More Than How to Fish

Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. This ancient Chinese proverb by Lao Tzu became one of the famous teachings applied by companies or marketing gurus as bait to fish followers. People always believe in proverbs that project sensibility and intelligence, hence many use these wise words to lure newbie to sign up for courses; to make them join as member of clubs; to engage them as franchisee; and all of the newbie with a high hope that they would learn the mentioned skills, or some new techniques that “guarantee” them a lifetime of success.

But these wise marketing phrases are like half-baked dishes; to chomp and to swallow them all could give you terrible stomachache or worse food poisoning. The business world is volatile, full of uncertainties, and the availability of technologies worsen the situation by accelerating the environmental change. The fishing skill will never be enough to feed you for your whole life; your knowledge would be outdated sooner than you think.

It’s no doubt that you may benefit from the teachings in the beginning, but it is still far from the comfort zone that could bring you financial freedom; and the business ‘pond’ would soon be too crowded when more ‘anglers’ joined in for the same catch. Your chances of catching a good fish would be slimmer, and soon you would be starving again. I’d followed exactly the methods you taught me on how to fish, but …..? A good but, but why does it surprise you?

I’m discussing this topic here to provide our resellers with a conceptual advice. Our motto, We Make Things Easy is just like giving fish to our users. We aim to ease our users when dealing with our products, free them from all the troubles. And because they are end-users, it would be much preferred if we could feed them fish even without teaching them how to fish. The lesser the problem they have with FingerTec, the better. We just need them to enjoy the tasty fish. Period.

For our resellers however, the motto We Make Things Easy is more than just giving them fish, and it is even more than to teach them how to fish.

A lot of resellers prefer FingerTec because we make their life easier in two ways, easy to sell and easy to support our products. But disadvantages always come parallel with advantages, when FingerTec takes care of almost everything, it obscures part of the vivid role played by a reseller.

How to distinguish yourself, instead of being overshadowed by a brand? That’s the question of more than “how to fish”. But some of the resellers don’t mind this, they want to be a part of FingerTec, proudly embracing and carrying the brand around. And this is also a question of more than “how to fish”.

If you are a solution provider, if FingerTec is a part of your solution, you have to build your own reputation, and with our branding efforts and reliability of the products, FingerTec may enhance your solutions. How to make FingerTec works for you, and how to brand everything in your solutions, that’s no doubt, is more than teaching you how to fish. We hope our more-than-just-a-product’s holistic branding efforts can be of helpful reference to build your own fame.

And for the second scenario as a distributor, you have to think on how to add local or regional substances into the brand of FingerTec, more than just to “distribute” as merely a product.

If the local or regional substance is your own efforts, like you’re maintaining a local FingerTec Facebook or Newsletter to actively communicate with your customers, or to add local language in the software and hardware that make things even easier in your local market, or to improve your website to be more dynamite or plug-in with some of our functional modules, these are more than just “how to fish”, and you would be surprised of what it might be harvest in the long run.

In short, with the impending competition, teach a man how to fish would no longer feed him a lifetime. In fact, by adding more values or renewing your learned skills or knowledge, why bother to fish when you can breed the whole pond of your unique species of fish?

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Labor Day, Diminishing Labor Class

This Labor Day, Hong Kong’s first minimum wage came into effect amid the rising public anger over sky-high rents and a growing income gap in the international financial hub.

This Labor Day in Australia, between 20,000 to 30,000 workers turned out for Labor Day marches across Queensland celebrating workers' rights.

This year in Turkey, Labor Day was celebrated on Sunday with mostly peaceful demonstrations attended by the country’s major labor unions and political parties, a definite contrast if compared to the bloodshed that happened in 1977 during the marching procession in Taksim Square, causing chaos that resulted 34 deaths.

This Labor Day, two Kazakh activists were beaten by police and hospitalized after the police forcibly dispersed groups marking Labor Day in Almaty.

This Labor Day in Malaysia, a demonstration calling for minimum wage saw 21 people being arrested in Kuala Lumpur. They were later released.

This Labor Day, downtown Manhattan was filled with thousands of people from labor and immigrants’ rights groups Sunday, as they manifested to celebrate May Day, an international celebration for workers’ rights annually commemorated on May 1.

This Labor Day holiday, I stayed at home reading “The Rise of Creative Class”, a book written by Richard Florida which discusses the emergence of a new social class, where they use creativity as a key factor in their work in business, education, healthcare, law or some other professions.

