The Fine Line Between Entrepreneurs and Businessmen

Can you discern the differences between businessmen and entrepreneurs? In vocabulary, both are synonymously similar.  Both have to form a company, start a business, sell products to customers and pay their dues.  But it does sound better when you’re known as an entrepreneur rather than a businessman. Nonetheless, a so-called entrepreneur would stay a businessman, if he lacks substance in being an entrepreneur.  

Businessmanship is not a word, but entrepreneurship is. So, what is entrepreneurship? Once, I asked a college student majoring in Finance and Economics; and he just stared blank at me. Of course, anyone can consult Google and find a bunch of answers, but if I did it that way, then my blogpost would look placidly plain, wouldn’t it?

Typical businessman

Some friends compared me with one of our common friends, and asked why am I more successful even though we are almost in the same industry? My reply amused them. I said, while we both started small, I applied businessmen practices to achieve the results of an entrepreneur; while he, an MBA graduate, did it the reverse way.

A businessman’s approaches are calculative; he will be frugal when the resources are limited in order to survive but he would never sacrifice the vision. Just like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, if a garage is good enough for an office in the beginning, then it is an office. 

Unlike businessmen, money shouldn’t be the only lure to start a journey for an entrepreneur. Yes, you can act like a calculative businessman, but you have to develop a mindset maintained like an entrepreneur. The right mindset is more crucial than a recipe that a step-by-step guide tells you on what to do to become an entrepreneur.

Would you have everybody sit down for a proper meeting, or you’d go straight to tackle a problem even without one? Do you fancy a SWOT analysis before anything is fundamentally laid down, or passionately jumpstart something that is instinctively right? Would you prefer a first-class report that will score you an A academically, or you would do a first class job even without a report? Would you choose to collect customer feedback from disseminating well-designed questionnaires, or you’d rather breathe in tandem with your customers? These, are the questions.

What is entrepreneurship?

To run an MBA-like enterprise, you may look professional, yet you could end up as just a businessman, if the luxurious pack that contains all kinds of tools, equipments, methods, strategies and skills eventually shrink to merely an objective on your monthly balance sheet. 

All the expensive formalities that come from the business books may not yield you the anticipated results if ones don’t pursue the core concepts, but hunt only for the details. And the few cores are in fact spiritual, rather than physical substances.

A businessman cares more in making money; an entrepreneur cares in a larger perspective, including humanitarian community and social responsibility. A businessman is nearsighted; focuses mainly on a monthly sale. An entrepreneur is visionary; stresses on research and development. A businessman trades to trade; an entrepreneur builds to trade. A businessman considers employees as costs; an entrepreneur treats them as assets. A businessman strategizes on exploitation; an entrepreneur believes in human resource development. A businessman turns himself into a selfish rich man; an entrepreneur brings wealth to the society at the same time.

How to become an entrepreneur? Maybe you can learn to become one from any B school, but I trust entrepreneurship flows naturally in one’s blood, and that makes one a true entrepreneur.

Marketing is Supreme Than Sales

I started my career in sales, selling PCs with standard software to home and corporate users. Later on, I moved on to sell Electronic Publishing Solutions to newspapers industry on a project basis. From sales of a few thousand dollars upgraded to over a million dollars in a single order, you may consider this a great leap forward.

But I disliked doing sales, especially project-based sales. You bade and pitched and diverted all your resources and times, writing thick proposals, presenting multiple presentations, and on top of that, you have to build relationships by becoming a Cheap Entertainment Officer rather than Chief Executive Officer.  Even after all that, you might still fail to secure the project. It is worse if the industry is so niche that all you have are only a few potential clients in your region. It’s like your fate is not in your hands but belongs to a handful few.

That’s why I relentlessly sought for new ventures that can turn my own fate around when the newspapers industry was facing its own predicament from the Internet threat. When by chance I settled on Biometrics, the road forked. Whether to aim for the lavish government projects; or to be more commercial, where we can land on a broader customer base? Or perhaps we can be greedy and stomach both?

