Some advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur

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ON YOUR OWN By TAN THIAM HOCK

Tan Thiam Hock gives some free but useful tips on how to be a successful entrepreneur.

 Know your weaknesses and strengths

JAGDEV from StarBiz sent me a cheerful email this morning reminding me of my weekly responsibilities. I am desperately searching for inspiration as I look around the dreary faces of fellow passengers on a train ride from Cambridge to London. Looking out the window, the sunny autumn day looks promising as we pass through the pretty countryside but somehow I had this feeling that it was going to rain in London. It was a hardly an inspiring thought but I do have to persevere and continue, inspired or not.

Since I started this column five weeks ago, I have had quite a number of entrepreneurs writing in, describing their frustrations at their slow progress in achieving success and was searching for nuggets of inspiration from me. Some relate their current business predicaments and asked for advice, others seek direction and even mentorship.

As for me, I was seeking refuge from a deluge of questions tinged with high expectations. I was in trouble, deep trouble. All I wanted to do was share some experiences, make a few jokes about celeb entrepreneurs and show the Star CEO a thing or two about mass marketing. Suddenly, I am expected to give advice and solutions to a vast variety of business scenarios and problems.

Qualified and knowledgeable consultants charge you for advice as much as your wallet can afford. Advice with solutions will cost you twice as much. Solutions with more questions which begets more solutions will result in permanent charges. I believe they call this personal coaching.

Sharing of opinion is free. You do not have to agree with an opinion. But you normally take an advice seriously because you paid for it. For once, I will give you free advice which should save you tonnes of ringgit in consultant fees. Just a few simple opinions for that man in the mirror.



Know your own limitations. Strengths. Weaknesses. Tolerance tests for suffering, humiliation, stress and financial deficits. Only your mum knows more about you than you. Once you have a favourable opinion about yourself, set realistic and achievable targets. Just be yourself. Play to your strengths and be the biggest fish in a small pond.

Be happy with little successes. Each brick of success will inspire you to the next level. Do not always dream of the big day, the one deal that will help you rule the world. It might never come. Besides higher financial rewards, have you built a better reputation with your bankers, suppliers and customers?. Are you happy with what you have achieved or do you still feel that the world owes you a living?

Wealth is relative so do not compare. There is always someone richer than you, bigger than you and smarter than you. Unless you are Bill Gates. Of which you are not. So stay humble. You will have more friends. And you will be a richer person for that.

Do not profit from other people's misery. Share your profits with your suppliers and your staff. A continuous profitable supply chain ensures long-term business survival. Suppliers and staff stay with you if they trust and respect you. And the only way you earn their trust is through honest engagements and mutual respect.

Behind all successful entrepreneurs, you will find a loyal core team of very capable managers. Ralph Marshall of Astro and Maxis, Kathryn Tan of AirAsia, Tan Sri Tay Ah Lek of Public Bank and countless other professional managers in all the successful corporations. Entrepreneurs hog the limelight with their vision and persona but they need to be complemented by trusted executioners to crystallise their vision. They are the unsung heroes and deserved to be treated with tender loving care by entrepreneurs.

Whether your business is small or big, when you are faced with what seems like insurmountable problems, you will feel really lonely sitting alone on your own little hill. Learn to embrace the solitude. Take this opportunity to reflect on where you have gone wrong. Take responsibility and not blame others. Eat humble pie if you have to. Take a step backward so that you can move two steps forward.

All entrepreneurs make mistakes. A successful entrepreneur does not make fatal mistakes. They just make more right moves than wrong ones. Just make sure the sum of positives exceed the sum of all negatives and you are on the way to a healthy balance sheet.

The Achilles Heel of high flying entrepreneurs has got to be over-confidence. Used to continuous rapid success, they start to believe in their own invincibility and perceived ability to be successful in every new business they wish to undertake.

Over-leveraging to fuel expansion can be fatal if the bleeding from new projects does not stop. So unless you have a bottomless pit of reserves like Genting or Hong Leong, be cautious in your ambitions. Expand, consolidate, strengthen your cash-flow, then expand. You will never be poor again.

I must admit that these opinions or free advice are hardly inspiring to entrepreneur wannabes. If you are seriously looking for guidance, there are many books on entrepreneurship. You could attend many seminars and join the numerous clubs for entrepreneurs. Just Google and you will find enlightenment.

Last piece of free advice.

No free lunches in business. Chew on that.

● The writer is an entrepreneur who hopes to shares his experience and insights with readers who want to take that giant leap into business but are not sure if they should. Email him at  thtan@alliancecosmetics.com

Learning from Steve Jobs: from Garage to World Power!

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Learning from Steve Jobs

Ceritalah by KARIM RASLAN

Before we can start talking about the need for innovation or speak of the need to create geniuses, we have to learn that creativity and innovation are first and foremost cultural phenomena.

STEVE Jobs is dead. Apple’s co-founder did more than anyone – and this includes his arch-rival Microsoft’s Bill Gates – to make computing manageable for everyone. Indeed, even my seventy-something mother owns a well-used iPad2.

Jobs’ brilliance lay in his ability to look at technology from the viewpoint of the user, stripping down the complexity and jargon until a machine became a tool in the hand of the user.

He asked straight forward but critical questions: what do consumers want and need? How can I meet these demands?

Instead of producing computers that flaunt their sophistication, Jobs made his devices ever more accessible and simple.

Apple products were the perfect marriage of form and function. They were sleek, intuitive and useful – objects that we enjoy touching and holding so much so that we develop a strange emotional link with them.

