Riding on with a smile

Rahman Khan runs a camel safari tour in Jaisalmer, India, He makes a mere average of INR3,000 (RM184) monthly after paying off ruthless commissions to travel agents who introduce his services to tourists.

The tanned skinned father of four children works 8 months a year running his safari tours while the other 4 months are spent doing odd jobs including farming and constructions to provide for his family.

By Chris Tan

He walks in his almost worn-out slippers for around 4 hours to collect his rented camels from their owner whenever there is a job order – he can’t afford his own camels yet as each would cost him about INR30,000. He walks another 30 kilometre with the camels in tow to where his clients await, as he doesn’t want to tire out the animals before reaching his customers.

After packing everything on the animals and presenting a 3-minute training demonstration for first timers to camel riding, he walks ahead pulling the customers and camels behind him. Along the way, he picks up wood for the campfire. It takes at least 2 hours under the scorching sun to reach the nearest sand dune for which the group will spend the night.

He unpacks, lay out the camp site and feeds the hungry and thristy camels. While his clients frolic on the dessert sand, Rahman is already heating up the stove for his ginger-flavoured chai tea while at the same time rolling out the mats and blankets for the night.

After sunset – where he is also often asked to coax the camels into place for photography – the man who has never set foot out of Jaisalmer, let alone travel outside India, hurries away to prepare dinner. His speciality of Maggi mee, naan bread, dhal and home-made crackers, all served in one plate, is to die for!

At the fireplace, he entertains guest with stories of his family, adventures from his previous customers getting lost in the dessert, and sings a tune or two in his high-pitched voice. His smile never once wavered since greeting his customers earlier in the day.

 The moment everyone’s tucked into their blankets, he puts out the fire and tucks himself in. Several hours later, he’s up and preparing a healthy breakfast of toast rice bread and hard-boiled eggs long before the first customer awakes.

 The next day, Rahman leads the group to the next dune; walking, singing, cooking, storytelling and collecting wood all over again. He does this for the duration of the 3-day 2-night expedition.

At the end of the 3-day safari tour, while his current clients looked weary from their adventure as they reached back to the jeep to take them back to their comfy hotel, Rahman kept up his jovial demeanour. Another group of tourists was waiting for him in front of the Jeep excited to go the dessert!  

Anyone in Malaysia willing to walk in the sun, cook under the skies and tell me stories to put me to sleep for RM184 a month?

Small in size. Big in service

It was an almost inconsequential hotel setup in terms of both size and operations. Located on a 40-year-old two-storey shoplot – we know because that’s where Azura found her favourite ice-cream stall still standing proud – the accommodation was hardly the type of place a discerning tourist would lay his eyes on.

But then, I was not in any capacity to choose after the Hari Raya, Christmas – also wife’s birthday – and New Year spending. Hence with a budget similar to that of organising a Ramly burger party, we found ourselves dragging up our bags of a seemingly lifetime-long flight of steps to the reception area.

By Chris Tan

Understandably worried that wife would leave me and parents would disown me after their initial sight of the place, I hurried towards the manager, all ready to pounce on her claims of being the state’s best. Well, the fact is that it wasn’t only her claims, as TripAdvisor ranked it #1 out of 81 hotels in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.

The 26-room hotel’s co-founder was answering telephone enquiries, changing batteries on the air-conditioner’s remote, and sketching out directions for the foreign couple in front of the reception desk. Her business and life partner was busy making sure that both of our rooms were ready for us, while at the same time reminding a cleaner to vacuum some dust from the lobby area. Ok, in truth it was more like a five feet wide passageway than a lobby. 

When she enthusiastically greeted me by my name without me introducing myself – she had already asked my flight times and arrival few days before – and the smile that came along with it, the tiger in me had turned to a kitten, but still slightly stirred. The rooms looked clean and presentable, while the bathroom did not have tiny creatures coming out of the sink and water holes. Since I did not pay for a Shangri-La or a Hilton brand, Hotel Eden54 seemed okay with us.

