50K funding to look forward to…

Today I had the opportunity to speak to Nicholas Chan, the director of Azione Capital Pte Ltd and co-founder of Project Senso. 

Well Nicholas is quite a fellow as he is a TECHNOLOGY VENTURE CAPITALIST. What he does is to fund or help start ups to take off. At the same time he also mentors this start ups to go up to the next phase. 

We had a very fruitful discussion as he asked me about the Malay Muslim Market Segments and he was wondering why our Muslim Community are not moving into the Tech Venture Directions. As I explained to him, perhaps its our culture and mindset that have not been moulded to be Entrepreneurs. I told him our people are different, we need to sowed very differently because our community needs to be moved spiritually too. Unlike the Chinese, the Malays are not driven because of MONEY alone. 

Nicholas said, ” People say they cannot start a business because they dont have money, what if I give them the money, can they do it?”

Well I answered very frankly. There’s no point throwing money that way because even if you give them money, majority of them would not know what to do with it and that money would be used for the wrong things. They will never learn about the real values of Entrepreneurship that way. Furthermore most of our community don’t even understand the true TECH BUSINESS yet. 

So I introduced him to my coaching program. For a while he wasn’t really keen to listen but I told him that Entrepreneurs can be groom. As I was when I started MLM, the Soap Business and  now my tech ventures, the mind need to be groom and they need to be sowed. From here equip them with the basic knowledge, get them to start with simple easy steps and show them results. Even if its $1 or 5 cents. Its still an achievement. 

Therefore I hope through this e-course, my students will be able to see the potential of internet business and they are able to start to go on their own through the techniques. Who knows one or two them might even utilize the funds that Nicholas can provide. :) 

Court cases

Nicholas also shared with me about a court case he is battling currently. Can’t tell you the details here.. I don’t want to get involve in the messy feuds. 

Ahh this is another subject that Entrepreneurs need to learn too. We have to learn to PROTECT ourselves. There will be a time either you will be SUED or YOU will sue people for certain things. You will never know, when someone or a company wants to do this to you. Therefore its important to get to know legal people and understand the laws carefully. Just look at the big companies these days, how many of them HAVE NOT been sued before? So when we grow bigger, its important to set some of your business funds for LEGAL action. How much, I have yet to reach that stage so I shall talk about it when I get the proper advice for this..Insyallah.

Getting free advice 

I was telling him that Islamicevents.sg could not move on to Malaysia yet because of several factors such as our REVENUE model not yet secured. Meaning the revenue model is not structured yet to guarantee enough funds when we set up in other countries. When that happens we can end up going broke before we even do anything. By the way this blog is read by several Malaysians too. Perhaps we can built up a joint venture biz soon. Let me finish my courses soon. :) 

I recall an advice from one of the richest Malay in Singapore, Mr Umar Hamid - “if you cannot do it here in Singapore, what else overseas..”. Why? because Singapore is the easiest place to start a business and here there is almost zero corruption.  No offense to my overseas readers. If you can’t do it here, can we really made it in Malaysia, Indonesia or anywhere else? Furthermore the different states have different perceptions of Islam. Therefore a careful study and research would be important before embarking on those places. 

So Nicholas showed me a channel of income on counselling. Upfront payments and a percentage cut from the revenue that can be proposed to mosque and how we can benefit from this idea. 

A few months back I talked about piecing up a puzzle or formula.. It seem that I’ve been attracting the answers to me. With Islamicevents.sg, to sponsoring the Asian Consumer Megasale Showcase, to developing my e-courses and listening to Nicholas about Consultations… It all makes more sense now. 

* A clear picture may not be seen early in the start up business phase, as you develop your business and stick around it for sometime, the anwers will eventually will come. To some it may take a few days, to some it may take months and to some it may take years to see this clear picture. Keep doing it..keep doing it…

Back to the 50K funding… If you do intend to start a Tech business. Drop me an email and I will tell you if that can be done or not…  You don’t have to be a TECHY or a PROGRAMMER but you need to be the DRIVER of your business.

Why don’t you need to be a Programmer, Web Designer, Engineer?
Well with that funding you can always hire someone on a project basis… If the project starts to make money, you can hire them full time or make them your partners.

