Yup, as I age and started my business, the remedy to preventing me from going insane is a 175gram of plastic.

This plastic I’m referring to is not a drug, even though it may sound like one. Well technically it’s sort of like a drug cause once you start to get into it, you just can’t stop.

For some people, this plastic seems astonishingly foreign where perception is something to play with dogs or on the beach.

While for some, it’s a universal language, where anywhere I go in the world, it’s usually welcomed with open arms.

This 175gram of plastic is truly the beloved frisbee disc and this is a story of my Ultimate Frisbee journey. It changed my life, my thinking, my perception and shaped me for who I am today. Many students always asked about my history like how I ended up starting a business, I would like to believe that this plastic played a major part in that, so if you are a student, do continue to read. If you are an adult, I encourage you to come and learn the game.

The love for this has no boundaries. I have seen some people loving the sport more than their other half, it’s because it’s not just the sport, but a combination of a lot of things – from the people, to the nature of the game, to the experiences created. The best case scenario, is marry someone who plays this sport and be as crazy as you are, then that’s a natural match make in heaven.

You see, it’s a sport that was introduced in Malaysia only in 2001 and the pace of growth for the first 9 years were relatively slow as compared to pace it is now. My journey started in 2007, when I went to watch a game of my coursemate, Sean, at University of Malaya to understand what Ultimate frisbee is all about, that didn’t really hook me yet, but it’s my first encounter of a proper game.

The game was unique by itself when I first watched it. 7 v 7 on the field, with men and women playing on the same game. Besides, it’s not a physical contact game, where players are not allowed to tackle each other. And the best part of all is the high spirit that is uphold by both teams who are competing that is usually unseen in a sport. The after game huddle and the “3 cheers chant” were the tipping point.

The Huddle

And then it took a bunch of crazy enough Nottingham Business school students to want to kickstart a Ultimate Frisbee club in the university. And that’s when I was first introduced to the game, as those crazy peeps were my coursemates.

It all started with say less than 15 people, meeting up almost every day after class to toss this plastic disc to each other. The ones who have played the game before would be there to guide most of us newbies.

Backhand throw. Forehand throw. V Cuts. Vertical stacks. Horizontal stacks. These are the common flow of learning for any new community nowadays and it’s such a classic when I look back. That’s how most of us first learn.

The effort to recruit players were just amazing, with friends dragging more friends, and then we started having people from non business school, people of different year coming together after class to throw this plastic disc. The funniest memories of all was always the attempt to recruit more female players as it’s compulsory to have female players in teams as this sport also promotes gender equality.

Most importantly, we learn what Spirit of the Game is all about – which is upholding our integrity and learning how to self referee ourselves to maintain a high discipline and safe environment for everyone was the key to making sure everyone represents a lot of themselves.

That was when we started to learn to call fouls on ourselves if we hit a players hand unintentionally when they throw, when we push a player unintentionally, when we trip someone – even when it is usually considered as a disadvantage in sports for ourselves, but the bigger goal to maintain the spirit remains. And this is what makes Ultimate Frisbee what it is today, which is something unexplainable until you readers experience it yourself.

My mindset started to change through this process. I had to learn how to evaluate the value of my honesty and the intention of upholding honesty for others apart from myself. And since then I was hook, from 2008 to today.

Our first Gold Medal

I can never forget the first few tournaments that we joined, even though we lost, we still had so much fun. It was more than the winning and losing, it was the people, the drive to improve after every tournament and every practice at university. And as the year progresses, our university team got bigger and bigger. When we won our first gold medal, I think that was the highlight of our team after many years of hard work and I could still remember the day like it was yesterday.

But it takes more than that to anchor this sport as a life changing experience for me. There were 3 things that I was always inspired by that made me continue playing this and spreading the love of this sport.

1. It was my first Malaysia Ultimate Open that I joined and I was playing for a new team call Pirates. The captain was a Scottish guy name Martin who was aged above 30 but he was like fast. Damn fast. And to top it all up, he was wearing a Klit. I kid you not, my whole mindset of the correlation of fitness and age changed. I was struggling even though I’m younger but the inspiration to do better started from there. And the key turning point is, the willingness for him to teach us to improve after every point even though it’s my first time meeting him, but yet the willingness touched me. The encouragement, the step by step guide, is what shaped me on how I wanna improve myself so that I can give back to people in the future. Thanks to him, my mindset evolved.
2. 2 working adults, spreading the love of Ultimate, bringing community together, hosting tournaments for the people could be seen as just something casual on the surface. But when you look into their sacrifice of love for the people, in having people to have a good time from all walks of life, was a blessing for the whole Malaysia frisbee community. This is none other than Kuan and Safwan (who are commonly known only among senior players who started between 2001 – 2012). They were always ever willing to teach, on how to catch, how to cut, how to throw, even though i’m just a young kid back then. Their contribution to the community in hosting tournaments which are priced relatively cheap yet giving back great value was very touching. When I started ultimate, I still remember tournaments priced where never exceeding RM 30 for a one day tournament and MUO was less than RM 150 for the first few years. I’m pretty sure they did some monetary sacrifices for the community with no intention in making profits, as I have done an estimation (as usual a business student thinking).
3. The high level of positive encouragement given by my team mates when I was playing for a new team, The Revs, in New York. Their level of spirit was really unseen back home, and the energy that they create to life each other up really taught me how much one can actually go all out to support each other in the team, on and off the field. I really thank them for that, the crazy bunch of Revs.

The Revs

Kuan’s and Safwan’s move to put the community first is my inspiration to host the first annual under19 tournament back in 2012, after coming back from New York. This is to develop the younger aged players and have the sport expose to more people, all at a reasonably priced rate. No profits gain, but pure love for the people. Kuan and Safwan’s act taught me how to give back first without personal gain and that has shaped my mindset on what giving really is, without expecting anything in return.

When we fall in love with something great, this is when we wanna spread it. But not all is well in my frisbee journey before. My down moments when I was chased out from school by a high school principal from my hometown, as he deemed it was dangerous. I couldn’t then teach in the high school anymore, but only in a park outside. Whoever that was interested will then come and just learn to toss. It was tough being shut down from loving people but heck that’s part of life. We ended up with almost about 10 high school kids playing with each other at a park almost every week during my summer break in 2009 and I was glad I took the risk anyway.

But beyond that, from tournaments like Bangkok Hat, Penang Hat, Malaysian Ultimate Open, joining a team in New York, to hosting tournaments in Malaysia are really highlights of my life. I have met people all walks of life from countries around the world and learn so much about culture, mindset and through these experiences, great friendships are forged.

The Malaysian Ultimate scene has grown so fast in the recent 5 years, where now almost every state in Malaysia has a team and there is now officially a Malaysia Flying Disc Association, where it’s aimed to provide a platform to bring up the level of ultimate through talks, clinics as well as providing guidance to organisers and captains of teams. What’s even greater is the amount of female players who joined the community over the years have grown leaps till the stage where Malaysia could host their own all female only tournament. It truly is gonna be exciting to watch this Frisbee space grow in Malaysia in the coming years.