The author said in the preface, “human creativity is the ultimate economic resource. The ability to come up with new ideas and better ways of doing things is ultimately what raises productivity and thus living standards. The great transition from the agricultural to the industrial age was of course based upon natural resources and physical labor power, and ultimately gave rise to giant factory complexes in places like Detroit and Pittsburgh. The transformation now substituted one set of physical inputs (land and human labor) for another (raw materials and physical labor) while the current one is based fundamentally on human intelligence, knowledge and creativity”.

The numbers of people doing creative work has increased vastly over the past century and especially over the past two decades. And the norm of this class is, you would hardly see any worker strikes, for example IT industry that housed mostly creative workers.

For the same reason, when the creative class or knowledged worker number is climbing, you would see Worker Union shrinking naturally, even without any suppression from the government or employers.

I agree on the proposed minimum wage, and support the under privileged class to fight for higher wage from the heightening living burden. And to offset the gradually increased labor costing, employers have to upgrade themselves from a labor-intensive business that is based on price competition to become a creative organization that can improve profitability. And for workers, they have to upgrade themselves too to join the creative class in order to upgrade the quality of lives. That’s the trend, brainpower is always stronger than the labor power, and applies to everyone in all industries.

If you are a creative worker, you don’t need minimum wage to protect you, and you don’t need a Worker Union to shelter you; your knowledge and creativity would become your own bargaining power. You have to upgrade your knowledge and creativity at all times, to avoid slowly falling back into the labor category again in any industry.

As we are in the tech industry, this year we celebrated the Labor Day by giving away an iPad 2 to all our staff as a token of appreciation.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Having the Cake and Eating It Too: Sales vs Marketing

When a discussion yields a fruitful outcome, it just makes my day. Norana came to me the other day to discuss a campaign to boost sales. The idea was good; the details were flawless. I was about to give it a nod, but deep down in my heart there was still something deterring me from doing so which I couldn’t figure out at that moment. Then we drifted away discussing some other topics, and the answer suddenly hit me when our conversation arrived at the subject of how resellers place our products in their websites.

immediate result vs long term impact

Yes, that’s the difference between sales and marketing. One focuses on delivering an immediate result, another looks for a broader aspect and a longer-term impact. Sales activities are good to generate extra income in a very short period, but at FingerTec I'm always inclined to the latter.

I understand that psychologically, customers welcome sales or promotional activities such as straightforward price cuts, 10% discount, 20% discount, and so on; the more the better. We do witness some products or shopping malls starting with a monthly or festive season sales, only to eventually become all year long sales. You can't help but pity them because without any promotion, their business would be seriously affected.

As we are not selling consumer products, I perceive more value can be added, and by adding these values, resellers are building up their own strength too alongside FingerTec products. The value might not turn into instant sales, or some resellers might think of the process as “a waste of time”, but with the right ingredients and direction, it will set you apart from your rivals and make your sales and support easier.

Sales activity short-lived; the money value ends together with the activity. However, long-term marketing activity accumulates value that remains for a long time, and the value even works for you even if you're not aware of it.

One might ask, “Why not do both to boost sales and yield longer term value?” Yes, it’s good to have both, but as a Chinese saying goes, you can’t have both the fish and the bear paws at the same time. When you launch a sales activity, you’ll drive away the resellers to aggressively sell your products, they will not spend time writing their successful project story, they’ll not bother to gather customers’ email addresses and etc. So how about slowing them down in sales, speed them up in marketing? (Some people might think I’m crazy)

I always think pragmatism should be mixed with a touch of idealism; only then we can expect more surprises.

A lot of businessmen on one hand think it’s good to tap on the social media tool, but on the other hand think Facebook and Twitter can wait, but sales cannot. And they also feel a standard website with a URL printed on the name card should be good enough, and regular contents update and upgrade of the website is a waste of investment. Once, there was a “pragmatic” businessman that laughed at us for having a big team to maintain a website.

Yes, we do a lot of “unnecessary” tasks from some people's point of view, but all these “unnecessary” would eventually turn FingerTec to be a great product and a great brand in the Biometrics industry.

We urge our partners to write us stories, to send us some successful projects as a case study, to set up their own Facebook and to maintain it, to keep their website active and plug some of our sales and support modules into their website. Create more local contents in the local language. This month, we have substantial growth of Facebook members from Malaysia, because we gave away a special discount for resellers who joins us at Facebook as a member. And our records show us that partners who have their own Facebook and actively manage it also perform well in sales.

My urge is, spend some time and money on marketing, by adding little more value of your own, you would unlock all the hidden values beneath a great product.

And, we should be having very clear direction for future marketing campaigns after my fruitful discussion with Norana.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Environmental Footprint

I always believe that the more we do for our products, software, sales and technical support system, the less our partners and customers need to do.

