I am obsessed with what makes businesses succeed. I have been building businesses for well over 15 years now. To build a high performing business you need 3 things; absolute clarity on your path, laser-sharp focus on specific things along the way and having a detailed process to follow. We have developed The High Performing Business Roadmap to help entrepreneurs on this quest.

We focus on Cash Flow and Profit, Revenue Growth being secondary and only achieved once you know how to be profitable. This is the reverse to what most startups are looking for; go big and grow fast and become profitable later. At The Business Collective, we view this as a risky strategy and we rather focus on the fundamentals and getting the basics right to build a strong foundation upon which growth can be achieved through a strong brand, aggressive marketing and entering new markets and introducing new products once you have earned the right to grow.

I also believe that entrepreneurship is the way to everything that one wants and needs in life– impact, purpose, fulfillment, success, riches….no other path can give you this. But you will have to work hard. And why do so many fail and get dejected? Because they lack 3 things; Clarity, Focus & Action. I learned this by doing, and failing, learning more, doing again and repeating until I had a formula that worked. Let me go back a bit to tell you how it all started.

I wasn’t always an entrepreneur. 8 years ago I was an employee on a salary, just like many of you who are reading this are now, working in a series of multinational companies. I grew up in an environment where there was only one path to be followed; from an early age I was told, study hard, go find a job, work hard and stay there and save your money and invest it wisely, accumulate assets along the way and eventually retire and live out the rest of your years on a pension or on your savings. Don’t rock the boat along the way and you will be fine.

I followed this path in the early days. I studied Aerospace Engineering and worked as an aircraft design engineer on projects in several countries and later moved to Spain and worked in a multinational corporation moving up the corporate ladder, always pushing for higher responsibility and new challenges. I had to learn Spanish (I now have deep respect for anyone who works in a language other than their native tongue) and understand how to operate in a new culture and worked hard to become the first non-native Spanish speaking, non-European leader in the organization. I took on several General Management roles along the way and eventually ended up as the Head of Innovation, Business Development and Strategy responsible for M&A across the EMEA region where my mandate was to transform the future of the business and impact its stock price positively. In this time, we set up several businesses in new markets and launched several new products and services and acquired and disposed of several businesses for the corporate.

I was earning good money but felt that something was missing. The higher up I went in the corporate world the more political things got. I felt that we were not really doing much and were ‘managing’ people more than anything else and putting on a show for the board and the shareholders. I also noticed that there was a big problem in the corporate world that struck at the core of what I believed was critical to the success of any endeavor.

‘ The Employee Mindset is the biggest problem faced by businesses today’

Everyone working in a corporate structure is an employee and thinks like one, without exception. From top to bottom. Very few people in any corporate structure are there for the good of the company or society. They are there to earn their paycheck and will do anything to protect their own asses.

The corporate world is an incredibly political place. Its hierarchical and most people who join it are doers, not thinkers. The business exists, and they learn what to do and just do it.

It’s simple. If you don’t like it, you leave and join some other big corporation where the same pattern is repeated.

There are good people and it does take skill to be good and to survive but ultimately you can hide very easily. If you keep your head down in such a structure, you can survive bar economic downturns and crisis. You don’t even need to be good at what you do and you can make a lot of noise and get noticed and succeed. Either way, you can earn a good pay cheque at the end of the month. The higher up you go, the less you really do. Tell others to do it, don’t rock the boat and be good at corporate politics and you will survive.

The biggest problem with this structure, in my opinion, is the employee mindset. There is a lot of ‘waste’ in these corporate structures. Everyone has an incredibly short-term view of the business driven by the fiscal reporting calendar. There is an aversion to risk. The business is not agile and very often before you know it the market has changed and the business is redundant. I am sure that many of you have personally experienced this. Innovation is very difficult as the focus is on the current horizon. There is no ownership of the business and no ownership of the direction and impact of the business in the world.

There had to be an alternative to this corporate rat race, a more effective and fulfilling one. Being an entrepreneur and running my own business was something that I had thought about a great deal over the years but now for the first time, I was seriously considering leaving the corporate world.

But if I was going to do it then I had to succeed. I had the required experience and had started and managed many businesses in my corporate career. But why did so many entrepreneurial ventures fail? I started to look at successful entrepreneurs and businesses that were able to grow and tried to understand what made them succeed. Was there a secret formula that only a few knew?