Ultimate Frisbee is truly a universal language where people are receptive of each other even if one is 50 years old and the other is 10. There are no barriers of age in teams. You see, it’s a sport that people can be competitive when it has to be but still remain friends most of the time.

The format of a Hat tournament whereby players are sorted individually to different teams just make the game even more beautiful, as more great friendship are forged.

I have been active for the past 5 years, but looks like I may get back into the scene again, this time supporting the community from various measures. As life gets tougher, I see myself going back to this plastic even more, as the joy it brings keep me sane from the work pressure. Now that I’m working, I am able to give back to this lovely community that’s close to my heart. There’s a lot of potential that the community can achieve together, apart from just playing sports.

This 175gram of plastic is more than just a sport. It’s a movement of respect, integrity, joy, relationship and love.

#keepitflying players

** If you ever want to get yourself into the game, feel free to drop by Sunway University field every Monday and Friday, 6pm – 9pm. No matter what your age is, you are always welcomed. Just say you are new and you want to learn. Then see your life unfold 🙂

This article marks the last part of my sharing and this part is mainly about the non technical aspect of business. A lot of sharing below is based on the deduction of my own self reflection over the years which could only occur by connecting the dots backwards.

So here goes, my last 3 pointers

7. Networking and Support

We wouldn’t have gotten till where we are today if it weren’t for the support given to us by all of our friends and families. If it weren’t for 3 of our network of friends, I don’t think we can really get till this far.

A lot of times in university, people talk about the importance of networking and I did expose myself through various events out of university to open up my eyes. But it wasn’t till when myBurgerLab was started that I realised the importance of having a big contact list of friends.

We got our current centralised kitchen head, 4 years now since they started, through my ex boss referral. We wouldn’t be able to test run at Red Bean Bag if it weren’t for my partners working there before we started. When I look back at connecting the dots, it’s amazing to see how everyone we meet just connects the dots for us. It’s somewhat amusing.

To tell you how crazy sometimes having a large network can be, is to tell you about our Sunway outlet journey. We initially rented a lot way further down the street but had to forfeit it due to the lot not being able to run restaurants (some MPSJ quote allocation crap). And then we wanted to hunt for another shop along that row, but there was no to let sign at all. On and off we will go and check out the row and one day I just walked along the row and notice the mamak back then (which is our lot right now) was closed during the day time. It felt weird to have a mamak closed at such hour so I asked around to see if it was shut down. And apparently it’s closed but there was no to let sign.

Fortunately, there was a water bill attached to it, and the name was fortunately the landlord! That’s because I took the name, type in Facebook, stalk his friends list and saw a few of his friends have mutual friends with me and I contacted those mutual friends to get to him. In the end, it was my friend’s friend’s dad. Funny, surreal, yeah it was. I still can’t believe how Facebook helped us to get our lot. It’s still a story I will never forget.

Another is the recent fundraising process that we are doing for our 4th year anniversary (in fact it’s today) with Epic Homes. We are raising RM 70,000 this year to fund for a home build for the Orang Asli and as of now we are already half way through the mark. This is because a big chunk of the contribution came from corporates and this support again is from our network of people who trusted us and believe in what we do over the years. It’s amazing to see how people just trust us in doing what we do and this couldn’t have achieve if we uphold the integrity that we have since day 1.

The world is really really small, especially the community in KL. Hence that is why, to have a good network it just starts from us being nice, sincere and treating people how we want to be treated. Any wrong move once, and people will know. I thought my hometown Sungai Petani network was small, but in KL, it’s no less different.

I could see how my network grew over the years, from frisbee friends to budding entrepreneurs and young students (our staff). I guess once you embark on this journey, most of the people who can relate to entrepreneurs are those who have done so themselves because of the magnitude of responsibility one has to bear. That is why I finally understood why many businessmen, like Tan Sri Liew, are interested to be part of the Alliance Bank challenge because he wants to contribute back to budding entrepreneur as the entrepreneurship journey is a tough one. And once one has gone through such journey, the mindset will grow into a giving mindset – giving to customers, employees, friends and the world.

Often times, we will feel like it’s a lonely journey especially when we have to make a big decision. No one would know how things would turned out and it has to be us that is making up our minds to face the music. Hence, it is important to form a network of support and that is why I have friends from various industries as well as those equipped with different level of experience to share advice and perspective with me. It is through their support which I still have the grit till this year. Sometimes their presence itself is really much comforting.

Seeing Daniel Cerventus hustling every year in his shorts to build events, form communities and organising TedxKL reminds me that there is a lot more to go. Sometimes they don’t have to say much, because their actions are already an inspiration.

Every leader needs an ally leader and that goes to the same for an entrepreneur. I wish I had gotten an experienced mentor over the journey, it would really speed things up. If I were to take back time to change things, that would be one of it but I’m glad we went through the difficult times as it really made us experience hardship and learn how to appreciate things a little more.

8. Decision Making

Back when we were short of funds, an opportunity to raise funds arise and we went to check it out. It was the most daunting experience of my life as it’s our first time raising funds to be honest, with equity dilution stake on the table. When I looked back, we were glad we made the right choice. There was a potential investor that wanted to inject RM 1.5 million into our company for a 50% stake back in mid 2014. The pressure was big to make a decision on whether to take the money or move on as we were dealing with someone who we were unfamiliar with as well.

Speaking about importance of networking and support, that was the time that I had to reach out to just anyone for opinion, to really assess if such opportunity was too hasty. Patrick from myElephant asked me some really good questions to ponder. I even reached out to Azran Osman (we used to play frisbee together) for advice and he just recommended me the book – The Hard Things about Hard Things. I went to buy it the next day and then started reading it to just find some advice or tips somewhere in the book.

Overtime, I realised that my friends will not give me direct answers because they know they are not in same situation as me and the best thing they can do is to ask me questions for me to find clarity and I think that is a big support itself to me.

In the end, we decided to call off the proposal close to the last minute because firstly we realised we knew we didn’t know them well enough to see common values between us (mainly because of the way we run our business is really different) and to give up 50% at series A would hamper us to raise further if needed to. We believed we could have done better if we fix the fundamentals right. If we are going to raise funds and have an external party to push to hit certain KPIs, why can’t we dictate that KPIs ourselves to push ourselves without an external pressure. And then later on if needed to, take that result and raise funds.

When there’s a will, there will be a way.

We wouldn’t have known at that point of time whether it was a good decision but now that when I looked back, I’m glad we did what we did. There will always be pressure from other parties but at the end of the day, us being entrepreneurs, we have a responsibility to pay to our staff and serve our customers better. The last thing we need is to have an external pressure to shrink our portion so that they can get their returns. It was mind tormenting back then as it was our first time dealing with fund raising and I’m really glad that we got some advice and perspective to calm our minds down to think objectively.