As this was a “homecoming” for Azura – born and lived her early years there in K.K – the manager and her team provided us with very helpful hand-drawn maps, tips and tricks on getting around the area, good car rental provider, and friendly taxi driver, who helped us reached Azura’s first school.

Whenever we bumped into each other – the “lobby” did not make it too hard to meet one another – the owner shared her stories about their dream to operate a hotel, spoke about unimportant subjects, and grumbled about the hectic city life in K.L. It was very genuine communication and not one that felt “PR-like”.

Even two power cuts during the 5-day period of our stay and the need to change room due to full bookings, did not really spoil our mood. They responded quickly enough – quick in terms of Sabah’s slower than Klang Valley timing – and were sincere enough with us throughout the difficulties.

This shows that you don’t have to be among the big boys and be flashy about your products to make your presence felt. All it takes is a very committed team, offering the best products within your means, sincerity in serving your customers, and a small lobby to make it a very pleasant experience for your customers. Of course being listed #1 on TripAdvisor helps.

Questioning the secret

Finally, the dreaded moment has arrived once more. Twelve months after the last episode, you find yourself here in this familiar situation again.

The plastic soup bowl appears magically in front of your nose. You see haphazardly folded fingernail-sized pieces of white paper anxiously staring back from inside it. Reluctantly reaching in, your hand feels heavier than usual. Your blood pressure shoots up two notches, and the world around you seems muted despite Bing Crosby’s Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer playing on the iPod dock.

Pix by: veeritter.blogspot.com

After a silent prayer and two swirls of the pieces of papers, your hands comes out of the bowl with the chosen one. Another quiet prayer under your breath – if you are still breathing by now – you unfold the paper to reveal the scribbled letters of a colleague’s name.

At this very moment, you will find out if the next seven days would be the most disastrous week of the working year. More often than not, it would be. Perhaps, ‘Secret Santa’ is nature’s quaint way of getting us to atone for all our tittle-tattles and criticisms of those we ignored at the office’s water cooler during the year.

Most offices are no strangers to the traditions of ‘Secret Santa’. The dispassionate office administrator writes the names of participants – you play along out of necessity in ensuring that your pens and stapler doesn’t go missing over the course of next 12 months – are placed in a hat, and everyone takes turn to draw the name of a colleague for whom to buy a holiday gift.

The unsmiling organiser then brusquely utters: “Buy RM20 item. Write down the receiver’s name on your gift,” she warns before moving over to the next cubicle. “Don’t write your name. Then put under the tree before Christmas Eve.”

Two minutes ago, you were skimming through TripAdvisor for the perfect hotel accommodation for your Christmas holiday in Melaka. Blink, and now you are in complete agony for the next seven days of what to get the person whose name you just picked out.

If it is a guy, it’s pretty straightforward. If he’s a footie fan, go the nearest S&J gift shop and get him a Manchester United keychain or an Arsenal scarf. If he’s not, walk into MY Tie Shop and “eenie, meenie, miney mo” out one. With RM20, there are not many options. Less than 2 hours after drawing from the bowl, you are back now on TripAdvisor again. A no-brainer.

Hell starts when it’s a woman you picked out. The first and second day you walk into all the pink-coloured gift shops available in town. You walk out empty handed because they are too common or “girly”, and she most likely has one too many bears on her bedside.

The third day, you try your luck at the music and DVD stores. Getting her a Jane Fonda workout title may offend her, while you have no clue if she’s into Rihanna or Chris Brown. You walk out disappointed.

On the fourth day, go strut into a bookstore beaming with confidence that you will surely end up with something. After all, who wouldn’t like a good book? Does she likes thrillers or prefers romance? Would The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People give her the wrong impression of what her colleagues think of her? Would a cookbook end up as a doorstopper in her apartment? Four hours later, you have no idea if she even reads!

By the fifth day, nearing desperation, you go into the RM5.00 shops to hopefully grab anything decent. You toy with the idea of a washroom toiletry set, or perhaps a combination of cup holder, air freshener and non-slip rubber mat for her new car. Yet, you fear being ridiculed for being cheap.

