines.

Name the trade and the product: auto parts distribution, three pharmacies, cloth wholesale in the Faisalabad market, a construction contracting firm doing government work. State the legal form, plainly: proprietorship, registered partnership, or private limited. Say whether it is in his own name or the family’s, and roughly how long it has run. Mention that returns are filed, if they are, because in this category that single word carries more weight than any adjective. Precision here does something unusual: it filters out the approaches that were never going to survive a visit to the premises, which saves everybody the weeks that such approaches always consume.