If the concept is applied to B2C system, it could be translated to good online retail shopping experience where customer sits back in his cozy home, a cup of coffee in hand, and a few clicks to complete his virtual purchase. The impact of this simple process is tremendous. He actually saves transportation costs, save parking fees, save unnecessary out-dining money, save himself from long queues, and eventually save a lot of time and money.

And for a B2B system like us, due to its complexity in system operation, more can be done. Why do you want to settle on just a corporate website that brags about your profile and products, your mission and vision, your awards and achievements, and your intention to foster investors relationships? Why don't you use the website to serve your partners better, or to extend the service down to the end customer level?

When we extended the usefulness of the website(s), it magically transformed us from a commonly "push" sales strategy company into a magnetic "pull" marketing-driven company. When we started to draft FingerTec Environmental Footprint after the launch of our "Going Green" campaign, it suddenly dawned on me that, our environmental efforts should be retraced from where we try to make everything easy for our resellers and customers years ago, and where our multipurpose websites tell a lot of stories.

And suddenly I got an idea to complete the environmental statement smoothly:

"Every time we burn fossil fuels such as gas, coal or oil, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. Easier to measure are the direct carbon emissions that we are responsible for. This includes the amount of gas and electricity we use in our houses, the amount of petrol or diesel we burn in our car, and the number and distance of flights we take. The Carbon Account is a tool to help us measure these direct emissions.

At FingerTec, we're constantly looking for ways to further reduce the impacts our products have on the environment.

While there are some study reports that explain online shopping is inherently more environmentally friendly than traditional retailing methods, FingerTec is constantly taking extra effort to deliver all our resources via online means to carry out business operations and ultimately achieve the same goal.

Lowering The Carbon Account

FingerTec has set forth two main objectives for our brand, first is to help our resellers market our products easier, and second, is to help them reduce their dependency on technical support.

These objectives, heavily furnished with our extra-ordinary online resources plan, have successfully and tremendously reduced unnecessary sales visits or technical traveling on the roads for our resellers around the world over the years. All the needed resources can be easily accessed on the web, including comprehensive online training materials, and technical tips, which has proved helpful to the customers and resellers in reducing transportation costs.

Besides that, our products are not only designed to have low energy consumption; we also work towards utilizing web-enabled technology to improve remote communications and achieve long distant technical support. Furthermore, the introduction of online tools such as TeamViewer for remote desktop support, has helped to further enhance these objectives.

Reducing Packaging Waste

We have worked to see that some of our FingerTec products and accessories are designed to be collapsible, to be able to reduce packaging size and also to ease transportation.

Since early 2011, FingerTec has made significant progress to reduce excess packaging in its shipments to customers and has introduced additional types of recyclable packing materials to protect items while in transit. The resizing of our packaging also plays a big role in reducing waste as well as transportation cost.

Most FingerTec orders are shipped in corrugated packaging, which on average contain 43% recovered fiber content. Once used, these containers are 100% recyclable for use in the manufacturing of other paper products.

At the start of 2011, we started a “Going Green” campaign to further reduce the use of paper in our products by putting a stop to all user manual print-outs for FingerTec‘s hardware and software, replacing them with an all new DVD which contains everything the customers’ need in one disk. All contents are professionally paginated, and designed to be easily accessible.

Continue Efforts To Go Green

At FingerTec, we will be continuing to implement environmental and energy-saving initiatives across all parts of the company. FingerTec employees at all levels dive deep into every nook and cranny of the process to identify waste and design alternative solutions that are more energy efficient."

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Social Responsibility 2

I wrote Social Responsibility in my blogspot last April when Google announced its decision to withdraw from the China market. I continued this topic this time around after the two seemingly not related disasters struck early this year.

Egypt's Jasmine Revolution

The political Jasmine Revolution sprouted beginning of the year in Tunisia and widely spread across North Africa and Middle East countries; successfully ousted the president of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and Egypt, Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak. The heat continues to influence and arouses the people of the neighboring countries, Yemen, Iran, Libya, and Saudi Arabia etc to go on the protests. The street chaos, affecting some of our partners like Al-Azzahra in Yemen that had to stop their order, as they’re afraid that they might not be able to claim their consignment from the custom.

A mother tries to talk to her daughter who has been isolated for signs of radiation after evacuating from the vicinity of Fukushima. (Reuters)

Later on 11^th March, an earthquake of magnitude 9.0 hit Japan, and the devastating Tsunami it triggered, paralyzing four of the six reactors in Fukushima's nuclear plant, radiation risk quickly becoming a domestic catastrophe in Japan and later on spreads across the ocean as a foreign threat.