On the sixth day, you know you are clearly desperate when you find yourself strolling along the women’s section in the mall. Lingerie? Too personal and besides you can’t imagine her being in “that” bra size. Perfume? Over-budget. Clothes? Don’t even go there unless you are willing to have a RM20 blouse used as linen for cat litter.

The seventh and final day available to fulfil your ‘Secret Santa’ role, you finally give up thinking and walked back into the pink coloured gift shop to quickly grab the next available coffee mug with the letters: ‘Merry Christmas to you!’

Sharing the joy

Sam is an underprovided-for jovial 5-year-old. As the Puchong-based children’s home resident softly whispered Donald Gardner’s 1944 classic All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth amid the goings-on around him during a hotel’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony, you could see that Sam does not recognise his shortcomings.

Sam wants to study medicine; dreams of going around the world singing Christmas carols; live in a big house; travel round the world; and he wants to open his own clinic. From the resolve in his voice, I believe that my medical bills would all be coming from his office in the not too distant future.

As John Denver sang in The Christmas Wish; “Even though I never saw a Christmas star, I know there is a light I have felt it burn inside, and I have seen it shining from afar.

He added; “Christmas is the time to come together. A time to put all differences aside; and I reach out my hand to the family of man, to share the joy I feel at Christmas time.”

With Christmas just around the corner and New Year less than four weeks away, business organisations and PR practitioners are working overtime to leverage on the festive period ahead. Children’s homes and orphanages are inundated with routine visits. Old folks are getting their annual exercise when they have to put on a smile and don their best attires for the media photographers. The homeless are having more used clothes than they can pack in their shopping carts.

“Surely there must be entrepreneurs out there that is doing something good for Christmas that is not the from the standard PR 101 textbook?” I asked myself. A few taps on my iPad, and I got my answers in a couple of days.

“We will be teaching basic financial management skills to the community of a fishing village in Negeri Sembilan,” responded Alan, who runs a Seremban-based insurance and estate planning agency.

His team of 11 members would be providing free weekend classes to the villagers on the fundamentals of managing their income, as well as advice on investment strategies.

For magazine retailer and bookshop owner J.T, she has already started distributing old copies of magazines to various native and tribal communities in Perak and Cameron Highlands.

The 45-year-old explained, “We want to do our part in helping more Malaysians read. These segments of our country’s population are also important to our overall development and progress. By giving them reading materials, we hope to be able to better integrate them with the rest of the world.”

Plastic mould manufacturer and golf driving range buddy Rashid believes that the spirit of Christmas and New Year begins at home.

“I’m giving all my staff complimentary food and beverage vouchers to a well-known 5-star restaurant in town for Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. The only condition is that they must bring all their family members along, as this is designed for them to spend quality time with their family.”

The founder of the 8-year-old business has also extended a subsidised overseas holiday package for his employees who are interested in going for a holiday break with their spouses and family members.

From the 22 responses received from these entrepreneurs, the idea that seemed most meaningful to me was Collin’s. The CEO of a mobile application development company revealed that his team of mostly Generation Y workers are planning to set up notebook computers in several old folk’s homes around the Klang Valley.

“In addition to be aware of the Internet revolution, we want the elderly to stay connected to their family members or friends. We also plan to link up all these homes so that the residents can communicate with one another and share the festivities together,” said Collin.

 \End. 

Love the Jobs

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.” – Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Pix: www.famous.tm

There was only one thing on my mind as I settled into the window seat at the rear of the musky aircraft. Nothing was going to stop me from carrying out the premeditated deed; not the crying toddler, not the overly amorous young couple in front of me, and definitely not the curvy red silhouette at the corner of my right eye. After a sleep-deprived 3-day work visit on an island, regardless of the distractions, I was determined to sleep every single minute of the 2-hour journey.

