Smiling Star Interview Mr Jimmy New

Transcription

1 Smiling Star Interview Mr Jimmy New Q: Nature of your business? A: So basically, Smiling Star runs courses for children as young as 18 months all the way to 12 years old. We run childcare centers, we have playgroup programs, we have phoenix enrichment programs and we run student care centers. We are also the operator for People Association when we run courses in CC and RC centers. Basically, we develop our own enrichment program, like phoenix and Chinese character recognition programs. So all these courses basically get the PA approval and gets run in the CCs. We also do curriculum development and we teach some of the enrichment programs in some of the childcare centers as well. So we are also providing enrichment programs to the childcare centers besides we running our own childcare centers. Q: When and why did you decide to take on entrepreneurship? A: A little bit about my history. When I finished my studies, I came from a very poor background. My father was a taxi driver and my mother took care of 7 of us. So she couldn t even work. So my father worked as a taxi driver and fed the 7 of us. My sister after sec 4, decided to work to support the family. I am one of the middle child, I am the 4 th child. So when it came to my turn, when I finished my O level, I decided to sign on with SAF and they paid for all my studies. When I finished my contract with SAF, I always wanted to be a boss by myself. Maybe because of my character, I like to make decisions. I like to be in control. Then I decided to run a business. So Smiling Star was my 3 rd business. The first 2 failed. Q: Oh, what was the first 2 businesses regarding? A: The first one was in 1996 when I left SAF. I started a web design company. At that moment, nobody talked about web business. People talked about web business somewhere in 2000 but I already started in So it was a little bit too early no doubt it was a good thing. Today, its everything. But in 1996, it was actually not a good thing because it was too early and then you have to spend a lot of time educating people and you cannot even get the income because you are spending a lot of time teaching people what is internet. So I somehow failed. And then when I failed, someone got me into the airport to run the first 24hour internet café. So I started that café and it was featured in the news as it was the first one in the world in the airport. but the business was also too early because it was only 1997/98. Nobody knew about internet. So it also failed. And then after that, I started my 2 nd business, more towards training. Company training. I started one center in the neighborhood community. I put in some computers and I started teaching. But I started to realize that people who supposed to learn IT in that area has learnt IT. So the business dropped and it failed again. Then I converted myself to do abit of tuition program. But it is very teacher dependent. So once, one of my teachers brought away 80 of my students. Then I started to ask myself, can I do something that is not teacher dependent, something that is brand dependent? Then I started to look into the tuition market and realized that the tuition market is a market where the children are facing some problems. Probably, they do not need certain topics. So they come and look for doctors and then they try to solve their problem. So I said that it is very teacher dependent as it is the doctor that cures the patient. So I told myself I need to come up with something that is purely curriculum dependent and in the educational business. And when I looked into it, I decided preschool is the business. If I can come up with a package and the children

2 consume it and they have the immune system for them to have a head start, for them to be strong and to give them a strong foundation, then that will be the kind of package that is not teacher dependent but curriculum and branding dependent. So I started to build Smiling Star. Q: But what made you change from the technology industry to educational industry? A: At that stage, when we failed we keep asking for reasons why we failed. And then I did not insist that I must remain in the technological background that I came from. In fact I asked myself, what are my strengths. And then I started to volunteer in the community, and I had very good relationships with the community partners. Then I said that is my strength and then can I work on that strength? So I thought of developing playground programs in the RCs and CCs. Then I got people to join me, to develop the foundational program that we want to build for the children. Q: How did you get the start up capital and the resources to start up your business? A: Precisely, I did not have that much money and capital. But when I looked at myself, I had all the contacts. So when I started, I actually made my home as a home office and I answered calls and held meetings at home. Playgroup programs are very short, probably around 2 hours, and the income is very little. So we kept asking ourselves what is next? When I came by knowing that there is a tender going on in this CC, I asked myself should I tender or not. By then, I already had some funds and when I took over this childcare center, I was quite lucky as formerly, this childcare was on the ground floor and was run by another operator. So when the other operator decided not to run this program, when I took over, they left a lot of furniture and equipment behind. So I didn t use a lot of money to get this thing started. Q: So why Smiling Star? A: We wanted a company name that can represent our company and what kind of business we want to run. When I look at all the businesses around my contacts, and also I ask myself, eventually what I want to achieve in life. So I said that I want to run a business that can last for 100 years. Even when I m not around, the business will still continue. So companies like Coke, KFC, where they stay on for more than 100 years. Can I build a brand name like them? So that was the initial thinking. A lot of businesses do not even cross 2/3 generations. That was also the reason why I picked education as the business. Education is a business where the more you do, the better you are and then the brand name will stay. So why the name Smiling Star? Children like stars. Star means somebody who have achieved great things, successful, you consider yourself a star. But you can be very successful but you are very unhappy with your life, then it will defeat the purpose. So I said the star must be a happy star. But happy star sounds a bit normal. So the star must be smiling. If this person is smiling, then the person is happy with what he is doing. So that was how the brand name came about. Q: So what is your company s vision or mission and how do you convey it to your employees? A: Vision we know that every child is unique and every child has his own strengths, so we want to uncover their strengths so they can excel in the area they are good in. we want to update the parents that their child is good in particular areas. But of course, that is not enough. If you want to be a successful person, you must have