Life is definitely full of choices. I finally chose to go along with my passion and inclination. With that, I might have achieved success and happiness; or even if I failed, it would be a failure with dignity.  And today, here we are, standing tall and firm in the commercial sector, but premature at that time when I made the decision without hesitation.

I still dislike doing sales. However, to avoid hefty selling process, a product has to speak for itself. And if customers shouldn’t be begged to buy your products, you have to be able to spread your feathers like a peacock to attract customers.  Your inner system must behave like a magnetic field to draw customers. If selling is oblivious and diminishing, marketing must be obvious and overpowering. The larger image marketing system stand in the way of sales, the better the sales would be.

In the big picture, our sales persons are chasing more than just sales, they’re also chasing stories from our resellers to enrich the content of our monthly e-newsletters. Furthermore, they collect quality email addresses as recipients of our monthly e-newsletter from our resellers, with more in mind than to just accomplish their individual sale figures. The wide reach of a good marketing system’s message has proven to yield better results and assist resellers to reduce their sales cycle to close deals.  Hence, when we hire, our sales personnel are from a plethora of backgrounds, but rarely sales.

Over the years, I have enjoyed seeing sales growth, being relaxed a bit in my office to improve our marketing system, to improve our support system, to improve our software and hardware products, to improve everything I think can be improved, with a clear vision and more importantly our own fate to where we are headed. With the oblique approach, ‘sales’ is no longer a worry to pursue a larger goal in life. 

Choices, Choices, Choices

Imagine if your sales strategy is to talk only bad things about your rivals and channel your entire advertisement budget to condemn their products and services; do you think it can help you boost sales? What if you don’t think you have done enough, can you go beyond?

Your next step may be, you soften it a bit by adding cash prize contests to hit the soft spots of potential customers, and later invite an international superstar to sing, dance and gallop your brand out. 

After a while, when you notice your brand's response is only lukewarm, you harden your tactics and include aggressiveness, this time sending some hooligans to create havoc at your rival's marketing events, and tear down their banners, splash red paints on their advertising vehicles, and beat up their supporters. “No problem,” you said, since you have the cops in your pocket. 

Pathetic.

You might think the above despicable actions are some fictitious and exaggerated illustrations in a Hollywood movie and restricted to only underworld organizations that control brothels, massage parlors or nightclubs; you won’t think it would ever happen in normal life, right? And if someone uses that strategy in business, you might think, he would most probably end up facing a fiery lawsuit, or behind bars.

But these are exactly the common scenarios happening now in Malaysia, especially with the General Elections around the corner. Even in a civilized society, the barbaric approaches in the political arena may not be necessarily worse than the less civilized. And the dire consequences may not necessarily occur to them, even when they’re evidently against the law.

My political view is quite simple. You need to have a choice to deter political hegemony. When a country spends too long a time controlled by a political party or a dictator, any tactic used can become very dirty. Normal commercial practices might not be applied anymore. Yes, you can have the Antitrust Law to promote market competition; but in politics, tyranny cannot be revoked.

If we appreciate market competition in a fairground, we should value the same for the political playground. If you have choices, the invisible hand of economics will steer the market so you’ll get better products according to your preference. Market competition promotes improvement. So, a mature country has to encourage alternation in political parties, and has a healthy rotation of those in power to maximize their people’s rights.

If we have no choice, we’re left with only one destination. Regardless of the light in the beginning, it leads to calamity in the end.  

Lead by Example

After I read a column in our local tabloid, The Sun, I decided to write a complaint letter to the CEO that the columnist had mentioned, which he said is also his close friend. This is because, he quoted, both of them praised Amazon’s high quality on customer service.

I half expected I would get any reply from this CEO from a leading online recruitment company in this region, when I know usually one’s high approval on something might not necessary apply to his own organization, especially when we already have some awful experience dealing with them, which further leaves me with no illusion.  

Lead by example? Talk the walk or walk the talk?