“Chris! How’s it going old pal?” queried the towering figure standing over me as he writhed into the seemingly snug seat, “Long time no see!”

“Would have been better if it was longer,” I murmured under my breath as I looked up at the intruder and readjusted my eyes to the cabin lights after closing it for less than ten winks. Bad enough that my siesta had been thrown out of the Airbus A320, this was the last person I wanted to be seated next to in a restricted contraption sitting 9,000 metres up in the sky.

Besides having a brash voice and exceedingly self-indulgent, he was responsible for leaving me unemployed many moons ago. Instead of watching him being flattened on the runway, I was seated beside him and had to endure the most unpleasant two hours of my life. Note to the Royal Malaysian Police Force: New procedure to interrogate criminals.

R.K was my former employer and previously an entrepreneur, and as I learned on the flight, a serial one at that. The fifty-something Johorean has over the last two decades dabbled into various enterprises including IT software development, golf apparels, second-hand cars, catering services, and he even ran a reflexology centre. Yet, I ashamedly assumed from his presence on a budget airline, none of these ventures lasted long enough to make him wealthy.

Fighting off my heavy and contracted eyelids, I asked, “Were you trying out all these businesses in hope to find what you truly love doing?”        

“Nah, I don’t believe in doing what you love,” he replied, “It’s all about the money. Where the money lies, I will go towards it.”

Over the next two hours, R.K, who is now employed as a marketing manager with an unfamiliar IT firm, explained at length his entrepreneurship disappointments, grievances with the government for the lack of financial support, and criticisms of the local workforce. It was always someone else’s fault, never his own.

“Are you happier now that you are working for someone else after all these years of struggling with your own businesses?” I asked. 

He hesitated and sighed, “It’s not about being happy. It’s just a job to pay the bills until I find some other business to venture into.” I felt sorry for his employer that they are having someone whose heart is not in his job. 

After being amongst the first passengers off the steps of the plane and rather absent-mindedly not giving him my business card, I found myself thinking about R.K’s career on the taxi ride back home. Personally, I have always advocated the need to love what you do and be enormously passionate about doing it.

Celebrated American writer and lecturer Dale Carnegie once said, “You never achieve success unless you like what you are doing.” In R.K’s case, it was never the love for the businesses he started. As he confessed, “It was all only about the money.”

He figured that if he could “go where the money was”, he would eventually find wealth and happiness in his life. Sadly till this day, the former entrepreneur has yet to find either. As famed philosopher and medical missionary Albert Schweitzer opined, “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you’ll be a success.”

Replying to evolving business needs

The headline ‘Pet peeves in workplaces around the world’ swiftly caught my attention when scanning through the RSS (really simple syndication) feed on SMEs and entrepreneurship in my email inbox on a slightly jaded week filled with run-of-the-mill news.

The survey report of small businesses around the world showed that the top five nuisances in businesses were; people not taking ownership for their actions, constant complainers, dirty common areas, starting meetings late or going long, and people who don’t respond to e-mails.

I did not have to dig far into my cerebral cortex to associate many SMEs that I have met over the years which possessed one or several of these traits. Heck, one even immediately came to mind that possessed all of the above virtues!

Amongst the other irritations revealed by the survey received from 17,000 global respondents included taking other peoples’ food from the office fridge, excessive gossiping, loud mobile phone ringtones and carrying out office pranks.

Pix by: www.chrisflett.com

Okay, I’m guilty of allowing Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance ringtone to go on a wee bit longer than necessary on the mobile phone, and I’m not exceedingly proud of having discreetly changed the screen-saver password on a colleague’s computer, or rearranging the alphabets on another colleague’s keyboard. But these were exceptional incidences meant for entertainment rather than the norm. Although I don’t think James had ever forgiven me for the gibberish text showing up on his computer screen!  

Sunday, is the only day in the week that I usually do not meet people for business or work as it is the day that is dedicated to my sports activities. But this particular Sunday I had to make an exception as P.T was someone I was trying to meet up with for the last three months. But I should have seen the signs.