In the process of this reflection, it dawned upon me that there were a few things that I valued most in life:

– The freedom to do what I wanted. My upbringing had made me think that I needed to follow what society dictated that I should do. The more I read about successful entrepreneurs I realized that the rules that define my life are actually mine and mine alone. I control my destiny and the success or failure of my life depends solely on me. If you want to effect real change and impact in this lifetime then do it yourself.

‘The Rules of the Game Are Yours and Only Yours to Dictate’

– A desire for what I was doing in life to be aligned with my passion and contributing to me fulfilling my purpose in life. I believe that everyone needs purpose in their lives; and in the absence of which one’s purpose should be to find that purpose. Otherwise, it’s all meaningless and the days all blend together and before you know it you will realize that you have wasted your life.

“Everyone must seek purpose in their lives”

– Having enough wealth to be able to support the lifestyle I wanted for myself and my family. Money is important and I needed a sustainable wealth creation model that was dependent on me and not external factors. The objective should be to make your business profitable as soon as possible. And you must not feel guilty about making money. We will go into what we do at The Business Collective later on in terms of the distribution of profits but suffice to say right now that you can become benevolent once you make money, but first be ruthless and make the money (legally of course)

“The singular objective of any business must be to make money”

It was about this time that I was wrapping up the roll-out of a massive corporate strategic plan for the EMEA region. Despite my desire to move, I still felt that I was doing something interesting, and about to make a massive impact on the company’s future with this ambitious plan. Then at the board level there was a shift in direction. The old CEO retired and a new CEO came in and all of a sudden I felt the whole process lose momentum. The new CEO was no longer willing to pursue this ambitious course and scaled back on a lot of the interesting initiatives that we had pushed for. The reason was obvious to me, he was making sure that his first year in charge was not going to involve any risk. Any new direction that adversely affected the end of year P&L was going to be attributed to him so he stopped the new plan in its tracks and we went back to the status quo of the previous years. This reinforced my problem with the corporate world and the employee mindset and I had 2 choices, stay and adapt to the new reality or pursue my own path.

At exactly this time a new opportunity came knocking on my door. One of the largest renewable energy developers and technology companies in Spain was looking for someone to lead them into a new era, an era of internationalization. The Spanish renewable energy boom was coming to an end and they realized that the future was outside of Spain and they needed someone to lead this. I felt it was too good an opportunity to say no to, so I jumped ship. It was a chance to move into a new, trending sector and a fresh challenge.

The problems faced in this new organization were different. A smaller organization with a smaller budget, high technological capability and little to no international footprint. In order to succeed we needed to find some strong partners who we could enter new markets with. We quickly moved into India and Morocco where we partnered with some of the biggest names locally and after 2 years about 75% of our business was from outside of Europe. I must state here that the biggest problem we faced in this organization was one of focus. The chairman was used to running things by himself when the business was almost exclusively local to Spain but now that we were opening up to the world he employed the same thought process and every time someone mentioned a new opportunity he made everyone in the organization stop and pursue the new opportunity. This is of course incredibly disruptive, and we quickly realized that in order to succeed in international expansion, you need focus and a long-term strategic view. I go into this in a lot more detail in the Planning section of The High Performing Business Roadmap (email us at enquiry@thebusinesscollective.sg for more information).

But the time had come for me to finally venture out on my own and I finally quit the corporate world to embark on my entrepreneurial adventure.

The Journey Begins

Quitting a high paying corporate job is a difficult thing to do. You go from not having a financial care in the world to suddenly counting every dollar. But I knew that I had to give up this paycheck and potentially go through a rough patch in order to truly discover my calling in life. Many people find that deciding on what to do when they leave the corporate world is the biggest challenge they face. And it’s the reason they don’t make the move. In my case, I knew that I wanted to return to Singapore, as the region was booming, and I wanted to do something that would capitalize on my strong network in Europe and Asia. There was a strong demand for all things European in Asia and a strong desire for European companies to come to Asia so I started a consulting business, bridging the gap between Asia and Europe as a start, that would ideally bring in enough cash to allow me to pursue other interests later on. So I was ticking two important boxes, know-how and demand (later on I realized that the best area of focus for an entrepreneur should be in the overlap of three areas: Demand, Skill and Passion).

“Ideally your focus should be in the overlap of Demand, Skill and Passion (in that order) and in the absence of any then the overlap of the other 2 and in the absence of all 3 then just pick something and do it”

….stay tuned for the next post where I will continue the story…