Quote-worthy #2

If you’re going to fail, fail early. Then try differently.

~ not sure who 1st came up with this quote but credit to the person.

When exhaustion hits...

I finally succumbed to exhaustion. Last week was mad. Working almost 18hours for 6 days straight was very tough. By the time Saturday came around, I was losing it. By Sunday, I was snapping at people and things. I need a break.

How do you handle exhaustion while juggling your business together with your day job?

Business Skills: Asking the right questions

Business is all about asking the right questions. Only when you can do that, will you begin to experience success. But to get there, you have to actually make decisions, ask the wrong questions, fail (miserably sometimes), understand what made your questions wrong and discover what should have been asked. This is antithesis of being an employee, where mistakes are usually not tolerated and asking (wrong) questions could show you up as incompetent.

As you learn from your mistakes, you will learn to ask the right questions the next time around. And when you get the questions right, decision-making becomes so easy as the answers naturally lead you to making the right and, in turn, the profitable decisions.

Write-in and share your experiences on learning how to ask the right questions…

If you must ask...

People reading this blog might be asking, who is the person behind this blog and how qualified is he to be writing on entrepreneurship? Well, If you must know, I am…

• an investor in a US oil-well partnership (Google US shale oil boom)
• a partner in a travel business (I do new-market development and advise on e-business strategy)
• a founding shareholder of a vocational training institute that assists workers improve their employability and also move up the career ladder
• a founding shareholder of a Workplace Safety and Health (WSH) consultancy
• owner of 2 f&b outlets serving local delights

And… I work at a day job that goes from 9-5

Everything there has given me the experiences to write on entrepreneurship, specifically part-time entrepreneurship. By diving in head first, I have had a fantastic first-hand education on what it takes to get a business started up. My standing in various business interests has given me unique perspectives in managing different kinds of business issues and different types of  clients.

This blog was started to share those experiences, connect with other PTEs and tell the world that it is possible to do this! Sure its been tough sometimes, felt lost at other times and made numerous mistakes often, but those are what has brought me to where I am today and where I will be tomorrow and beyond.

Who are you?

Trials & Tribulations of a Part Time Entrepreneur

Last Thursday I faced a serious issue concerning one of my employees. Just as I was about to fall asleep, I got the call at 11.30pm on a working day. After determining that it was indeed an emergency, I rushed off to my office at midnight, together with my business partner.
By the time I got back home after resolving the issue, it was 3am. Despite that, I was up at 7.30am in the morning to go to work at my day job.

Before you start a part-time business, ask yourself: are you willing to make such sacrifices?

How trying to be perfect holds you back from success

By trying to be perfect, it actually works against you. Stalls our progress, limits your talent and keeps you from being successful.

When you say your product is imperfect, in who’s eyes is it imperfect? YOURSELF
When you say you want your product to be perfect before unleashing it onto the market, who are you making it perfect for? YOURSELF

Your product seems imperfect to you only. No one else has experienced your product, yet.

Beauty is in the eye of the holder. So is perfection. What I’ve discovered in my journey is that there is no such thing as perfect.

Will your customers see it as perfect just because you do?

Its the entrepreneurs who take the plunge and release their products onto the market that succeed. It sounds weird but the truly successful people took their products out there, got feedback, tweaked things, sent it back out, tweaked multiple times. Note that this never made their product perfect. It was brought to a level that satisfied customers demand at that point in time.

Do you see Google, Facebook and other businesses continuously releasing updates and modifications to their products? If they were striving for perfection at the first release, why then would they require updates? Are they successful now? U bet. Will they require further changes to their products? Certainly.

So stop over-worrying, get your product to a reasonable standard with a distinction against your competition and start marketing it! The market will tell you what changes it requires to be better (not perfect).

Quote-worthy

Absolutely love this quote from Mark Suster (http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/)

“It’s better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.It’s a way of life. It’s not about abusing the situations but about knowing when to push the boundaries. It’s about knowing that the overwhelming number of people in life are naysayers and “no sayers” and sometimes you gotta just roll the dice and say WTF”

Business takeaways from Yoga

Recently during the yoga class, the instructor brought up an interesting issue. For some reason, the management had decided to radically change the class schedules for this week. Obviously they must have received plenty of angry feedback and complaints from students who had tailored their lives to their preferred classes and were shocked at the drastic change.

So the instructor was explaining that the reason for the change was management responding to earlier feedback and suggestions from students on classes and schedules. And also feedback from the instructors on how to make the client experience better.

the instructor added that next week’s schedule would be more or less back to the previous schedules, save for minor tweaks.

As a PartTime Entrepreneur (PTE), two things that I take-away:

1. people’s resistance to change. People were so used to the routine of Monday-Hatha, Wednesday-Vinyasa that they cannot fathom any deviation from the norm. Imagine if a class reschedule had this effect, what would a career reschedule do to that person?

2. the management actually took in feedback and responded with changes to make things better. unfortunately, the changes were not well-received. Makes you wonder who exactly gave the feedback. Should it not be the exact students who were taking the classes? How then do we explain the frustration?

And then finally the instructor made a very very good point. When students give feedback, it should be with an explanation. Most people simply wrote-in “the class is fantastic” or “the instructor was sucky” or whatever else. Where is the because of?

How can we expect organizations to change without a “because of” attached to any feedback. Example, “your classes are awesome because the number of students is not overwhelming, giving enough space to spread my arms during the motions”. Do you think that will help the management understand that they should not pack the classes so full that students have no breathing space? Definitely!