3 positive thinking and good moral values. So we put that into our vision. So that this person can shine like a smiling star. Mission we want to make it valuable to the parents, we want our teachers to be friendly and we want to create a clean, caring, welcoming environment for everyone. Q: What about the company culture? Do you have a specific company culture? A: Our company culture is pretty simple. We want our teachers to be positive in everything that they do. When they encounter problems, we want them to use positive thinking to come up with solutions. When crisis drops onto you, we have 2 choices. 1 choice is to be negative and then you stay there for long as you don t know what to do. Another approach is that you be positive and look for alternative solutions and do it better the next round. Q: What are some of the challenges that you faced when you first went into this business? A: Mainly resources, capital. Q: So how did you overcome these challenges? A: Trust and relationships in terms of people. We commit to our staff that we will definitely pay them their salary. So I guarantee my people this and once they feel that they have the trust in me, they will continue and follow me. Q: How about sales and marketing? Do you have any problems gathering sales in the beginning? A: I don t face a lot of problems in sales. Before I started Smiling Star, there was a period where I worked for an IT company for 5 years. I headed the customer services and I learnt a lot of skills from there and applied it here. I will run the customer service course to all my staff. So that means every staff that joins Smiling Star will have a chance to attend the course that I conducted. So I will train every staff to handle different type of customers. And we also define ourselves as a people s company. We deal children, teachers, parents as people. We have a huge focus on communications and customer service, HR, systems. We do customer feedback surveys and staff evaluation surveys to know where we are. Q: Are the awards that you have achieved so far important and meaningful to you in any sense? A: I think all these awards give you a certain recognition that you are doing the right thing. But that is only an award. Because my personal vision is for Smiling Star to be continued for the next 100 years. And I have to continue to build the system so that the legacy will continue for long. So I still have along long way to go. If you ask me what makes myself feel good? Is when I see my students wearing Smiling Star uniform walking on the road. Q: How do you promote learning within your company? Do you have any progressive training opportunities for your staff, other than the customer service lesson that you mentioned previously? A: We have defined a few key important training. Besides the standard induction program, we have 2 programs. 1 is the customer service program and the other is the Smiling Star leaders program. So once they come in as a supervisor or head of department, they will have to go through training.

