Giving up is a way to gain!

By Matthew Kwan - Copyright © 2011

Principal consultant of Adams Company Limited (www.adamshk.com)

Would you ever consider giving up to be a smart move? To give up sounds so negative, but it could well be the result of a very strategic thinking process. If you have watched the movie 127 Hours, you will understand what I saying. This real story is about a mountain climber who was trapped in no man’s land but who got himself rescued by his own sheer determination and courage in cutting his own arm off…

You can be experienced and skillful in certain business but this does not guarantee your work will be free of mistakes and risks. The macroeconomic environment is out of anybody’s control. We have seen a number of crises in the last 15 years including the Asian financial crisis in 1997, the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the global financial and economic crisis which started in late 2008. Few people were able to predict these events. If you have personally experienced these most terrifying moments, you can understand that blindly holding on one particular stock which is no longer valuable can cost you more than giving it up altogether!

So, how can we be smarter by giving up the right things at the right moment? The answer is toexercise a prioritization and continuous review process. Prioritization is the best way of strategic planning as well as budgeting. However, we need a continuous review process to ensure we areon the right track as well as looking out for potential risks and macro environmental changes.

There are different tools for prioritization. The following are some of my favorites:

1. Weighting table

By far, I think this is one of the simplest kinds of prioritization tool as it is so easy to adapt and expand to multiple dimensions, if you know how. The idea is first to list your options in no particular sequence. By giving a score to each option in accordance with its level of importancewithin an area of interest, you can instantly sort out your priorities. If there are multiple interests, then we can do the same exercise by allocating the percentage weighting to each interest area, making a total of 100 percent. There’s no limit to the number of areas of interest but the more there are, the less significant they are. I suggest that the maximum number of areas of interest should not exceed five.

2. Zero-based budgeting

I learnt this great tool during my good old days of working at Intel. It is particularly useful when you have to draw a clear line during your business planning due to a limited budget. Provided thatyou already know your priority list (which you could achieve by using taking the results from theweighting table exercise) you can then draw up a budget per item on the list. Next, you just need to draw a line on the priority list when you hit the limited budget amount. When you move the line to a bigger or smaller budget to see the impact on the potential return-on-investment (ROI), youwill be amazed to see the huge variance of ROI in certain cases.

3. Management by objectives (MBO)

Peter Drucker, father of management theory, came up with this wonderful tool in 1954. It has been adopted by countless corporations all over the world as a management and performance review process for many business matters. The simple idea is to assign a priority to the list of objectives for a given project or person. Hence, the focus for time and effort should be applied according to the relative priority. Though it sounds simple, I personally think it requires a great deal of discipline to make it work.

4. Boston matrix

This is a very nice way of segmenting your business lines or products. It shows you which really have relatively better market growth and market share potential as a bigger picture in terms of the four dimensions of the matrix: Star, Cash Cow, Dogs and Problem Child. By plotting your products quantitatively on the matrix, clear actions (both positive and corrective) can be easily identified in most cases. Of course the ideal situation is to make a bigger segment of your products into Stars!

Matthew Kwan is a Principal Consultant of Adams Company Limited (www.adamshk.com) and is responsible for business consulting and enterprise training. He is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, lecturer and consultant working with enterprises and organizations in the commercial and Christian communities. He served for many years in multi-national companies including Intel, JP Morgan and Jardine, and has broad experience in sales & marketing and management in multicultural and international settings.

Leaders Are All Fools!

By Matthew Kwan

Principal Consultant of Adams (www.adamshk.com)

Copyright © 2010.

Too many of us are under the illusion that people who are in leading positions are leaders. In my own mind, they are just positional leaders and NOT true leaders at all! In a lot of cases, these positional leaders are not even possessing the basic qualities of a leader.

So who are true leaders? What leadership is about? A lot of great authors have already written extensively on this topic. Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, once replied in a TV programme to a MBA student that “Leaders are those who do the right things…” I would agree very much from a 50 thousand feet level. However, I would like to address this topic from a different angle.

Leadership, in a business context or any context, is not about the position you hold but the way you act. We are not talking about your skills and knowledge but how you would react in a given circumstance and environment. Even a fresh graduate, straight out from college, without any real working experience can be a true leader. It is not a matter of qualifications as certificates would not help you to become a true leader. However, I think all successful and respectful leaders are fools and a lot of them may possess the following characters or qualities:

1. Running Extra Miles

You will only be a follower if you are not running ahead of the game. In order to be ahead of the game, it means you need to run not only an extra mile but breaking away from your own competitions. Even though you are breaking away, it does not mean your competitors may not catch you and overtake you in due time. So there is no easy way out, you just need to keep running if you want to stay in your leadership position! I would like to share a mindset I often talk about “you can only know what I know yesterday but not tomorrow as I am moving forward all the time!”

2. Seeing Great Visions

Leadership is about leading team, group, department, organization…etc. However, you can never lead without a vision. Given any point in time, your vision must be clear enough to lead you towards the right direction with clear outcomes and at the same time being shared with your team. You cannot be a true leader if your team cannot see what you see! Though it is a very difficult and sometime painful process, you do not have a choice but to share your visions!

3. Being Noble

It is nearly impossible to be a great leader without integrity. Your followers will only choose to follow you if you are respectful and noble. Humility is often a function of nobleness. It sounds very strange in our world today but it works perfectly in many ways! A noble leader is someone with integrity and who is willing to trade off personal benefits for the sake of the followers and others. The end result is your followers will follow you unconditionally in return. I guaranteed you the joy of this if you dare to try!