This was because we weren’t as educated in fund raising process as we are now, but I’m grateful that we went through the process anyways as we would be able to learn more things.

The biggest take home I gotten from this is that sometimes for a decision as big as this, it is alright to sit on it for a period of time. In fact, when there is a need to make a decision, it’s good to make a mental decision without implementation, and just sit on it for a brief period of time. Then take this mental decision and bounce of a few people to get some advice and perspective. This would allow you to then assess the decision again during that period instead of assessing which decision would be better. This has helped me to make a decision faster than I used to be, mainly because of the constant fear of how it would play out back then.

(Disclaimer: this belief does not apply in all industry as some industry just need investor to grow, fortunately for us we are a cash business.)

9. Learning About Myself

I wouldn’t be able to here today mentally without the help of many of my friends, particularly a personal development programme I went through for 6 months in 2013. That made me more conscious about many of my actions and the reason behind it. It is always easy for us to get into the moment whereby we just do things automatic and becoming subconscious about it. I’m glad I went through the self discovery journey (by Milestones Trainings), otherwise I don’t think I would have the wisdom to pull of what is possible today.

Being able to laugh at myself is the greatest liberation as it signals acceptance of self and wanting to learn how to grow within. So much I have learnt, and just to share with you some of the few below

• I had dilemma after 2 years in the journey and whether going back to working world was a viable option as there’s not much worries, fixed income and there’s certainty in terms of holidays. It took me a while to made peace with my decision to stay when I realised that I need to flexibility of doing whatever I want to do anytime of the day, even though it’s hard work of 16 hours a day. I can work long hours (thanks for 4 months in Pricewaterhouse), but it has to be within my control of time allocation. And with such clarity, I have never looked back and just focus to go forward.
• Another big learning I gotten about myself is the problem to focus. They say founders are often very much wanting to always start new things after one another, and I believe this is indeed a common trait across entrepreneurs. It is very easily swayed and I am no exception. It’s so tempted to always start something else after thinking that I have started something really well. Only when reality hits the fan then it pulls us back to reality. The amount of distraction in today’s world is more than ever and the ones who will go furthest are the ones who has the focus and the grit to get to the finish line. It was Cheryl Yeoh who made me realised (during my e@Stanford trip last year) that I have been focusing too much on width that I forgotten on depth. It became so clear that the businesses I had was lacking a lot of depth and when I came back from the USA, that’s where a lot of restructuring happen and we had to just focus and building a more sustainable foundation in my existing businesses.
• One more lesson that I will always remember after these challenging times is to always have a respect for money. We will have to learn how to spend every $1 wisely and treat every $1 like $1000. As entrepreneurs, we are all here to build sustainable businesses and not to just build glamour, because there is too much to lose if we don’t take care of our finances carefully. This is because when you have no money to move forward, it sucks. It just is. I’m glad that when I was young, my late grandfather always taught our family to – “Always have money for rainy days, you will need it one day”. I guess being a businessman himself, he knew how tough money can be when things are really tough. That word always stuck to me since, and if it wasn’t me to have some savings throughout the years, I wouldn’t be able to take my pay cut just to buy time during the difficult period that we went through. In fact 3 of us had to take some pay cut for some period of time during this tough period and I’m really glad we are managed to sustain until today.

So get out there, read books, go hiking, diving, get a mentor, learn more about yourself. All these will really help you to progress in life. Get a buddy who will not take your bullshit and excuses.

Be open and vulnerable to what people advice you to be because it requires a lot of energy really to help someone really.

To end, I just want to say that success is impermanent. It’s actually multiple milestone in life, and it can be small or big. A lot of people deemed myBurgerLab is successful but really success is just a perception. After we gone through this stage, we are just glad that we are still here, existing to serve customers as best as we can. All the awards at this stage really is really menial now at the moment, as the true success for us is that our staff continue taking care of the customers so that the customers continue to take care of our staff and hoping that the cycle does not end. That itself to me, is the biggest success of anything.

Thanks for your time to read this series, I didn’t expect such readership. If you really want to start an FnB, I really advice you to go work at place for at least 3 months, non negotiable. It is required to know what you are getting yourself into, be it a hawker place to some fancy restaurant. If you are not willing to clean a grease trap, you are not ready to start a FnB. It’s tough to be sustainable, so put your money to good use.

I will be sharing more learnings in the future. If you have any topics you want me to touch on, do leave a comment in the comment section below.

To end this series, again just want to thank everyone who helped us through since Day 1, despite the long lines. We are in the midst of looking how technology can help with the line going forward since things have progressed a lot in the tech space since we started.

If you are available today, we are celebrating our anniversary in 3 locations, SeaPark, OUG and Sunway. We are serving 2 burgers for the day, the Umami Beef burger (that got us to win the Tiffin throwdown challenge) and Ultraman 4.0. All profits made for today collectively goes to our fundraising of RM 70,000 for the epic home build.

To find out more, here are 2 links for you

Our Anniversary Event Details – here

Our Fundraising Campaign for Epic Homes – here (you can have a chance to own myBurgerLab, more details in the link)

Links to all previous 3 parts

Part I

Part II

Part III

A reader pointed out to me that I did not cover in Part II about what I mentioned in Part I, which is how having co-founders would affect the culture if it’s not aligned or managed properly.

It all starts with the mindset of individuals on how things should be done. In our case, we know that food quality and service are always important, hence the underlying foundation of everything we do revolves around that. We only ship out new product if the product is good, and the pace of our growth is much reliant on how we can maintain our quality and service.

Once the fundamental culture is establish (which is the easy part), then there are the multiple small cultures like the magnitude of hunger for sales, the pace of execution of ideas, the frequency of relationship building and networking which could dictate how the rest of the team perform. That’s culture, and it is always a progressive process to align, breakdown and realign again to move forward.

Every stage of growth will require a level up of experience, mindset and alignment, and it is through challenging times that we will experience it. We just have to step back sometimes and see it from a third party point of view on how the company is doing and then move on from there (with no emotions attached).

*** Back to Part III ***

I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who always say follow they wanna do this because they are passionate about this and that. A classic example is people who open cafes always start from claiming that they are passionate about coffee. Few years down the road, they wanna sell of their business. I’m like what?!! Or some of them close down?

So is passion really all enough to really venture into the business? Or is that the words we tell people and ourselves because that’s just what the norm of the answer is.

To me, pure passion is overrated, because when you understand how important it is to build a sustainability business is to keep the passion burning, then you will not say you will just do it solely for passion.

Sadly, that’s how the world works, and we just have to learn how to play around the rules of the game. When we accept that sustainability is required through proper planning and the hunger to sell, then we will become responsible towards everything and everyone, rather than brushing it off saying it’s not important and claiming that it’s just the passion.