4 Q: Do the company do any social activities or team building activities? A: We do team building activities yearly. We have our own directional meeting. Every year, I will set a broad direction. Our staff will base on my broad direction, using SWOT to brainstorm within their own department. I want to see bottom up ideas. And we set such achievable ideas as the goal of individual departments and we will sub divide these goals into individual teachers and we record them into the self appraisal form and every year we review their performance based on goals achievement. So we do a series of these kind of activities. Such meetings are important as it is a form of communication between teachers and myself as well as within the departments. So the head of departments will be able to run day to day operations without me being there all the time. For social activities, we work very closely with community partners. We bring our children to perform in community events. This year, we are going to do a charity fundraising. Children will work with their parents to do up their creative artworks and then have a charity sales. Then all the money that we have collected will be channeled to the charity. The goal I set for this year, is a healthy caring and united Smiling Star. That is a broad goal that I set for this year. So our staff based on this, what do you mean by healthy, caring and united. So they came up with ideas like getting our children to visit the old folks home and monthly staff barbeque etc. Q: How about future plans? Do you any plans to expand? A; Continue to expand definitely. Locally and overseas. I m looking at 2 areas. Vietnam or China. It is never easy to go overseas. I have failed before. I went to Shanghai for 2 years to start a kindergarten there and I failed. We are not the locals. Especially education where it is something where most government would control. So it is never easy for private to enter the market. It is a lot tougher than many traditional businesses. So a local partner there is important. I am not rushing into it. I want to have a good match so I continue to source. Currently, I am in the stage of sourcing for a good partnership. For my uniforms and everything I source from Vietnam, so I travel to and fro there very often. Why I do that is because I want to use the relationship to bridge and to know more people and slowly ease into the market. And I believe in not rushing into anything and giving myself too much stress. I want my business to continue and I always ask myself do I want to take it slow and slowly build my business over the next few years or do I want to stress myself and game over by 60? The thinking is no longer like people of your age, where I want to do something and I have a lot of energy. As long as I have the determination, I can run run run run run. But I cannot. Now I have came to a stage where I tell myself I better plan because if you don t plan properly, that is your life and your business all together. So you need to be healthy and go on for another years. And you can see the business become more stable and the 2 nd generation will come in and take over. And only then will the vision realize. So there are many stages. For the start, it is the building stage. Second is stabilizing and third is prolonging. I am currently in the prolonging stage where I am trying to get crowd funding money to fund my expansions. So I think businesses is a very big thing. First, you need to believe in your product. Your product must be able to continue to compete until it is a good product. And your brand name must continue to grow until people say that eh this is a trusted branded. Not pure advertising. You need to deliver what you promise. Then after that, you would want to expand as you have all the things ready and you have all the

5 capabilities. And then the money must come in. So I am looking out for crowd fund so investors can invest. Q: How do you differentiate your business from your competitors? Are there any factors that are unique to Smiling Star? A: We want to give the children a good foundation so that they can have a foundation. We talk about learning with fun. We want to make learning as fun as possible so we use some methods like experiential learning. We get the children to learn by doing it themselves. We create such an environment of learning, which will stay with the children even longer. We talk about learning outside classroom and exploring. With all these, I think we know what we are doing. We know how to compete in this market. I can more of less say that I can produce students who are in the top 20% when they enter P1. So that is our unique selling point. Other than that, do you know that I sell milk to other childcare centers? Ok you see here. Smiling Star develop our own program and curriculum and we sell it to our competitors. Competitors don t look at us as competitors. They look as us like we are sharing more things to them and then they can value add from us. So when we sell this program to them, I told Meji milk that I am already reaching out to all the childcare centers. Why not I help you to distribute your milk? So they sold me the distributionship and now I distribute Meji milk to all the childcare center in Singapore. So my business model does not restrict only to definition of IT company or educational company. I don t restrict myself. I look at the market needs and the requirements and then I branch out. And I look at my own resources. If you look at Smiling star in the future, of course education is the main thing and then they have the IT supporting arm, investment arm. Q: What exactly does entrepreneurship mean to you? A: First thing you must start off with a belief. Then you need to preserve. You will definitely face all kind of problems. Continual learning is also important. I don t have business skills because I came from IT background. During our time, we do not have a module talking about business. So you need to continue to learn to pick up skills. You need to read books to pick up knowledge. And then your people. You have to take care of their interest first then your own. Also, you must build the trust. You must be able to deliver your promises. You must continue to learn, continue to innovate. Learn from your own mistakes and step by step you move forward. My friends describe me as move forward 3 steps, drop back 2 steps. They see me as progressive this way. It s not a smooth journey. Q: What other qualities other than trust is important? A: The attitude determine the future. A person with positive attitude determine the whole thing. Every step that we take might be right might be wrong. So if it is wrong, learn from it. If it is good, maintain it. And then you keep doing this, keep asking yourself. And then when problem surface, you need to have a positive attitude. Q: Other than children wearing your school uniform, what else motivates you to overcome the challenges that you face? A: I have 3 children. They are quite independent. Eventually when you are more successful, you want to share your success and happiness. Definitely, you need a family begin you and share the joy together. If you are alone, success becomes less meaningful. It is not necessary for them to give me a lot of support. I consider myself very strong. I think the family part is I want to share my successfulness with them.