There is a dotted line that ties these two different political and natural disasters in nature, when we look at them in social responsibility perspective.

After the first disaster, my question is, why the governments in the West showed their support to the dictators in the past but when push came to shove, put pressure on them to relinquish power? Why did the foreign banks help the dictators to stash their corrupted money in the past, but were so quick to freeze their assets now? Why did they not do all these much earlier to help the poor people? The answer is simple; the social responsibility issue was not a priority at all until the chaos started to snowball, which in turn might hurt their interests in the long run.

And on the nuclear energy threat issue, we witnessed combinations of governments and corporations whom teamed up to "educate" the people of the importance of nuclear power to generate cheap and efficient energy for the country's future development. They always downplay the risk in their propaganda.

Under the name of development, nuclear power may benefit the country, but it also benefits the corporate or some individual politicians staggeringly. When the same power causes an environmental failure, it is collectively borne and rescued by the ordinary people.

One of the common examples I like to quote is the Kuala Lumpur flash flood problem that hits the city whenever there is a heavy rainfall. It is obviously the impact of inadequate city planning, where the involved companies are happily enjoying the profits, but eventually the government is left to solve the ongoing problems it causes using the taxpayers’ money to improve the drainage system. For this recent nuclear power leakage disaster, the Japan government does not only have to utilize the taxpayers’ money to clean up the mess, but more disastrously, millions of lives, humans, animals and plants are now endangered by the radiation.

Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, discusses why do some societies make disastrous decisions in his bestseller, “Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”. One of the reasons he said was the clash of interest between people. That is, some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own reasons by committing behaviors that are harmful to others.

He analyzed, “A frequent type of rational bad behavior is ‘good for me, bad for you and for everyone else’ – to put it bluntly, ‘selfish’. A further conflict of interest involving rational behavior arises when the interests of the decision-making elite in power crash with the interests of the rest of society. Especially if the elite can insulate themselves from consequences of their actions, they are likely to do things that profit themselves, regardless of whether those actions hurt everybody else.”

We know that all companies have three groups of people that they need to serve—customers, employees, and shareholders. We also know that most companies would prioritize shareholders first, customers second, and employees the last. If a company keeps the ranking list that way, I doubt that their claim of concerning social responsibility carries any weight. Even their charitable activities or good deeds they may have done are more for the purpose of maintaining their company image, rather than to sincerely fulfill their social responsibilities. Also please bear in mind; the so-called public listed companies are actually serving the minority public rather than the majority. For example, the shareholders for the affected listed power company, if given a chance, would still woo the hike in electricity rates; regardless of whether it will hurt the entire country's economy or not.

Jack Ma, the Chairman of Alibaba.com once proudly announced that he ranked customers first, followed by employees and then shareholders, but to me, this statement was meaningless, merely a hypocritical pretense. Because I always believe, as part of cause and effect, that employees should come first rather than customers. Just as the ISO9000 is a standard to improve product quality, you should ensure the quality of your staff is improving as well; only then will they produce the targeted quality of products or services to benefit customers.

Customers first?

Jack Ma’s way of “priority ranking” backfired last month when Alibaba.com found that over 100 employees are suspected of abetting fraud. And the CEO David Wei and COO Elvis Lee had to take the fall and tender their resignations.

I always think that a responsible company has to arrange their priority to put employees first followed by customers, and profits should only come in the end to benefit shareholders. From how a company places its priorities, we know how seriously a company takes its social responsibility on its shoulders.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Preparedness For The Nature

1.

A scene in a flight headed to Tokyo from Kuala Lumpur: Those who were reading books are mostly Japanese, only a few Malaysians were seen with books on their hands.

The similar scenes were observed in metro trains in Japan, passengers were absorbed in their readings. Hardly you’ll find such scenes in metro Hong Kong, or in Moscow, Russia. In Hong Kong, passengers are into mobile phones.

reading in the metro train

Japan is a nation with a high percentage rate of reading habit amongst its population, a culture that yields hope. Despite the country facing economy stagnation for over two decades, the city of Tokyo still looks vibrant with radiance and exquisite civilization omnipresence.

I believe that a nation that has a high reading rate will never run out of stamina.

2.

I was in Tokyo last Wednesday attending a Security Trade Show, to survey the market opportunity of civil and commercial biometrics industry. And I was in a similar famous situation that marketing gurus like to quote when motivating their students:

Two shoe salesmen were sent to Africa. The first reported a problem - all of the natives went barefoot - and thus he believed that there was no market in Africa for shoes. The second salesman reported an opportunity - all of the natives went barefoot - and thus he believed that Africa held a tremendous untapped market for shoes.