Part III is about the tough times that we went through because of the failure of planning and not having a more aggressive approach in selling.

5. Planning

“If you fail to plan, then be prepared to plan to fail”

These words has never been so true until we faced our toughest time. I learnt this when I was still studying in university, after I left university, and yet I never felt the magnitude of importance when come to planning until the shit hits the fan.

Being complacent with life back then when I was 23, 24 when we were raking money so easily with people lining up the door has blinded me to plan for the future. Things changed so fast in today’s world that you have to keep your eye on to the ball. Momentum breeds on momentum.

And this mainly comes from the mindset of mine of fearing to plan because at the end I may just set a goal which is too big to achieve or I will just self sabotage the goal. When I learn more about myself, and understanding how my mind and fear work, that’s when things started to change.

Blaming on external factors is always an easy way out, the reality is that that we lack strategy.

That’s a fact that if you want to start a business, you just have to own up to it.

So what actually happen back in the days? Why a business had all media talking with 600 burgers a day ran into such tough challenges? It just seems ok from the outside but just similar to any businesses from the outside, what you see from the outside and what you know in the reality is really different.

Chung Lynn from Nando’s told me before that running 1 store and 2 stores will be very different, and from 2 to 4 stores will be even more different. We know to a certain extent that it will be different, but we didn’t know how different the fundamental of the business will be once you expand.

We opened our centralised kitchen in Q1 2013, to cope with production of our Seapark outlet (which was doing 600 for a night shift), before opening our OUG location in Q3 in the same year. Things were still doing pretty decently well, till we closed SeaPark for renovation of downstairs and upstairs while we launched OUG.

When both stores were opened we were doing more burgers collectively but averagely burgers in both store dropped. It was great that our central kitchen was opened so that we can produce more, but it was over the couple of months after that collectively the percentage of incremental volume from opening an additional store was not 100%.

So in pure math terms, if we are doing 600 a day, we should be doing 1200 of both stores, but in reality things just didn’t go that way. We did not account for the drop in volume collectively when we did our budgeting and because of that, incremental of revenues were not incremental of cost to support both.

We had a heavy top headcount, which meant that we had too many full timers being hired in the office, but not enough traction to utilise such big team.

In short, we were below capacity of what we could have accommodated and revenue were just not coming large enough collectively to cover our cost. So on some months we make money, on some months we lose money.

We lack strategy to boost sales in both stores, but more importantly our fundamentals of an F&B business is not ideal. You see, when we run with one outlet and our production is being run in the same location, our cost is being maximised across all verticals. And we can always have the option to close once a week, as we are neither top heavy nor have heavy commitments of full time wages. But as we expand, cost goes up but our revenue may not go up by the similar percentages.

If we were to turn back time, we would have to craft out a solid strategy on how to open up 3 additional stores and its timeline before opening our centralised kitchen. If we didn’t then it would be better to just stuck with one outlet. What’s more challenging is that our store managers work 5 days a week, instead of the norm of 6 days a week, and our store only opens 6 days a week.

As you scale for F&B, a lot of things which you would have done for one store would unfortunately have to change, as it’s just business fundamentals. Adapt or die. Which is why when people say opening more chains is better, I beg to differ. Better is always relative, it’s the bottom line that counts. It took us 3 years to finally open 7 days a week and that moved itself just changed everything. Imagine if one day’s sale is 3,000 on the low end per store, 4 stores would mean 12,000. And one month it would mean extra 36,000 of sale by just opening one store across the board. That every bit helped even though the margins may not be as high.

On the down side, the price we got to pay is lesser bonding time which usually we use our Mondays for, but at this stage, it was going down entirely so partial sacrifice, with the first Monday of the month being our geek outing day. And I’m glad we chose the latter.

And that was why we know we just needed to fill up capacity for all the staff hired for production and management, which makes the 3rd and 4th location necessary. There were moments when we were lost on how to go and fund raise for our third location and in the end we just resort to take private loans (not from banks) to give it one last push. That’s when we open our third location at Bandar Sunway end 2014 and then Cyberjaya right after in May 2015. At the end of the day, it’s unfortunately a business that thrive on volume, similarly like airlines. It’s a volume game. If we want to scale, we got to be ready to pay the price.

It was through this downturn, that I learnt the importance of planning. It’s better to have a plan than not to have one, at least you have a direction, instead of moving fast without a direction.

There’s always a question on but where do we start? How do I know whether what I plan is achievable? What should I be planning for? When we plan, we will never know what will happen, but it all starts from doing 2 things

1. Setting a goal that you want, try small then go bigger. From daily sales of 1k to 1.3k for example, that’s a small goal, but it’s practicing that goal setting step that is essential.
2. Break down every strategy into very small steps on how you need to hit the goals

One example now that we practice now is setting sales goal for the year and bonus scheme as well as coming up with a proper budget based on our cost structure. Once we do all these, we will then know what are the sales targets we need to achieve monthly, by store.

Besides, it took me 3 years to see the importance of budgeting, because it’s not something I like doing when I was younger because to me things always change. But budgeting has taught me to use it as a guideline to know what are the sales needed to hit for our own cost structure and not treat it as a tool that may cause rigidity.

The best lesson I learn from my trip to e@Stanford (under my other startup Ops Ninja) last year was to start with the end in mind and then reverse engineer from there. It was something so simple, yet so hard to see. If you could draft out your end goal in mind, a lot of things can fall in place really clearly. In this case, if we know how much is the cost gonna be as we scale, then we would know how much revenue we would need to hit in order to be sustainable.

Also, by doing the reverse engineering method you will then be able to plan out for the hiring as well. This would help you to dictate what kind of function to hire and when to hire. Every industry is different and every stage of business is different. From my experience, as mentioned previously is to hire for sales and operations first and then accounts and HR will come much later. But this is different if you are doing big scale cross country fast growth like how K-Fit does, where they would hire heads of multiple functions because their directions were clear. With proper planning, you would also be able to figure out how you can use certain technology tools to automate or simplify processes so that you wouldn’t have to hire so many headcount.

Note for F&B business wannabes – again, sometimes doing an outlet is better than doing more outlets. You will require a very detailed expansion forecasting plan to move from one location to multiple location, because there’s a lot of extra expenses require such as extra management head count.

Make sure do your cost structure properly and then figure out how much money is needed for your expansion and then do what it takes to get there.

If you think getting a franchise will get you rich, think again. If you really want to go and take a franchise, go sit at their outlet and do the math on how many people actually walk through the door, and not believe whatever numbers the franchisor gives you. This is because I have seen so many being affected and they just close down in the end. Or even better, go SSM and print out their annual report, it’s as simple as that.

It’s just perception vs reality when people look out for F&B business to invest in. That is why we are refraining from franchising because the amount of people who can execute a myBurgerLab outlet properly really low and we rather maintain our special experience for our customers. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that success is built over a number of years and not just an overnight thing, so be patient and plan it out 🙂

6. Sell, Sell, Sell

If you want to start a business, you have to start from selling.