This, is how the corresponding letter looks like:

DISSATISFACTION OVER SERVICES PROVIDED BY X COMPANY

FingerTec Worldwide has been X’s client for many years and until now, we are still engaging with your services to recruit suitable personnel for our business. Deemed as one of the leading Internet Recruitment websites in the Asia-Pacific with 11 millions jobseekers available, it is in my opinion that X does not reach my expectations. Please let me elaborate on that point.

The Company has been looking for R&D personnel candidates for more than a year without many applicants or much success. The scarce candidates who applied for the positions were not reliable candidates and most of them failed to turn up even though the interviews had been agreed and scheduled beforehand. The problem is, we are not looking for high-level skillful employee to fulfill our requirements; we do welcome fresh graduates. Nevertheless, even though this is a simple requirement, X fails to provide us quality candidates for consideration.

I do understand that X does not guarantee suitable applicants, but X’s ignorance to the fact that your services provided yield negative results even after a long period of time is appalling. As a responsible company, you should be concerned with this trend and have the courtesy to put in more effort to ensure success. Unfortunately this effort is in vain when it comes to X.

We are your paying customers and we pay to get your services. The resources that we have spent should result in the services we requested. This is a simple economical concept understood by even the simplest layman. If your services fail to fulfill our requirements, you shouldn’t accept future orders or at least provide us some form of compensation to remedy our losses. I look forward to getting a reply from X regarding this matter, and will appreciate your prompt cooperation in dealing with this issue.

"My mom asked me to walk a straight line"

I recalled a very minor incident that happened two years ago when a manager from this particular company called to demand payment on an “arrear” of less than USD50, which had been long overdue, according to him. My HR Manager argued that we paid cash in advance to get their services, so how could we still owe them money? And our system showed no such record. Even though this untraceable “debt” is due to their own mistake, they were steadfast and insisted we cleared the old “debt” in order for them to process our new ad placement. In short, the whole episode did not look the slightest like Amazon.  I wonder how this CEO said he valued Amazon’s service quality as high?

So, my complaint letter went down the drain without any reply, which is not unexpected.

That’s why I believe LinkedIn, Facebook and some other online platforms closing in from different angles to grab the online recruitment businesses in this region will not meet much resistance. 

User Interface Defines User-Friendliness

Since the foray of personal computers into our life during the last three decades, monitors, keyboards and mouses have remained as the most essential interface devices for human to interact with computers. Even though we observed some minor improvements like monitors from bulky to flat, to higher resolution; keyboards from big to smaller; and mice from cabled to wireless; the nature of the medium stayed put.

It remained that way until computing power were compressed into tablets and smartphones, where the new human interface started to observe a real change, and the change is obviously welcomed and quickly situated the once dominant PC-era to a post-PC era.

Innovators are betting on new interfaces to drive computing power

And more and more innovators are betting on new interfaces to drive computing power, like the wearable Google Glass, a Kinect-like device to replace the mouse, voice control and etc. Or, another advancement in interface development is to find a way to stuff the computing power into other existing devices from car dashboards to kitchen appliances, or even to the TV in the living room.

Just like how many other eBook readers failed to change the human reading habit until Amazon’s Kindle reader became the mainstream, user interface typically plays a crucial role.

Even though we are a technology company that focuses our attention to develop industrial products, our efforts are not really out of the scope of user interface. In 1999, we had the idea to replace the RFID cards with human fingerprint as the fundamental threshold interface for employees to enter a premise or to clock in/out when they report to work with an objective to curb fraudulent activities. We realized our idea by designing biometric devices that were first implanted with fingerprint recognition, expanded later to face verification, and then integrated into our software that processes all the captured clocking data.

When technological products are invented to serve human, we have to think holistically, fine-tuning the products to suit every possible use of customers and, in a comforting way. You just can’t expect users to adjust themselves to adapt to some of your shortcomings in design; not even the slightest. We believe any technology that works against the comfortableness of the users, would not achieve big success.