4. Sacrificing Time, Money, Family, Relationships, Life…

Scientists are excellent examples of leaders that do not have positions (…well, until they get recognized and rewarded!). They generally work very hard and very concentrate in their fields of research with most people thinking they are crazy and wasting time. Yet they are all leaders in their own fields and often they are sacrificing personal time, money, family and relationships in order to breakthrough and reach new grounds. True leaders must be prepared to sacrifice if you believe in your visions. In some extreme cases, you may even be threatened to sacrifice life as your followers and oppositions are reluctant to follow when you are trying so hard to make changes for the good but damaging their personal interests! Are you really willing?

About the Author

Matthew Kwan is Principal Consultant of Adams Company Limited (www.adamshk.com) responsible for business consulting and enterprise training. He is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, lecturer, consultant working with enterprises and organizations in both commercial and Christian communities. He served many years in multi-national companies including Intel, JP Morgan, Jardines with broad experience of Sales & Marketing and Management in multicultural and international settings.

7 Most Important Steps for Entrepreneurship

By Matthew Kwan
Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited http://www.adamshk.com/
© Copyright. April 10, 2009

Starting up a business is not difficult and failing it is more than easy. What are the most important steps entrepreneurs should take in order to stay above the water is the most critical question one should ask well before actually forming a company. I have summarized the our own experience as well as gathering some good practices that are available to ensure the chance of success for entrepreneurs as described below:

1. Business Ideas


2. Sales & Marketing Planning


3. Cash Flow Calculation


4. Business Registration & etc…


5. Website Building


6. Promotion & Advertising


7. Execution & Continuously Review

1. Business Ideas

Whenever you think of any business idea, you need to start from the TAM (Total Available Market). Without knowing how big the demand of your products or service is, it is impossible to estimate how well you will achieve your sales goals in time. Even knowing your TAM, you should ask also how well is your potential competitors are doing in such market as they are a very good reference for you to evaluation the potential growth of this business in future.

2. Sales & Marketing Planning

I have written before about the 5C’s Business Planning idea and I would like to recap the idea here as it is too important to do this analysis to ensure you are not too far off from reality. Moreover, I think it is a very simple and effective way to plan & measure your sales & marketing effort. I have used in many customer cases and they work extremely well for them to position and re-position the overall business plan and idea. So, what are the 5C’s, they are Customers, Competitors, Complementors, Channels and Costs. Our of the 5C’s, I personally think Complementors is the most important of all. For details, please refer to The 5C’s of Business Planning in Adams’ Business Advisory Blog.

3. Cash Flow Calculation

Cash Flow is Everything! (as written in Adams’ Business Advisory Blog) If you cannot manage well you cash flow, you are dim to fail in time. A lot of companies fail not because of not having enough sales but not enough of cash flow. The most important question to ask is when can you breakeven your running expenses each month. If you cannot maintain a stable cash flow, your feeling will just like riding a roller coaster! The other important question to ask is how much initial capital you need to have to sustain throughout the period before breakeven. Obviously, the earlier you can breakeven, the less capital you need. Oppositely, if it takes too long for you to breakeven, you will very soon loose your momentum and your energy level and sometimes faith in yourself or your partners!

4. Business Registration & etc…

The process of registering a company in different countries are different but typically it is a lot easier to work with company secretary companies or certified public accountants and sometimes business centre companies to get these processes done with reasonable costs as there are too many nitty-gritty’s that you need to pay attention at for just once when you form a company. Personally, I think it is not justified at all to spend time to learn it through but not helpful for your business

5. Website Building

It is an internet age, if you are not building a website, you will never survive a chance to win in this extremely competitive world. In terms of building a business effective website, I recommended that there is a 4C strategy. (Please refer to Websites are so important to make e-Marketing campaigns successful!) The 4C’s are Customer Oriented, Contextual Contents, Call to Actions and Community. Since Converting Clicks to Sales Leads is the most important consideration, you really need to try every effort to make sure whoever visiting your site would take action to call you, email you, fill in a form or forward your information to friends. These would ensure you have a very good chance to succeed.

6. Promotion and Advertising

In order to be cost-effective, you don’t have choice but use e-Marketing as it is proven to be one of the highest ROI (Return On Investment) ways in promoting your company products and services. There are many ways to promote your products and services using e-Marketing and largely they may involve sending emails, doing search engine optimization or marketing, advertising online with banner ads or registering to directories…etc. However, if you don’t have any idea to start, you can use my proposed 6 Simple Steps to Start e-Marketing with a Success. More importantly you need to Maximize your dollars on e-Marketing in order to gain the best possible ROI.

7. Execution & Continuously Review

Doing plans and generate business ideas is very easy as it is comparatively less effort than execution. When you actually execute your plans you will soon find them difficult to realize as some of the ideas or methods would never work in the real world. With limited time, money and resources, you often end up dumping the whole idea all together. Therefore it is extremely important to do reality checks and review what is really happening with all your effort in executing your plans in a quantitative measure. I found many clients have a very ambitious start with lot of energy and so passionate about their dream in success of your business, however they fail to review the progress constantly and sidetracked by many things and challenge. So they were not able to re-focus and re-prioritize their effort early enough to regain the momentum to move forward.

Finally, I wish all the best to all entrepreneurs who have wonderful dream of success may achieve great result with their business plan and share with us the joy of Entrepreneurship!