If you don’t like to sell, you just can’t do it. Everyone sells. People sell themselves when they apply for a job. Students sell themselves when they apply for scholarships. A mom sells cakes to fund for her family living if she has to.

Everyone can sell, it’s just whether the result meets your target. Good or bad result again is relative, relative to each individual’s goals.

Selling in one location and selling in multiple locations is so different, with different demographics, different consumer behaviour, different city development structure are all factors of how well one can sell achieve the targets.

I personally don’t like sitting back and hope for customers to walk through the door. This is what I know I set my mind to it before we open. I like to be busy. Fortunately for us, when we open on the first day, the customers were just pouring in. When we looked back it was timing of a social media boom period that we capitalised on and also our tasting sessions at the Red Bean Bag.

Selling goes beyond marketing, especially what we all learn in universities with the so called 4 Ps. Those are theory, but in reality it’s much much tougher. Which is why I always encourage whoever who wants to open a F&B to go and work in a F&B place first so you will understand consumer behaviour better.

My friend Han King once shared with me that he goes to supermarket and stand on body and personal care aisle to observe how consumer shop and how they make a decision on which brands to purchase. That really taught me a lot in respecting consumer behaviour as a lot of it starts from understanding the behaviour of all type of consumer groups from the ground level.

Our OUG consumer behave very differently from our SeaPark customers. They come in bigger groups, families mainly and thankfully our location is a bigger location to accommodate such demographic. Otherwise our sales will very much be affected even more.

As you start your business you will learn that there are too factors that affect a customer decision making at different points in time, from long queues, to convenience, to special treatment, to fear of losing out, to peer recommendation, to peer pressure, to many many more. I’m always astonish on different customers make their decision and I learnt a lot of this from cashiering at the counter for almost 2 years.

One big lesson learnt was when we got our first phone number (after 3 freaking years) that people could actually contact us. Previously people just contact us online through social media or email, but when we got our phone number, we realised 3 things. People actually google about us and there were so many more customers we missed out just because a lot of them do not know when we open and where we are exactly located. The last thing we realised was sometimes customers really want to come to eat before we close but because they don’t know if they can make it in time, they decided not to come. But with the phone number, now they can call us to place an order before we close our kitchen so that they can still enjoy our burgers when they arrive.

It was really not funny on how much of opportunities we have missed out. When everyone is trending about social media marketing, for us it was just a simple phone number. Selling is not just about what you sell, or how you sell but also what channels you are selling your products through. Having extra channels means you get to reach out to customers who behave differently.

What made us took it to the next step with a mobile phone channel was the inspiration from startups like BeMalas and Helpr, where we provide convenience to customers who want to “BeMalas” to Whatsapp in their orders at least 1 hour prior (only applicable for non peak time) to preorder their burgers. This helps us to fulfil our downtime capacity. This behaviour is not uncommon as I see my dad always do it back in my hometown where he will call his usual restaurant and order fried rice so that he can just go and collect it after 10 minutes.
(*Note we sometimes do reject orders through Whatsapp if the store is like super busy, so you would still have to walk in).

We even launched our non heavily publicised delivery service through Whatsapp to test out the feasibility of the delivery market and how to go about coping it operationally as the orders scale. The experience has been pretty fruitful.

Many people see our social media as a case study, but we have a lot of sale funnel beneath the surface that we work with because we know social media cannot be the sole bread and butter. This goes similarly to many businesses. We always keep an eye out of how different verticals do their sales channel, be it AirAsia, Tesco, Hilton, Apple, McDonalds, there are many lessons to be learnt from these seasoned guys.

One piece of advice to learn is that selling just doesn’t start with the sales and marketing team, but the operation team are also the sales people. Sales and Marketing converts customers to come, while the operation teams are the one who convert them to be local returning customers. Both functions have to work hand in hand in order to build a kick ass sales team. In our case it’s our geeks, our store managers who walk the talk when it comes to food quality and customer service. Without them, no matter how kick ass our social media marketing is, it wouldn’t work.

All these are just lessons that we learnt throughout our journey. And it all starts with the hunger to sell, if you want to make it, you will do whatever it takes and explore whatever it takes. 🙂

010-3695275 and say hi to our lovely Evan who will handle your request 🙂

P.S. Our 4th year Anniversary is next month and we are fundraising RM 70,000 in total to build a house with Epic Homes. Head on to this event page to find out more details on how you can contribute 🙂

Image source: http://thewanderingeater.com/2010/09/17/homemade-mooncakes/

So a lot of people (even our part time geek) has been tagging us, messaging us saying that Singapore McDonald has launched the Salted Egg Yolk Burger, following our foot steps. (google Salted Egg Yolk McD Singapore if you havent’ heard)

We are honestly grateful that you guys think that myBurgerLab has the upper hand by launching it first or our idea is copied. But in F&B, there’s no like who’s who first one la. There’s so many restaurants whose Char Siew are so equally good that we don’t really pick on who’s first la. Even black charcoal buns can be found in many places anyways.

Salted Egg Yolk trend started way before us anyways, with Le Bread Days (from Malaysia) doing the much talk about Salted Egg Yolk Croissant.

Go ahead and enjoy their burgers, I’m sure they are good. Every product has its market.

We are different concepts anyways.

There’s just a lot of recipe to go around honestly. You can’t patent recipe unless it’s a process recipe like instant powder mix, or coke formula etc. That’s the fact of life and if everyone goes around patent this stuff, then there will be a restaurant that will only serve carbonara. How boring that can be 🙂

And yes, our Salted Egg Burger is still on the menu. Maybe bring one down from SG and we would swap one of ours with yours. At least share some goodness with us as well!

Peace out!

Firstly, I just wanna say that the response of you readers for Part I was really overwhelming, it was really unexpected. And I just want to clarify that I didn’t actually have to eat bread everyday (though economy rice was the actual one), but the statement I was putting out there was a “What If” question of a worse case scenario. Sorry if you thought I did, Pai Seh…..

** back to Part II **

Do you ever wonder why some companies can last longer than some, and some companies just die after a few years? Do you ever wonder how some companies just thrive more than the others at different times?

It was a question that I asked myself constantly after the first year of starting out and there are all sorts of reasons given from books and the media – from unable to adapt to change to not pivoting fast enough. Is there no fool proof way? Or is there a fool proof way sort of?

Then I realised that essentially a business is just like life, everything has up and downs. People come and go. Deaths and births happen. There’s never a fool proof way to last forever and this goes the same to the Central Bank. Maybe one day, central bank may not exist anymore too.

Fun Fact: 80% of businesses fail within the first year!!

From my personal journey and assumption, I can narrow down to only 3 internal factors after seeing how some companies succeed and fail. It all starts from the founders mindset, the team that is part of the business and the culture of how things are run internally.

