Entrepreneurship, technology and life

Slide 12: What Is In For Me? Now that I bursted all the myths and bubbles, why am I still running a business?  Other than I like to torture myself, here are some of the reasons. Lots of Learning: If you love to learn, this is where all the learning is.  As OffGamers grew, I noticed that none of the partners have any knowledge in financials and I decided to attend the CFA course.  Even though I didn't pass the exam, I learnt enough about financials.  I also learnt more about law and trademark after we received the first lawyer letter. Entrepreneurship expose you to all areas of business, not just a very narrow scope as an employee in MNC. Lots of Challenges: Economy outlook, GST, currency, haze, etc, are all challenges.  If you don't like challenge, please stay away from entrepreneurship. Self Discovery: I figured that everything that didn't work in the company or business can be reflected back to me.  For example, when we can't hit sales ta...

Slide 7: Myth #1 - I Will Have Flexible Time For the first 5 years of OffGamers, I don't remember taking any vacation and all partners worked through most of the public holidays.  My phone is next to me when I go to bed, as OffGamers is an online store running 24/7.  Good thing about online store is that we have orders and sales coming in even when we are sleeping, bad thing is that there are also complaints and issues coming in 24/7. It took us about 7 years and 120 pax later, to be able to work 9 to 5, and have annual leaves like other employees. “Entrepreneurship is working hard for 40 hours per week so that you can save enough to start a business and work 60 hours per week.”  I can't seem to find the author of the quote. Slide 8: Myth #2 - I Will be Super Rich I am still getting less pay than my first job as a programmer in USA.  Most business owners pay themselves very low as most profit are put back into growing their business.  Grabcar and U...

I was invited by UCSI University in Malaysia to give a talk on entrepreneurship in their inaugural SEE (Student Entrepreneurial Experience) Conference. I put together the following slides for the event. Five MYTHS about Entrepreneurship (UCSI University, 2015) from Stanley Chee Here are the notes of the slides and I noticed that I have missed some of them during the talk. Slide 1 Cover page: UCSI University Student Entrepreneurial Experience Conference 2015 Five MYTHS about Entrepreneurship Stanley Chee Slide 2 A recent photo of me and my wife in Tblisi, Georgia. She started a new business importing naturally semi-sweet wine from Georgia to Malaysia. Slide 3 Many businesses that I am involved in, also illustrated my fair share of successes and failures in businesses. I now run a digital marketing agency, Gapture.  Gapture is a certified Google Partner and I am a certified Google regional trainer. UPDATE (2019-07-10): I have exited Gapture in Octo...

I believe most entrepreneurs have this conversation before, "Are successful people just lucky?".  I have talked to many businessmen who have made it and they attributed a big portion of their success to luck.  I have also talked to some who haven't made it and they were also attributing it to the lack of luck. Photo credit: mentatdgt Some of my friends argued that it is plain luck since everything is uncertain in the business world and some of these people are just "lucky".  My counter-argument to them would be, are you saying that if Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, or Richard Branson were to start a new business (assuming that they have no access to their established network and wealth), it is as good a chance to succeed as any random person from the street? After a few conversions on this topic, I decided to write about some of the conclusions that I have come to.  First of all, I believe even for a seasoned entrepreneur like Richard Branson, there will ...

Going green to me means being easy on the environment, but whatever we are implementing must also make sense (it can't be too tedious for users) and cents (it has to be same or lower in cost).  Here are some "Go Green" strategies that we have implemented in the office: Office Printer When shopping for our new printer, the requirements are: Laser printer with separate drum and toner unit.   Laser toner is much more economic than inkjets and we also make sure the laser printer we are getting have separate drum and toner unit as the drum unit usually have longer life cycle than the toner. Duplex printing , so that we can save on papers by printing on both sides of the paper without manually flipping and re-feeding the papers. Extra tray for recycle papers (papers that have been printed on one side only).  Please note that we only feed the tray with recycle papers that do not contain confidential information. Scan-to-email function.   Together with a vir...

In my digital marketing company, we outsource a lot of the tasks in the office.  The following considerations are weighed before we decide outsourcing or hiring: Is this role a core competency of our business? If the answer is yes, we will hire if we have enough jobs to keep him/her busy.  If we don't have enough jobs yet, we will outsource until we can get enough jobs to hire one full-time. Photo credit: rawpixel.com Is there a career path and environment for this role to grow in our company? We would like all our team members to grow professionally and personally.  We may have enough jobs for a particular role to be more cost effective hiring in-house, but if we know that we can't provide the right environment for this person to grow, we will outsource the jobs. We outsource our accounting, payroll, systems administration and office boy (despatch) jobs.  There is pretty much no career path for an accountant, a systems administrator and an office b...

We need a phone number for the company for general inquiries, support and also as a back-up number just in case a particular mobile number is not reachable.  This number will be printed and published on all our marketing materials, including letterhead, business cards, website, invoices, etc. Photo credit: Joenibraw Challenges We want as minimal hardware investment as possible and we always have the idea of able to have the whole company work outside the office when necessary. Simple solution will just be getting another mobile phone number and a dedicated mobile phone, to be carried by whoever responsible to answer the incoming calls.  However, we are afraid that having a mobile phone number as our company number would give the impression of a fly-by-night company or a freelancer. Solutions that We Adopted We came across a radio ads from our local telco, Maxis, promoting Unity Hotline service, where we can get a 1-700 hotline number and all incoming calls will ...

I'm a strong supporter of open-source, freeware and SaaS (Software as a Service).  We have recently switched half of our company's computers into MacBook Pro.  Here are a list of software that we installed (or not installed, if we are using SaaS) for common office tasks on all MacBook Pro.  Most of them work on Windows as well since we were previously living in that world. Photo credit: Toni Cuenca Text document, Spreadsheet: OpenOffice  (Free) Presentation: Keynote  (USD19.99).   We previously used OpenOffice for presentation. E-mail, Calendar, Address Book: Google Apps  (Free for 10 users) Anti-Virus: None, however we do run as Standard User instead of Admin on our MacBook.   We previously used Avast on our Windows computers. I am a strong advocate for Google Mail (part of Google Apps) as I have used Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird and some webmail solutions, but nothing come close to Google Mail, in the se...

Background We need a file system to backup all our laptop data files in real-time manner.  We also need a file system to share files among team members.  In previous company, we set up a NAS (Network Attached Storage) and configured backup script that automatically run every morning to backup files from each laptop to the NAS.  We also set up shared folders in the NAS for file sharing purpose.  The shortcoming of the file backup system is that it is not so real-time and it can only run when the laptop is connected to the office LAN (Local Area Network).  The shortcoming of file sharing system is that we can only access the file when connected to LAN or via VPN (Virtual Private Network) when working remotely. Challenges Some of the policies that our company (team of seven as of writing, and we don't intend to get bigger than 30) follows when adopting a IT solution is that: a) Minimal setup cost b) Minimal, if not zero, hardware (disaster recovery and...