Hence, we always revisit our products, collect feedbacks from users, and constantly improve them. And, this time around, besides adding job-costing features to enhance TimeTec, the web and cloud-based time and attendance software, we spent two months since February, to revamp its user interfaces, towards a more intuitive, convenient, user-friendly software.  

In this round of improvements, we expect to achieve greater user satisfaction. 

Physically Being Together

Statistics show that 97 percent of the working class has a daily ritual of traveling back and forth to work, and only a mere lucky 3 percent work from home. But the good news is, the number of Stay-at-Home workers rise rapidly; for example the 4.2 million Americans in 2000 working from home represents a 23 percent increase from 1990. Of course, laptops, high-speed Internet access, and smart phones have made home offices nearly indistinguishable from office offices.

Working from Home is only for a lucky few

The benefits of working from home? A survey summarized in the Microsoft whitepaper, Work without Walls, indicates the top 10 benefits of working from home from the employee’s viewpoint in reverse order:

10) Environmentally friendly (23%)

9) More time with family (29%)

8) Less stressful environment (38%)

7) Quieter atmosphere (43%)

6) Eliminate long commute (44%)

5) Less distractions (44%)

4) More productive (45%)

3) Avoid traffic (47%)

2) Save gas (55%)

1) Work/home balance (60%)

But the vanguard IT companies that usually boast of how their staff can work from anywhere in the world has gotten a setback last week when Yahoo! circulated an internal memo which required their employees who work remotely to relocate back to company facilities.   

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” reads the memo. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.” Yahoo! relinquishing its long time working-from-home policy for certain employees should alarm some firms that highly embraced this practice.

No more Working From Home

We partially practice the concept of working from home at FingerTec, but yet we value physically being together for better collaboration and performance very much. How to strike a balance? That is an art to be learned but a good system that is based on management by objective would be more important to measure remote processes.  

For example, we rotated our technical engineers to work from home in night shift for one week a month for them to handle technical inquiries from different time zone clienteles. Three quarters of their time still need to be spent in the office to learn new technologies and to collaborate with peers. Accomodatingly, our system is ready for them to handle their time and attendance clocking and to pick up their works from home.

And, unless you are part of the self-driven class of people or self-employed bosses that run your own business (that constitutes 58 percent of the Stay-at-Home workers); formally incorporated or otherwise, purely work-from-home employees are those who will get less corporate culture influence. If your company has a good corporate culture, this can be a bad thing. 

Poetic Way in Business

I love poems, often read and write poems, have published 4 poetry books so far, and have filled my library with poetry books as its main collection. Does my love for literature or especially poems contribute to my business? It may seem that the two interests are polarizing to many people; but to me, they don’t. They roll well into one another like two gearwheels.

But how has my affection in poetry helped in the FingerTec business?

Firstly, in a poem, words are meticulously chosen. The use of words must be frugal; the best poet can get the most out of them in a dozen of lines. This unusual sensitivity towards language spreads its tentacles across the write-ups in our marketing materials including brochures, ads, taglines, website and social media. Metaphor, paronomasia or rhythmic techniques are often used in our taglines to increase readability.

Secondly, the practice of intensifying language in poems polishes my management skill. Any redundant steps would be eliminated just like the unnecessary words in poems. It gets me right to the point, and hierarchical barrier reduces to a minimum. In short, it increases efficiency and effectiveness in an organization.  In today’s business world, you simply can’t waste time and energy as it diverts your focus. A solid poem carries all the right substances in a neat way.  The same with a successful organization, you have to stream the right resources to the right places without any waste. 

Thirdly, it’s all about creativity. Literature values creativity and imagination, particularly poems, as they spurn repetition. Verses are formed with inventive composition of words. I like to add new ideas to refresh our system and product lines, not unlike the characteristics of a poet.

Perhaps most importantly, a poet has to be passionate and should be more sensitive to humanity by nature. All these would help a company raise the bar in corporate social responsibility.  

Just like poems, paradoxically, many points are achieved indirectly. You may call this an oblique approach. As a poem is also known as the gem of the literary hall; when business is operated in a poetic way, it may produce gems too.