On 28 march, Our Managing Director Mr Ken Koh gave new insights on being an entrepreneur to HomeTeamNS members.

During the sharing session, every participant agreed that they would like to achieve financial & career stability. Many wish to pursue a career they are passionate about.
Mr Poh Chong Wee, who has been working in a logistics company for 11 years added, "I would like to achieve freedom in expressing myself, my own management ideas and work style"

Another participant, Mr David Tan planned to start his own company, but is afraid of financial risk. Instead, he advises his wife Joanne, to start her own business. The couple feel entrepreneurship is the only way to reach financial stability.

Entrepreneurship Talk at HomeTeamNS Bukit Batok

Continuing from previous posting on new start ups optimism in US, I want to share with you a great write up by Brad Sugars. "Top 10 Reasons to Start a Business in a Recession" should give you enough reasons not to wait to kick start your own venture today. In anticipation of the next period of growth, this is probably a good time to start pursuing your (business) plan.

Those 10 reasons are:

1. Everything is cheaper.
2. You can hire more and better-qualified people.
3. People are looking to change suppliers.
4. Ownership equals tax incentives.
5. Family and friends don't want to (or can't) invest more money into the stock or real estate markets.
6. Suppliers are giving better credit.
7. You can get good PR by showing you are going against the trend.
8. You can buy everything you need at auction.
9. You can find great "low money" or "no money" down deals.
10. And finally... You've lost your job, and you have to do something.
    

Although this article seems under estimates the difficulties of starting up during bad time, I believe it gives you some sense of optimistic you need as aspiring entreprenerus. Read more on this article on Entrepreneurs.com

Top 10 Reasons to Start a Business in a Recession

Despite global economic recession, not all entrepreneurs are giving up their plan to start new venture. Thanks to advance technology like web 2.0 and cloud-computing that result in less cost of starting up a business. The following are written by Rachel Metz for AP.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) - With many established businesses just trying to survive, you might not think it's a good time to start a company, let alone ask anyone for money to help get it rolling. But if a series of presentations from fledgling Silicon Valley startups is any indication, innovation is not braking for the recession.

Over three hours Wednesday, more than a dozen startup founders - most of them in their 20s - gave rapid-fire talks to a group of peers, journalists and potential investors about their companies.

Many of these startups are just a few months old, and some have not yet launched. Those on display ranged from an online marketplace selling gourmet treats to a company offering Web-based voice conferencing. Another is developing dating applications for the iPhone.
The presentations comprised "Demo Day," an event held twice a year by Mountain View-based Y Combinator, which provides startups with small amounts of initial funding (usually $5,000, plus $5,000 per founder) in exchange for small ownership stakes. Since its inception in 2005, Y Combinator has funded about 40 startups each year; it hopes to use a recent $2 million infusion from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and other investments to bump the number up to 60 per year.

Read more

Despite Economy, New Startups Retain Optimism

During recession time, many companies start cutting cost by letting go some of their employees. One of them could be us. But you don’t have to worry because there are alternatives out there aside waiting to return to work again.

Starting new business is one of them. Although we are now in the turbulence era, there are still plenty of opportunities that we can explore.

There is maybe one question in our head, how can we start a new business while big companies collapse? Instead of listening to doubtful voice on our ears, why don’t we start to look around and learn other people's success story, how did they start their business with small or no capital?

Learning from successful entrepreneurs, you will notice that there are millions of opportunities out there. If you don’t know what kind of business you want to pursie, you can start by looking what you have done in your previous jobs. Alternatively, there might be one thing that we want to do for a long time but have not chance to realize that. Many successful entrepreneurs are doing business based on their previous working experience. For example, if previously we worked at a bank, we can set up a financial consultant firm.

But there are other people who do something that is completely irrelevant with their previous background. I know a lady who worked as assistant manager before she chose to start a boutique and became a fashion designer because she felt that she has talent for that.