Peeve #1. Three months ago after we exchanged name cards, I promptly sent him an email the day after requesting for casual meeting to get to know his business better. A week later, no reply. I sent another email on the second week, no reply. Perhaps he was away on business. I wrongly thought that every single living being was on BlackBerry or iPhone these days.

Peeve #2. As his name card did not display his mobile phone number, I called his office to verify his email and mobile phone number. “Why you want his email ah?” brusquely asked the annoyed receptionist, “What you want to do with his hand phone number ah?” I had wrongly assumed that Viagra sellers and bank card fraudsters utilising email spamming would not be personally calling up their targets for their emails.

Peeve #3. Three months past and I finally received a call from P.T. No apologies or explanation on my three months wait. “Hi Chris. Read your email,” he coldly stated, “If you want to meet only this Sunday can as very busy.” Now there are several sub-peeves here. First, who was this calling as he did not introduce himself? Secondly, which email was he talking about? In between the 15 jokes and 25 marketing spams, I receive a never-ending list of work-related messages in my inbox daily. And I have five different email accounts he may be referring to.

Peeve #4. Thus, replacing my basketball sneakers with a pair of moccasin, I found my way to a visibly aged commercial area in Puchong. If not for a washed out signboard on the top floor of the three-storey shophouse, it would have taken me longer to find the road as there were no road signs around. I guess you do not need an attractive office location and an unambiguous signboard to be an award-winning SME in Malaysia.

Peeve #5. The meeting was arranged for 10am, yet when I arrived five minutes before time, the doors were locked and no one answered the door bell. Called his mobile over the next 45 minutes, but to no avail. As this was like the remains of an old cowboy town where time had forgotten – even the steadfast mamak restaurant had abandoned the area – and I had decided to leave, he drove up in his gleaming BMW 7 Series. As before, no apologies or explanation for his tardiness.

Peeve #6. Over the next one hour, somewhere in between him relentlessly blaming his sales manager for failing to hit the sales target, rebuking his secretary for him missing his golf times, and vehemently complaining about the lack of financial assistance by the government, we spoke about his business and his need for media relation activities. Frankly, he may not be ready for media just yet!

While my experiences have pleasantly shown me that the above scenario is atypical with many Malaysian business owners and entrepreneurs, yet there remains a few out there that is still making it hard for SMEs to lose their image of being amateurish and even shoddy in their approach to business. It is time these businesses take the first step to be globalised entrepreneurs by hitting the ‘Reply’ button on their email tool.

Don’t easily discount the business deals

Times have undoubtedly changed. A touch-screen 9.3 millimetre telephone sits inside our pockets instead of its water-bottle sized predecessor. The zippy broadband has replaced the screeching dial-up kilobits per second modem in the office. And Google Maps has long eliminated the need for annoying deliberation with a new client’s frosty telephonist.

But yet, when I took an evening stroll amongst the endless rows of traders along the busy Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman (or as my grandpa unrelentingly reminded me of it being called Batu Road) during the recent Ramadhan period, certain aspects of running a business seemingly remains as before.

Pix: virtualmalaysia.com

Today, while these marketing gimmicks are better known by the online generation as daily deals, group buying and online coupons, the objective and intention of these marketers are clearly the same. They know that as before, now and many more years ahead of us, consumers are and will still be looking for the best deals.

According to BIA/Kelsey, U.S. consumer spending on deal-a-day offers will grow from US$873 million (RM2.6 billion) in 2010 to US$3.9 billion in 2015, representing a 35.1% annual growth rate. Last year, more than 23 million Americans made purchases through daily deals websites.

Kicking up global recognition

Unlike other over-promising entrepreneurs before him who have bought their way into English Premiership football clubs, newly minted Queens Park Rangers boss Tony Fernandes is at least a realist. Immediately after controlling 66% of the recently promoted club, the AirAsia and Team Lotus F1 owner declared that he will not make any lofty promises and that he “wouldn’t have got involved if he didn’t think it was a profitable venture”.