3. Team is the real King, Product is the Queen.

One big observation I came to conclude that product is no longer king, that is really an old philosophy. Screw it. Many people talk about how good a product is and how life altering an idea can be, but that is just the surface reason.

Products and ideas are actually byproducts of people.

How Nokia fell and Apple rose is what usually people claim to be the product problem but in all honesty the real reason is the team behind these companies that dictates the future of the business. They are the ones who will decide on
1. Whether to go ahead with new innovation
2. What direction of innovation they want to take

The people in the team can make or break the business, just like how Leicester beat everyone in this season’s Premier League. It’s not just Jamie Vardy, it’s the whole team collectively.

It’s not about how much money one company raise, cause if it is then all the latest startup failure stories in the USA wouldn’t happen. The suicidal cases of founders wouldn’t have happen.

A great team will find ways to do whatever it takes to make things happen. If the goal is 5 million sales this year, then it’s to go out and make 5 million sales possible. If the founders and the team are great, they can weather any downturn in the company.

Building a team is probably the highest learning curve that I faced throughout these 4 years. We were really lucky, we got off with a really good start by having great people from the get go and to hire so many young people aged below 25 mainly, gave us a really big advantage to create the myBurgerLab experience that we want.

Seeing how many of these kids grew over the years are personally rewarding. 97% of our crew have no culinary or hospitality background and to be able to understand our philosophy in what we do and translate that into action by putting customers first is amazing. Some geeks just got the hang of it from the start, some take a while.

Many of them do not know how great they can be sometimes in the start, and after few weeks seeing them in action is when you can truly see them flourish. I have seen geeks who are so quiet in the first 2 weeks and after that they opened up really much and just have fun working. I have seen geeks who are over self confident and have lots of ego, but after a few weeks they value team work, helping out others and putting excellence as priority. They probably don’t see it as clearly as we do, but many of them do grow along the way.

I have personally seen a geek (whose mom runs a pet store) who doesn’t know much about F&B and is unsure of what he wants to do in his life after SPM. When he came in he was fairly quiet and timid, and eventually opened up to be one of our best geeks. Seeing how they are when they first came in and how they have became at the end of their journey is just great as it aligns to what we wanted to achieve which is to educate and teach the young generation the mindset of serving and putting others first. It all starts with attitude and I’m glad most of our hires have great attitude (though our rejection rate has raised to almost 50% compared to 10% in year 1).

The energy and vibrancy that these geeks bring to the team is just priceless. myBurgerLab wouldn’t be what it is today if it weren’t for them. Having said that, it is really challenging to handle such high turnover and managing a group of raging hormones. There’s just a lot of team dynamics to deal with. I guess it comes with a price for having what we want to achieve, but it’s still manageable. 🙂 Credit goes to the store managers! Thank you Geeks for the hardwork too!!

If you ever come to the lab and enjoy your experience with the team, drop us a message. Any compliments about a particular geek will always be passed down. Give them a high 5 when you see them, they will appreciate it 🙂

That’s for the part timers. Though for the full timers is a different experience as they are the ones who will be setting the core foundation of everything we do. We made few hiring errors in the first 2 years and we also lost several full timers along the way. Much of it is due to how we founders hire people. I can’t stress on how important it is now to hire correctly especially at the start of the business. We as founders have to be clear with what we want, what kind of people we want and how to manage their expectation at the start of the hire.

To know how important is it to build a great team, it takes failures to see that over a period of time. It always take time to learn how to conduct effective interview and selection process.

I finally understood what it meant by hiring experienced people. If a staff is inexperience or having at least worked at our other places before, he/she may experience stagnation after a few years if the business has a weak system and processes (very much in our case previously). This is because as the business grow, the experience required at the stage are very much different from what was required at the starting phase. There are of course certain exceptions where inexperience hires can pick up really fast and surpass expectations as well. All in all is the attitude of the person, but having the experience of even working could give a really big edge.

You will need to look into your budget and determine what kind of people you can hire and what each hire can bring to the table. Some experienced hire may not be suitable even to work in a startup environment which lacks of systems and processes. Getting a few experienced people at the start will be able to create long term stability, while hiring fresh grads will help to create fearless creativity, so hiring both opposite profile of people in a team at the start is really crucial.

Every staff lost along the way, is always a kick in the gut for me as I felt that we have let them down to present myBurgerLab as a great opportunity for them, but I have learnt to accept that it is part and parcel of building a team. It is through this failures that we can see how else we can improve how we do things.

I always think that my life can’t be as worse as what many football club managers have to deal with for all the summer transfers and change in team dynamics. I just know that for some I had to let them go, mainly for their own benefit as we had poor learning pipeline for some of our functions and it requires an experience eye to set that function up properly. And in some cases was a poor estimation of hiring needs, hence the over hiring.

All these are part of lessons on how to overcome internal organisation challenges and it helps to keep us on our feet to develop a strong learning growth for the team. We changed roles and responsibilities of our core team quite often as we grow and always had to develop processes to patch things up. I wished there’s a textbook on this but there’s nothing better than experiencing ourselves.

3 of us are really grateful to the team, some took risk to join us from the start, some was their first job and it was because of such sacrifice from them to trust us from the start that made us to take the risk to give one last push to see how else we can bring the business back to sustainable terms.

4. Culture

I was invited to speak at Jobi’s career fair recently to speak about building team culture in a company and that topic given really got me thinking of what culture really is. Looking back over the years, we hit several great home runs in terms of the culture we manage to establish, but there were a also few cultures which I hope we established earlier.

Back in 2009-2013, the media were showing all the trendy cool working culture at the great offices around the world which had cool bean bags, pool table, flexible hours, free breakfast. Boy, was I sucked into the media thinking that those perks should be the benchmark to establish a great working culture environment at myBurgerLab.

At the back of my head, I always questioned over the years on whether we are good enough. There’s no PlayStation in the office, no Wii, would we be good enough for people to join or to even stay longer. Such pressure as a startup can be quite self destructive because sometimes we forget that we are comparing ourselves to big companies who are well funded or big multinational companies who existed for years.

But over the year, I have learnt that the truth is people will not determined whether they will stay based on what facilities are available (in fact I call those benefits as perks and not culture). The key is what kind of mindset and culture do you want to set to attract the kind of people you want and to help to push the organisation forward.

Culture is very much explained by how things are being done by the people and what kind of thought process is being cultivated across the team.

Example, by not having much resources available on hand could open up an opportunity for the team to build on a culture of “how to be resourceful when there are no resources”. This creates creativity thinking on ideation and execution. For example, pre sales business model, where sales and transaction is captured even before a good/service is being shipped out.

Not having a cool kickass office with pool table and ping pong table could open up an opportunity for the team to build on a culture of “gratefulness of having essentials and how to use those essentials to build on to bigger things”.