Of course, when there is a forked outcome likes this, marketing gurus would appraise the latter, encouraging the students to take the problem as an opportunity to be seized, because “positive thinking” always prevails in any marketing teachings.

But I despise this conclusion out of sheer simplicity. Because when we go deeper, you know you have to invest a lot of money and time to change the habitual barefoot culture of the natives with no guarantee of success. Are you prepared for this? And even if you have successfully changed their lifestyle, but footwear is a low-tech products, other footwear companies would easily foray to seize on the emerging opportunity, which may not necessarily benefit the early birds.

Big Sight, Tokyo International Exhibition Center

The Security Tradeshow confirmed my view that Japan is "barefoot" for the commercial biometrics market, despite it was commonly deployed at the government level.

I dropped by at the only two small booths that were displaying China and Korean fingerprint products respectively, and both affirmed the lukewarm response. Other countries can easily draw a larger crowd with more biometrics exhibitors. Japan is a unique and closed market for foreigners, with privacy concerned, it takes extra ordinarily hard to penetrate into this market. That’s why our online marketing activities draw a large pool of inquiries from other countries from all over the world, but very little comes from Japan.

Our permission marketing strategy discourages us from taking an aggressive approach. And I would not want to forgo this market either. I would rather use some softer approaches and let the nature takes its course. If there is a need in biometrics products, I always believe we will get a knock on our door.

That's how we expanded our business to over 100 countries. And we have to always get ready, even for the Japanese market.

3.

A devastated Earthquake (magnitude 9.0) struck Japan on March 11th, Friday, during my stay there and had caused the worst Tsunami in a part of Japan as well as in a few countries along the Pacific rim.

The violent water, Tsunami Japan

The earthquake has caused major damage in broad area in Northern Japan; I felt the building where I stayed shook rigorously during the quake and the aftershocks. The death toll rose to more than 800 now and it's still rising.

From the TV, I could see the violent water swept away houses, cars and ships, fires burned out of control. Power to a cooling system at a nuclear power plant was knocked out, forcing thousands to flee.

But I have to admire the resilience of Japan in facing geological disasters. It shows how efficient and effective their government is and the cooperation and discipline of the people to minimize the destruction.

The second day, most of the activities and subway operations in Tokyo were restored, and I observed the Japanese with their reading habit as usual like nothing major happened yesterday.

4.

FingerTec Alert:

Kindly take note that due to the thermal power plants on the coast that are damaged by the Tsunami, leading to an unprecedented shortage of its power supply capacity in Japan, this has affected FingerTec production in the coming two months, as we are using 40% components made in Japan. This incident may cause an unexpected shortage of our stock in the following months.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ

Music to My Ears

It’s music to my ears when a customer, Tim left his comment on June 26, 2010 on FingerTec TA100 at Amazon.com.

“Best Time clock

I bought this time clock about a month ago & never had such a good experience like this, Very simple Software & easy to use . I recommend it for every business .... Great price & fast Shipping .... & FREE TEC SUPPORT IN GUIDANCE..............”

Another two customers, Mobilitytheraphy and Mike, reviewed on FingerTec TA300 on Nov 13, 2010 and Jan 31, 2011 respectively:

“Fingertec - Great Time Clock Machine, Superb Customer Service

This is a great machine! It's affordable, easy to use and superb customer service. Just one phone call to customer service and they did the whole set up configuration to our computer system.”

“Very user friendly; Amazing customer service

Though the initial software install was a little tricky--2 phone calls to technical support fixed it right up. Surprisingly tech support answered after almost no wait time, took the time to help me set up the entire clock schedule for my employees. Entering fingerprints is a breeze. This should solve all my payroll woes.”

All the three reviews with full 5-star rating thrilled me two weeks ago when I bumped into our own products in Amazon.com, whereas some rival products received harsh and thumbs-down reviews. I attributed the credit to the diligence of our partner in the US and also our effort to deliver good quality products.

I have a friend who owns a factory in Penang, a Northern state of Malaysia. Whenever I visit him, he would proudly show me his new machines, or new expansions of the manufacturing building. But one of his customers whom I happen to know complained about his stagnated service and product quality despite his business growth. We reckon his success is mainly due to his right investment at the right time for some emerging technologies. Yes, a lot of monopoly or oligopoly businesses are still making tons of money even though they do very little to improve the product and service quality.

What good is it to the customers when you buy a new building to yourself? What benefit is it to the customers when you install a new production line to boost the output? A picture of a swanky office block printed on a brochure or on the web would certainly impress customers, but they welcome high product and service quality even more.

With the introduction of TeamWeaver in February to support our customers, we took another step further to improve our service.

And this is how we impress our customers.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