6 Q: With the changes in the market today, do you think it is easier or harder to be successful in your own business? A: It all depends on your mindset. When there are changes, there will be challenges and opportunities. We must be able to get that opportunity and ride on it. Like when the market is bad, you cannot just sit and do nothing. You know the government is providing more help to SMEs. So you need to go and listen to them, listen to what they have to offer and ride on any opportunities that are provided to you. When it comes to changes, human beings will not want to change. When you are quite successful and have been doing something for so long, you might not be able to receive new ways of thinking because you have your own template of successfulness. And that is the worse thing. But the environment has changed and your template cannot be used anymore. So you need to let go of your template and find new templates. And don t restrict yourself eg I am a technical guy, I need to do education etc etc. Once you have those kind of restriction, you get yourself locked. They say that I am a person where I can look at opportunities and ride on it and develop it to a business. But of course, you would also have to ride on your past experiences and your capabilities. So that you don t everything from scratch. That is very difficult. Q: What advise would you give to young people who want to start their own business? A: I always say. If there is a pond infront of you and you want to swim across the pond. Before you jump into the pond, you always say like I will plan. I will swim frog style, free style. You will do a lot of planning. You can do a lot of planning but eventually is whether can you jump into the pond. The first step is crucial. There are people who just can t jump. It is the same feeling when doing business. You cannot jump. You must be able to jump. Second step, is when you are already in the pond. Whatever you planned is going to help you. But there are circumstances and things when you did not think of. The current, the crocodile. So then what must you do when you are in the pond? You need to quickly identify challenges, you need to be positive and you need to overcome then you can eventually swim across. In Singapore context, a lot of graduates cannot jump. They can just go on to the conventional route. You look at the amount of money that your parents spend on you on education, you might think that what if your business fail. But I thought to myself business is a one lifetime kind of journey. If you really want to compare to your peers, you only will compare when you are At the start, you will definitely lose out but at the end you will gain so much more. At lot of my peers they get retrenched now and they don t know what to do now. Their salary is so huge but they work slower than the fresh graduate. Their mindset have been locked to the old time mindset. To them, it is successful. But now their mindset is outdated. Company let them go and once they are out in the workforce again, they will not be able to accept a fresh graduate salary. So if you want prevent such mid life crisis, you have to lose at the beginning and gain at the end. Youngsters are very energetic and want to show the world that they are capable. They always compare the results and the salary that they get. But they need to see long term. Lose in the short term but gain in the long term. And that s in me. Whatever we build at the very beginning as an entrepreneur, we are getting the fruits at the age of So it depends on what you want. You can pluck your fruits at the beginning after you pass your O level A level Uni. But that s not true. The real fruits is only later.

7 Q: So what if a young person enter the business and then fail, what would you say to that person? A: Ask yourself why fail, where went wrong and then you must always believe once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur. It is very suffering for an entrepreneur to go back to the corporate world. They will lose the luxury of flexibility. Human beings want their freedom. If you want to do it, my advise to a youngster is when you are 30 years old, you need to start something. When you are 40 years old, you must be already doing something that you like. When you are 50, you must be rich. Then your 60 and 70 will be happy. 20 a little bit too young. You don t recognize things. A lot of things are very different from other people. Then you start to realize things at the age of 30 then start then. It is also important to diversify your business. Smiling Star runs so many things. It helps because when one sector is down, the other sector will help to support you. But I try to get leaders to fill a particular segment, so that they can grow that particular segment. Q: Do you have any last words? A: If you believe, jump. And don t turn back. Continue to look at the current issues and think how to solve them. Have a positive attitude towards all your problems. Look for solutions, fight for the best. Previously, one of my student care center the lease expired and I had students at that center. So I came to this CC and I talked to this MP and asked for help. So he let me use the basic classroom for 3 months till I found another space. You call it game over or you continue to fight and find an alternative solution. Once you can keep the students for 3 months, you have another opportunity to fight for another 3 months. It is the attitude of how you preserve to move on. But of course if you choose to work for somebody, which is also good, but you need to be so outstanding till you reach the top management level. Besides doing so, you must keep your real skill set. Because when you reach the top management, you will only use your mouth. You don t do hands on. You only give instructions. That is also not enough. Because eventually your pay will still be too high and company will still decide to let you go. If your job can be replaced by a fresh graduate, prepare to be gone. So you must cross that hurdle, once you cross that you are safe. Reach the top level and still do hands on and maintain in the company. But that being said, we only have one lifetime, it all depends on what you want. I want to leave something behind. I want to leave the 100 years smiling star behind. So I am building towards this belief. But there are people who say I come to this world, I just happily enjoy the process and then I say bye bye to this place. So there are 2 different approaches and for me it is a little bit different. So I will work towards that.