In order to achieve this aim, Jobs also upended the way we’ve traditionally thought of music, books and films – freeing them from their analogue formats. He discarded the old-fashioned ways of receiving entertainment and placed his products – the iPod, the iPhone and iPad at the heart of future solutions.

His success was prodigious and extraordinary. At one stage last year, Apple briefly eclipsed ExxonMobil in terms of market capitalisation.



Indeed, it’s estimated that well over 100 million iPhones and 25 million iPads have been sold to date. That the Indian government, on the day he died, rolled out its own tablet computer, called the Aakash (or “Sky”) is a greater tribute than the legions of obituaries.

The global outpouring of grief on Jobs’ death is hence a measure of the man’s reach even in death. It’s also a testament to his iconoclastic style as well as his breath-taking ability to think unconventionally.

Furthermore, Jobs executed his ideas with flamboyance and flair, disregarding the consequences as his various inspirational ideas wrought havoc with long established industries.

Standing back from the man’s achievements, it’s hard to deny that all entrepreneurs have a little bit of Steve Jobs in them.

They all possess a modicum of his verve, dynamism and, yes, madness. Wouldn’t they have become bank managers or civil servants otherwise?

However, we can’t deny the element of luck either: had Jobs died in the 90s, he would probably have been consigned to history’s footnotes, yet another businessman ousted from a company he had founded.

Also, as the son of a Syrian emigrant, Jobs was lucky he was born in America, where the opportunities to succeed were more pronounced than anywhere else.

Indeed, it’s hard to see where else a college dropout could turn a company that he started in his parent’s garage into a multinational with a market capitalisation of US$222.12bil (RM694.78bil).



This is not to say he was some kind of secular saint. His paranoia and abuse of friends and subordinates alike were well-documented. Neither was he a flag-waving patriot either.

Unlike Henry Ford, most of Apple’s products were contracted out to East Asian manufacturers, particularly China, where allegations of sweatshop labour and poor working conditions continue to haunt the tech-giant even today.

Nevertheless, no one can deny that Jobs displayed the individualism and entrepreneurial spirit that are the hallmarks of the American character.

Indeed, if we shift the discussion from Jobs to the idea of entrepreneurialism, we have to acknowledge that we are all shaped by the environment we are born into.

We can separate ourselves from the world that surrounds us on our birth.

So as we start talking about the need for “innovation” in Malaysia’s economy or speak piously of the need to “create” geniuses we have to address the national condition.

Let me ask a question then: what if Steve Jobs were born in Malaysia? Could he have reached the same dizzying heights or would he have been consigned, like so many others, to dead-end jobs.

Alternatively, would he have directed his prodigious talents to chasing after government contracts? I’m not joking.

If Malaysia is to compete in the future, we have got to learn that creativity and innovation are first and foremost cultural phenomena. These are things that you cannot pay for or legislate into existence.

Creativity cannot thrive in an environment where the balance between risk and reward is skewered. Can we truly say we’re allowing people to reach their fullest potential when our obsessions with race and religion are so dominant?

Innovation in Malaysia is hampered by our Government’s constant interventions: protecting and bailing-out businesses and individuals that ought to have gone bust ages ago.

There’s absolutely no incentive for people to think unconventionally if the most important criteria for creating wealth is your “know who” rather than “know how”.

How many Malaysian Jobs’ or Gates’ or Zuckerberg’s have we smothered because they lacked connections or were born in the “wrong” community?

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has declared 2012 to be the “National Innovation Move­ment” year, but it won’t count for much unless we start really rewarding hard work and genius rather than mediocrity or mindless conformity.

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Soros makes Forbes Top 10 rich list

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SINGAPORE: Microsoft founder Bill Gates has retained his top spot on the Forbes 2011 ranking of the richest people in America with US$59bil.

The number two spot went to Warren Buffett with US$39bil and Larry Ellison (No. 3) with US$33bil.

George Soros (pic), in seventh spot, joins the Top 10 for the first time, with US$22bil, and is one of the 27 hedge fund managers – 7% of the Forbes 400 – featured in Hedged Fortunes.

George Soros

This year, entrepreneurs dominate the ranks, comprising an all-time high of 70% of the Forbes 400 members.

Enthusiasm for popular brands, like Starbucks and Forever 21, has helped boost some fortunes, while the spread of social media has sparked others.

The combined wealth of America’s richest is US$1.5 trillion, with an average net worth of US$3.8bil, reflecting a 12% uptick from 2010.

Wealth was up for 262 members of this year’s list, while 72 members saw a decline.



The Forbes 400 welcomed 18 new members in 2011 (Fresh faces), including Sean Parker (No. 200) who rocked the music industry with Napster and helped build Facebook (agent of disruption), John Henry (No. 375), majority owner of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC, Jeffrey Skoll (No. 139) whose Participant Media’s most recent release, “The Help”, has grossed nearly US$143mil to date and Forever 21’s Jin Sook & Do Won Chang (No. 88).

Every member of the Top 20 gained wealth this year, with the exception of Buffett, down US$6bil from 2010, the largest dollar amount loss of any 400 member.

The year’s biggest dollar gainer is Mark Zuckerberg (No. 14), who cracked the Top 20 with a gain of US$10.6bil.

Among the 42 women on the list are media mogul Oprah Winfrey (No. 139) newcomer Gayle Cook (No. 96) and Meg Whitman (No. 331). – Bernama

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• Forbes 400 Richest: Less to Tax Buffett On (thestreet.com)
• Forbes 400: Bill Gates Tops Forbes Rich List 2011 (blippitt.com)