So now another opportunity opens up for the Malay Community. Are you going to take it up? For Singaporeans you are elgible up to 50K funding. For Malaysians you are eligible up to RM $300 K funding. Nicholas also have bases in Malaysia too. 

 

Don’t just get angry…Believe it ..Do it…

Taken from ProjectSenso.com

By Anita Roddick (founder of Body Shop) 

I never went to business school. I went to the business school of life. And I did so from an early age. I was brought up in an Italian immigrant family with a work ethic that teetered on the verge of slave labour. We got up each morning at five to make breakfast for the local fishermen in our café in Littlehampton and did not close until the last customer wandered home. The other cafés opened at nine and shut at five. This was a clue to me about what makes some people entrepreneurs and not others. Our café was owned by ferociously determined immigrants; the others were not. This is an important difference and the reason that I do not advise new entrepreneurs to submit themselves first to the rigours of an MBA is that business schools do not understand it. The conventional advice to budding entrepreneurs is that they should groom themselves to be the whizz-kid with a suit and a fascination for spreadsheets that bank-managers like. Actually, potential entrepreneurs are outsiders. They are people who imagine things as they might be, not as they are, and have the drive to change the world. Those are qualities that business schools do not teach. An MBA can give you useful skills that can be applied to a life in business. But they will not teach you the most crucial thing: how to be an entrepreneur. They might also sap what entrepreneurial flair you have as they force you into the template called an MBA pass. 

I often get asked to talk about entrepreneurship - even by hallowed institutions such as Harvard and Stanford - but I am not at all convinced it is a subject you can teach. How do you teach obsession - because often it is obsession that drives an entrepreneur’s vision? How do you learn to be an outsider if you are not one already? In the business school model, entrepreneurs are most at home with a balance sheet, a cash-flow forecast and a business plan. They dream of profit forecasts and the day they can take the company public. These are just part of the toolbox of re-imagining the world: they are not the defining characteristics of entrepreneurship. The problem with business schools is that they are controlled by, and obsessed with, the status quo. They encourage you deeper into the world as it is. They transform you into a better example of corporate man. We need good administration and financial flair, after all, but we need people of imagination too. So here are 10 lessons that entrepreneurs need more than what they teach in business school. 

1. Tell stories. The central tool for imagining the world differently and sharing that vision is not accountancy. It has more to do with the ability to tell a story. Telling stories emphasises what makes you and your company different. Business schools emphasise how to make you toe the line. 

2. Concentrate on creativity. It is critical for any entrepreneur to maximise creativity and to build an atmosphere that encourages people to have ideas. That means open structures, so that accepted thinking can be challenged. 

3. Be an opportunistic collector. When entrepreneurs walk down the street they have their antennae out, evaluating how what they see can relate back to what they are doing. It might be packaging, a word, a poem or something in a different business. 

4. Measure the company according to fun and creativity. Business schools are obsessive about measurement. The result is vast departments of number-crunchers, but often little progress. What is most important in a company - or anything else - is unquantifiable. 

5. Be different, but look safe. If you are different, you will stand out. But do not take risks with people who can make the difference between success and failure, especially if you are a woman trying to borrow money from the bank - which is how I came to be turned down for my original loan. 

6. Be passionate about ideas. Entrepreneurs want to create a livelihood from an idea that has obsessed them; not necessarily a business, but a livelihood. When accumulating money drives out the ideas and the anger behind them, you are no longer an entrepreneur. 

7. Feed your sense of outrage. Discontentment drives you to want to do something about it. There is no point in finding a new vision if you are not angry enough to want it to happen. 

8. Make the most of the female element. Companies as we know them were created by men for men, often influenced by the military model, on complicated and hierarchical lines and are both dominated by authoritarian principles and resistant to change. By setting up their own businesses, women can challenge these models and will be welcomed by customers for doing so. 

9. Believe in yourself and your intuition. There is a fine line between entrepreneurship and insanity. Crazy people see and feel things that others do not. But you have to believe that everything is possible. If you believe it, those around you will believe it too. 

10. Have self-knowledge. You do not need to know how to do everything, but you must be honest enough with yourself to know what you cannot provide yourself. 

Until they can teach these lessons, business schools will remain the whited sepulchres of the status quo.