These are the type of cultures which are important in the long run. Putting others first and giving back to the community are 2 big parts of our culture. Humility is also the other.

Culture is very much dictated by how the founders behave and react, and that transcends to the core culture of the company. If punctuality is one non negotiable thing in the company, it will create a culture of people being on time.

One thing I’m glad it started from top down is that when us founders and shareholders do dine at our restaurants, payment is required. We don’t write off the bill as free meal, cause this would create a culture of abuse in the future among us and the staff. It’s better to communicate out what kind of culture to set at the start.

I even queue with other customers to place an order. It’s all this small things that we have to set an example to the team.

One culture that I wish I have cultivated earlier among the team is developing a sense of stronger ownership and developing a risk taking mindset to make decisions. Being in a founder position, there’s this tendency to always want to make the final decision or make the decision, which sometimes can hamper a staff’s ability to think, suggest and take risk. Sometimes the best way to teach them is to have them to go through the experience of trial and error themselves, instead of creating fear in them to try.

Another is the culture of working through people. Frequently, we as founders will always give instructions straight to the employee by bypassing their superior, and that gives the superior less accountability. By working through people, it can create a better sense of respect of a superior and subordinate relationship among my managers. Over time we could see the importance of working through them and holding them accountable to their actions. Wish we would have done it sooner.

It was this year that I started to craft out ways to have the team to start taking steps to make strategic decisions. I have seen progress from creating parameters of expectations for them and give them the creativity to develop ideas to work around so long it meets those parameters. For example, a minimum profit margin can be a parameter. Amount of time to test the idea can be a parameter. It’s just developing a system and safety net created for them to take a step to try and to buffer their failure if they fall.

Remember – flexible working hours is a benefit, hustling late night to do whatever it takes is a culture. We got to know what is the difference.

And that is why it is important to lead by action than through words, cause actions can send through a lot of messages. If we treat our customers or client right and put them first, the staff will follow suit, cause that is the culture we wanna showcase.

Try being late as a founder for a week, and you can start seeing your team members to have punctuality issues. I have learnt over the years on how to be neater (due to my ever messy table), cause it does translate down to how the team keep things in order. One very bad habit/culture I have learnt to kick is the sleep on the restaurant bench habit (which was really terrible in the first 2 years and I became famous among my geeks for that. I wished I would have take it seriously but it is through various experience that we learn the magnitude of impact one action could have on the team.

Unfortunately as a founder, your every move is that brutal, because it’s the type of energy you are sending out to the team to follow. So do catch yourself next time. I’m still learning.

So how do we know when to hire and what function to hire for? This starts from planning which we will cover next’s week column. And I will also touch on the juicy story some of you have been wondering what actually went wrong in 2014/2015.

Till then, see you.

P.S. We are always hiring, if you know anyone who wanna join our team, head on to our page by clicking here.

And just like that, 4 years have passed, since the day we embarked on an idea from Renyi’s home, to testing our burgers with friends at the Red Bean Bag, to now what we have at 4 locations in Klang Valley.

Sometimes I do wonder how everything just happen, cause it just feels like yesterday that we were just talking about the idea. There were so much emotions that come and go throughout the journey that makes it even more surreal.

The whole 4 years did feel like a degree sort of, a degree which is cheaper than my actual education degree actually, which has taught me so much, especially in the year 2015 as it was the toughest year ever. It was as if I was going through a FYP/Thesis phase for my final year.

It’s been a while since I last wrote about our journey. The emotions, growth, self reflection and friendships that have occurred over the years have fueled me to write about this 4 series article, due to release every weekend till our Anniversary week, July 10. Many of these things have not covered by any media and it’s about us opening up on our vulnerability to the world to see what are the things that goes behind that black burger joint.

Many thanks to the people who were part of my life over the years. Thanks to my family for continuing trusting me, the myBurgerLab team to give their all hustling through a roller coaster ride, my myBurgerLab partners for believing in the journey and hustling non stop, the customers for the continue trust in us with their returning visits, my Ops Ninja partner and team, my budding entrepreneur friends (your presence itself is a good reminder for me to hustle) and my friend Li Kheng who supported me spiritually since I knew her.

Throughout these 4 years, we went through from selling 600 burgers a day to facing a decision on whether to call it a day for the business. We went through few fundraising talks but all didn’t happen in the end. We took risk to work with someone abroad to open our Cambodia location which we learnt a lot with working with someone else. We lost staff along the way, some which we should have fired faster and some was we over hired. We had to reshuffle roles and responsibilities many times. We made so many friends along the way, many whom helped us one way or another, giving us advice and supporting us emotionally.

And after such intense journey, I will be covering 9 things that I learnt along the way.

1. Mindset

Starting a business starts from the right mindset. Your why and conviction has to be strong and clear.

Entrepreneurship they call it, is not something glamorous to began with. The media has worked its way to glamourize entrepreneurship that makes a lot of student contemplating on quitting their studies and jump into entrepreneurship.

Awards, PR Release, News Coverage are good for business marketing, but it doesn’t guarantee personal success. We are just people who just wanna create things for the world and grow a bunch of people to serve the people of the world, teaching them to put others first.

If someone wants to start a business because they say “at least I have something on my own”, or “I’m tired of working for people” or “I don’t like working at my place”, I will go like F**K you!

That is because business is not a game of just try and see what happens. Being naive is a good firepower to have when you first venture into a business, but being able to focus on yourself first and not others will cause you burnout in the long run.

The amount of responsibility you hold as an owner is large. So large that it involves other people’s life – your staff and their children, their family, their partners.

Take this perspective into account where you look at your financial statement and worrying that you have to lay them off when you go into the office. It’s so mental torturing. Sometimes I will just feel ashamed to even go to work, but I know the 2 routes that exist are either downwards or just keep on trying to go upwards.

We get paid last when it counts.

There’s no security, no fixed schedule of 5 days work week, no benefits of public holiday and to sum everything else in a much worse state, we are not even building something that is ours, because we will never able to bring it to us in the grave.

So why bother to take such a difficult route?

If you ever want to start a business, please start with these questions.

“What would keep you going if you have to eat bread everyday for couple of months just so you can issue paychecks to pay your staff? Are you able to take the grit test and put others first when it counts?”

And it is through these hard times is when I finally understood why some people are just reluctant to start their own business. Some people’s lives will be made miserable if they venture into entrepreneurship. Honestly some people are just better off working. Many of my peers now are making even more than me in their monthly salary. The good thing is, through this difficult journey, it also helped me to evaluate a founder of another business sharper if I were to work with that person or invest in them.

2 years after the Alliance bank challenge, now I finally understand why Tan Sri Liew Kee Sin asked me these 2 questions:

1. “Why is this important to you” and
2. “What happens if this venture doesn’t work out”.

When a seasoned businessperson goes through the hard times, that is when you truly understand that the only way out, is the person itself, and that is all that makes the difference.