Clearly, it is all about the business prospects and not merely about living out a childhood dream now that he has the means to do so. While Fernandes cautions that building a winning philosophy at QPR may take years, judging by his recent track record, fans over at Loftus Road can start preparing for better days ahead and possibly even dream of reliving the club’s glory years during the mid 1970s.

Pix: www.qpr.reward.tv

With the Premiership attracting growing interest from wealthy American, Russian and Indian businessmen, it is fantastic to finally see a Malaysian name onboard arguably the most exciting football league in the world. Why did it take us so long – Fernandes is only ranked 20^th in Forbes’ list of richest Malaysians – to take over an English football club is beyond my comprehension especially with the obvious global marketing and branding benefits on offer.

While much has been spoken and written about his entrepreneurial abilities and how Asia’s budget airlines poster boy bought over the airlines for the cost of a teh-tarik drink and transformed it into the region’s largest budget airlines ten years later, it is his passion for marketing and branding that stands him out from the crowd. “Many people do not realise the power of sport to market a brand,” Fernandes said.

Wage-ing war against job cuts

For an economic dabbler like me, it seems perplexing to read of news that a growing number of international banks around the globe are cutting jobs by the thousands. And even more mystifying is when the bank had just recorded an increased profit. Aren’t these the same people that are supposedly skilled with balancing the accounts?

While we could sympathise with Barclays Bank’s decision to reduce its headcount by about 3,000 this year – it has a total of 146,100 people – as well as Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse’s plans to cut more than 2,000 jobs of its 50,700 full-time employees worldwide, both in an effort to control escalating costs and declining profits, the move by HSBC to follow suit was more dubious than that of its counterparts.

Pix: www.irritatedtulsan.wordpress.com

Unlike Barclay’s 33% drop in profits during the first half of the year, HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, is firing up to 10% of its staffs in Europe and the United States over the next three years despite turning in first-half pre-tax profits of US$11.5 billion (RM34.2 billion), an increase of 3% from the year before. To further add to the puzzlement, the bank in the same breath revealed that it would be hiring up to 5,000 people a year in emerging markets including in Asia and Latin America.

For the 30,000 workers in HSBC, this must be the most startling compensation for having helped their employer improve their revenue. They must surely now be cursing themselves for having not walked over to their rivals Standard Chartered before as the United Kingdom’s second-largest bank recently declared its intention to hire 2,000 people globally by the end of this year.

Row, row, row your boat

“You are on a boat in the middle of the ocean together with your mom and dad. The boat springs a leak and starts to sink. As the only one who can swim and can only save one person, who will you choose to save?”

Like me, some of you may remember going through this similar enigma when you were young and too naive to sock the person in the eye for asking such a harebrained question, even if that person happens to be your parent.

I cannot recall whether it was my mom or dad that raised it, and why they would do so to a primary school-going adolescent who at that time in his life could honestly care less about saving either one since I wasn’t getting enough pocket money and my dreams of a red BMX ride never came through. I also can’t remember what my answer was, but we shall return to this riddle in a jiffy.

Pix: www.jeffreyhill.typepad.com

Once I had accepted a local university lecturer’s invitation for me to share some thoughts at a roundtable discussion for his class of postgraduate entrepreneurship students, I spent the next couple of days rummaging through my outdated and dusty collection of management books and scurrying the Internet to prepare for the event.

After all, one assumes that those SpongeBob scholars and their eagle-eyed professor would demand an endless list of intellectual theories, research methodologies and academic references from a supposedly qualified presenter.

As I tenderly pushed opened the lecture room door, the 15 participants of the roundtable session – it was technically a U-table dialogue – abruptly turned around and stared expressionless at me. They looked drowsy from the whole morning of schooling; lunched seemed to have weighted them down even further; and being a Saturday, probably had their minds on the cosy sofa back home.

The last thing they needed was another dreary lecture on theories and entrepreneurship philosophy. There goes my two days of research and 35 flashy PowerPoint slides out the window!