TIP report

Something I wrote while I was in school. Found it as i was clearing my com

The first seminar I went to was the Buzzcity NUS inaugural Digital Media Forum cum MOU signing ceremony. The first speaker shared his experience of setting up a mobile applications. In the initiation stage, he spoke of the importance of market surveys and told us of an example of his findings.

He shared on how the people from less developed countries, people were more receptive to the idea of internet usage on their hand phones as opposed to internet on the computer as many were not computer savvy. He also shared with us the success of mobile social applications which he deemed to be the selling of friendship and vanity. His own success story involved the http://mygamma.com website.

The second seminar I attended was CEO unplugged. Adam Khoo was the 1st speaker. He spoke about learning how to model successful people, about this being the quickest way to attain the success that you desired. As he touched on how to brand and sell a product, giving examples of his own books, which are the fusion and reproduction of other books that he read with his personal touch. He therefore concludes that you do not need to have a great new idea to be an entrepreneur; you just have to improve on a current idea. With this he share a bit about his book, Mind your Destiny, whereby he teaches people to copy other people who excel in their fields.

Adam is one of the more memorable speakers from these series of seminars. I felt I could closely relate to his experiences and actually followed up on this talk by him by reading 3 of his books, Mind Your Destiny, Secrets of a Self-made Millionaire and Secrets of a Millionaire Investor. From two, namely Mind Your Destiny and Secrets of a Self-made Millionaire, I can see how he ‘copies’ ideas from other people, specifically, Mind Your Destiny was modeled after Steve Covey’s 7 habits of highly successful people and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. He also added his own experiences and a Singapore flavor to the book. Meanwhile, Secrets of a Self-made Millionaire was modeled after Rich Dad, Poor Dad and had a chapter effectively summarizing Warren Buffet’s ideas.

He also spoke of the joy of being in a business for the love of the job, not the money, as money is a just measure of success, not the motivation for doing the job.

The second speaker was Ivan Lee, the owner of New York, New York and Thai Express. He shared on how much of running a business is good leadership. He spoke on how in the past he worried too much about employee’s opinions and feelings and how he spent too much time trying to accommodate them. Now, he does not explain too much on his decisions and chooses to replace staff that go against him. He did however emphasize the need to respect and empower his staff to do their jobs.

I do agree with him on this point as I have a tendency to explain my self too much sometimes as I worry about what other people think of my decisions, especially when I lead projects. Too much empathy can be a problem as it distracts you from thinking about what is best for the task at hand. I realized this during group projects in NUS and have somewhat changed my style of working in a group.

He also spoke about copying other people’s idea as he studies other country restaurant’s menu ideas and improved on them for his own restaurant. He then spoke on Cash flow issues in business and the importance of being able to manage your cash flow well.

ASEANpreneurs youth leaders networks was the third seminar I attended. The 1ts speaker was Mr Teo Ser Luck who shared his experience that entrepreneurs need to learn to accept failures. He stressed that its not the success rate, but the ability to try and innovate, and gave the example of the person who invented the new coke, which failed miserably. But the person was promoted anyway. He also share on how the employee who lost 15 million at goggle was told by its owners that if he did not take risk, he was not doing his job. In his experience, for every 10 investments, there are about 2 successes. He also share how his interest in his work was initially about the money, but later became about keeping the people in their jobs.

The panel of discussions saw Ivan Lee sharing again. He shared on how his opening of a western café in the beginning had failed, after which he started Thai express. He spoke a bit on the importance of having an identity when doing retail, as with he did with Thai express. He stressed the importance locations when expanding, expressing his regret of opening an outlet in New Zealand, which he only visited once due to its distance.

Henry also followed up on the high failure rate in venture capitalism. He however mentioned that the one success made up for many failures that you would come across in his line of work. He shared on how too much investments can be a bad thing for a company, giving the example of how during the dot com boom, one of his companies had too much cash invested and it was wasted in hiring unnecessary people. This resulted in the collapse of the company.

Finally, Robert shared his experience in the air condition business. He shared on how he travels often to the countries that he plans to invest in to understand the local culture there. For example, home appliances sold in Vietnam are sold in small shops and therefore distribution would be very different as opposed to countries such as Singapore.

The fourth seminar was the unlocking the potential of solar energy seminar. This seminar was about the potential of solar power as a replacement for our current energy sources in view of the rising fuel cost. It dealt less with entrepreneurship because of the high cost of infrastructure.

I see similarities in many entrepreneurs. They all have a high threshold for failure; they take note of their mistakes and come back stronger. They all have passion for their work, that being their main driving force behind why they look forward to going to work everyday. I have learnt that you need to take a hard line with your staff at times and respect them at the same time. The most important thing I have learnt is probably how to view and take failure. Being a society driven by the need to succeed, failure had become almost a taboo word in our education system. This paradigm needs to change if we are to embrace an entrepreneurial spirit. We need to view failure as a learning experience, ‘just another way in which it does not work’ as Thomas Edison put it when he was trying to invent the light bulb. These entrepreneurs also modeled their idols or mentors (Adam Khoo) and learned from organizations already out there (Ivan Lee). They do not waste time reinventing the wheel.