It is not the best years that count, it’s how you handle the bad times that counts.

It’s no longer which idea is the best or whether this idea would change the world, but how much of grit do you have to just run a business successfully. It is true when top VCs in the States say that it is difficult to find someone that can qualify as both a founder and a CEO material at the same time, because both roles do require different set of emotions.

End 2014, early 2015 was the toughest times of our lives, as we had to get some money to open our 3rd store to ensure our survival. It was either taking that risk to do one last push or end up losing everything (more explain in the Part III). During that struggle, the motivation to even go ahead for one last push was questionable. There were doubts on whether there could ever been a light at the end of the tunnel, despite thinking we have done the really best we can.

From 18 months of having people to queue outside our first outlet to facing shutting down the business, it was a mental ping pong in my mind. I was really lost, struggling to pull myself out of bed sometimes. It’s depressing, that’s fact of life. You just don’t see it in the media.

And through those difficult moments is when each of us would have to find our own source of motivation and for me, it was the people who trusted us to embarked on the journey at the beginning. There’s just too much sacrifice from their end for me to let them down. If it’s up to me to battle it out once again, it’s for the management team, the young energetic geeks and the customers.

Who else could possibly do a burger joint with such creative burgers and such energetic service if it’s not us. If it’s meant to be, we should be the one who power through to leave a legacy and putting Malaysia on the map.

80% cut on my pay for 15 months, cut down on spending to buy time, working 18 hours a day, weird sleeping patterns, hustle to make more sales and started another business (Ops Ninja) with my other partner (Chok) to fund my living. When times get tough, you just have to do whatever it takes to just make it work. No negotiations, just whatever it takes (within the moral discipline of course). If there’s anything to blame, it’s to blame it on us ourselves as entrepreneurs.

Throughout those difficult times, catering for Maxis management lunch saved us. Catering for Digi annual internal staff celebration saved us. Samsung Star Light Cinema events saved us. Many more events saved us and it is true that when people said “When you ask for a miracle, you may just get what you want after all.” The world does work in mysterious ways, and that is when I learn how to be grateful for what I have.

I’m usually stress out over things, what more when the business was at such uncertain stage. But it was through the understanding what these 2 words “Acceptance” and “Impermanence” really mean that helped me to detach myself emotionally from the business.

Acceptance – Being able to accept that whatever happens, happens for a reason and instead of resisting them, it’s all about accepting them and ask ourselves what’s next. Acceptance starts from giving the permission within to accept the situation and scenario. The more we resist, the more friction it creates and then there’s where paralysis happens.

Impermanence – Nothing in the world is permanent. Look at Nokia. Look at the various banks worldwide, nothing will last forever and that is just the fact of life. It was the biggest breakthrough for me as I understood that the business success and failure doesn’t define me. This helped me to make my decision more objective instead of emotional ones.

We are always faced the challenge of an entrepreneur to always take the emotions of our team into account, but sometimes we know better that we have to do what’s best for the business because through that, the business will in return be able to take care of the people. No matter how hard we try, it will not be ours forever. We are just given this duty from the universe to serve others during this lifetime.

And it is through this difficult times that made me realized why so many of the successful people out there are so humble, because they have been through terrible times and they are just here to make other people’s life better.

So start with the right mindset, a purpose, a why that is bigger than yourself because once you start a business it’s no longer about you. It’s about others.

If you are in the working world, and wanna do your own thing, talk to your boss to see what you can help him to kick start with. There’s a new trend call Intrapreneur, and that is much better as you have at least some safety net.

2. Founders

Some say birds of a feather flock together. Some say we attract what energy we portray – if we are positive, we will attract positive people.

When you have the right mindset, your circle of people will usually have the similar wavelength of mindset. It’s true because over the years, I could see how my network of people grew, from budding startup friends to seasoned entrepreneurs. But both having the same purpose and mindset, just that they are in different stage of business.

Hence when you are starting up your business and are looking for a founding partner, you will be able to attract the similar kind of people if you have the right mindset. After listening to so many stories of founders’ breakout over 4 years, I am seriously grateful to have my partners as my partners. Sometimes when people ask us what our success of myBurgerLab is, I don’t even know really because it’s a combination of so many different things, but sometimes I like to think that it starts from us having a good partnership which is honestly unexplainable.

Many people have asked me before, should I have a partner? How is it like working with partners? People say 2 is hard to deal with already how do we go with 3?

To be honest, if you can handle marriage or a relationship partner, you can definitely handle business partnership. It ain’t that bad really, in fact it’s much simpler because usually the bigger end goals and directions are clearer, it’s only the small little goals that builds up to the bigger goal along the way that has its own challenges.

Having partners and no partners have no right and wrong, it’s just both have different consequences and it’s how we perceive each choice to be.

When you have no partners, it just means that you have find really good people for your team to complement what skill sets or mindset that you do not have. More importantly also to find good hire for your team that can cover you when you are sick or unavailable or to hedge on the risk on the continuity of the business. The good part of having no partner is the simplicity it can create for your team in terms of directions and culture, as they don’t have to be stuck in the struggle of partners to make a decision. Sometimes that could cripple the speed of taking action in an organization.

When you have partners, it could create more conflict but also it helps to keep each other in check. Having partners is good to complement each other and with that, together everyone could achieve more things going forward.

There bound to be conflicts as long as there’s more than 1 human being, so if you are not a conflict person, my advice is try to stay away from partnerships. I myself don’t really like how to deal with conflict but over the years I have learnt that conflict exist because of 2 things:

1. not putting myself in their shoes to address their concern
2. focusing on self goal then the bigger goal

The key is how do we turn the conflict into a resolution that is for a bigger purpose, which in our case is what would make customers happy and have a better experience. If it serves that, personal agenda will immediately be nullify, because customers at the end of the day are our boss, not us. They pay our bills.

Both my business in myBurgerLab and Ops Ninja doesn’t have full length partnership agreement kinda thing, and I think that’s because of our trust towards each other that somehow we just don’t see the need to. And that sometimes is what they say the best partnership is, people who can work with each other naturally without much black and white terms.

I have always like what one of my favourite entrepreneur, Tan Thiam Hock, shared about his partnership history with his late partner Mr. Ang in his first few ventures. It just shows trust is the most valuable thing over any fees that you pay to the lawyers to prepare an agreement.

From my own experience, if your partnership gonna involve 2 people, then best to have one handle operations and the other to handle business development + marketing. Cause these 2 are the main core of early stages of the business. If you can’t handle accounts, get someone else to do it. Having more money in the bank is more important than recording money in the bank. Go out and be a hunter.

One piece of advice I could give though is to find partners who share the same kind of values. Having similar life values would really help.

The only caution I would have for having multiple partners is how it can affect the culture of the company, which I will continue in next week’s column.

Till then, this marks the end of Part I.

** Added – Part II link is here