AlwaysWoW! For a Great Great WoW in Life

Thoughts from me about things that are cool, that are WoW, that blow me away. Observations about businesses and people from a wide variety of life. Daily encounters - and thoughts outside the box, inside the box and without any box. New thinking, and challenging old thinking. Passionate about life, about respect, and about integrity.

Saturday, August 14, 2004

Summarising the conference: How to become a Malaysian Entrepreneur



There were three speakers at the conference that I mentioned in my previous posting. One was Aman Aznan (I hope I got his name correct), who is running an office furniture supply business. The second one was Lim Boon Siong who runs the Vista Laser Eye Center (www.vista.com.my) and the third was a guy called Suresh, from www.jobstreet.com.

Their objective was basically to showcast, how someone becomes successful without a lot of capital at hand. I think the objective was good, because most of the time, people think that it takes millions and millions of dollars to get a business up and running.

Azman started by redefining capital. He said that capital is also having a good character in everything you do. Being a good person, living great values would build up trust that allows someone to get credit from for example, suppliers, who wouldn't give this credit to someone with lesser character - makes sense.

The second point he made was about knowledge. His objective is to learn something new everyday and he showcast how much he read. It is important to learn in order to understand and utilise what one learns. Basically, nobody wants to do business with someone who doesn't understand much.

The third ingredient to become a successful entrepreneur is to have selling skills. Selling is everything in life - be it the sale to your kid to learn smarter, a discussion with your wife, or to convince someone that his product is a good product and that he is the right person for the deal (examples by him). Azman also talked about the necessary passion that one needs to go forward.

Lim Boon Siong started his business of eye surgery as he underwent an operation of his eyes in Australia. His business is to correct eyesight, so that one doesn't need glasses or contact lenses anymore. He first brought people over to Australia but than started to set up a partnership with this company in Malaysia.

He stressed the importance of a couple of points as well:

1.) Will it work - one needs to have the vision and the strategy to run a business
2.) Where to get the capital you need - think outside the box what is possible, not just about the money available in the bank account
3.) How to get the know-how for the business. He isn't a doctor, so it was clear to him that he needed to team up with someone who has the knowledge
4.) Identify your sacrifices - it is clear that no one is rich or successful from day 1. There is a lot of suffering and a lot needs to be given up in order to become successful.
5.) Do whatever it takes and go forward with it.

The third speaker from www.jobstreet.com , Suresh, somehow missed the objective. He talked about the starting up of Jobstreet, but never related it to some simple and distilled points. May be one point that I could take from it was that timing must be right. Jobstreet started in 1995, 2 years before the Internet took of. What means that he was ahead of time. I learnt, in a different setting last week, that to be successful in business, one needs to build a business where demand comes tomorrow. So Jobstreet was able to capitalise on this.

|

Powered by Blogger

Blogarama - The Blog Directory