So what are you waiting for? Is it lack of knowledge that hold you from pursuing your dream? If so, you can start to ask around and searching for counseling to provide you with advices about starting and running a business. At Talentpreneur Hub for instance, we help aspiring entrepreneurs to generate viable business ideas and take action to turn those ideas into sustainable business.

Stop worrying and take action today!

Get Laid off? It's Time to Start a Business!

The business board games at Talentpreneur Hub are organized by Business Board Game Meet Up Group. They are business board game enthusiasts and meet up every second Tuesday of the month to play business board games.

Business Board Games

Building a Winning I & E Club

ExoroGame™ for Facilitators & Educators

Startup! Accelerator

NUS Entrepreneurship Week

From the website of Interactive Digital Media (IDM) Singapore:

The IDM Jump-start And Mentor (i.JAM) initiative aims to grow a self-sustaining capacity for continuous grassroots innovation in the IDM sector. Individuals and start-ups with breakthrough ideas that can be developed into innovative products and services will be matched with appropriate mentor support and funding, to bring about their realisation. The i.JAM initiative marshals support from industry players, business mentors and technology suppliers to provide bottom-up support to the transforming of innovative ideas into useful applications and breakthroughs.

IDM Office will appoint incubators to identify and nurture startups as well as to help them with funding on behalf of the IDM Office. These incubators will also advise the digital media entrepreneurs on the uniqueness of their ideas, aggregate startups with similar ideas, offer networks, and provide guidance on securing additional funding and general business advice.

In short, incubators help entrepreneurs nurturing their ideas into real business. These incubators are expected to take 10% to 25% ownership (or "invest", in another word) of the project cost of the startup.

Some ideas that are funded by this initiative includes: SharedCopy (an online service that allows its users to markup and annotate any website with a simple bookmarkelet), Spree2shop (aggregator of user reviews and owner replies of blogshops and sprees) and Comiqs (web based tool for creation of comic strips online) and so forth.

Find more detail about this initiative on IDM website

i.JAM, Turn Your Ideas Into Reality!

One of the main reasons most businesses don't succeed is because people don't understand the difference between an entrepreneur and an employee. A true entrepreneur doesn't work in his business. A entrepreneur creates jobs for other people. An employee works in the business. That's the reason why there are so many business failures today. We have too many employees who don't know how to be an entrepreneurs attempting to run businesses. You cannot run a business with an employee mindset.

Employees and entrepreneurs are two different people, although none of them are better than another. You can't compare them because their thought process is different.

Employees look for jobs, entrepreneurs create jobs. I've been talking to entrepreneurs recently and all of them share a common thing. They refuse to work for anyone. Employees feel comfortable getting a steady income and they "have to" work for that. They work because they have been taught that working is the only way to enjoy Singapore's 5 Cs (Cash, Credit Card, Condos, Car, Country Club membership).

On the other hand, entrepreneurs understand that there are people who are willing to work for steady income and so they create jobs for these people. It's then entrepreneur's job to create a team who runs the business for them. They go out and hire the smartest people who can run their business. Entrepreneurs hire the best managers and these managers hire brightest employees. Managers run the business as entrepreneur tells them to. That's why managers are paid higher than employees. Although the truth is, a lot of managers are actually smarter than the entrepreneurs.

Can you see their mind set? You don't have to be the smartest person in the world to be an entrepreneur. I read in one article that Sir Richard Branson cannot read financial reports, even after years being successful entrepreneurs. Of course, he has hired smartest Accountant to help him understand the even most complicated financial reports. Entrepreneurs need only to know how to create and demand respect -- and being risk-taker along the way.

Let's think about all the top paying jobs all over the world. The owners of these companies created and demanded respect. They created something of their own. People respect entrepreneurs. And now we know why they work for them. Let's take Steve Jobs for example. If he came to you tomorrow and offer you a job, surely you would take it -- will you? The reason you would take this job is because you respect Steve and his company, Apple. I'm pretty sure there are so many people working for Steve Job and Sir Richard Branson that are smarter than him. He gained those smart people's respect and now they are continuing to build his business.

Do you want to be an entrepreneur? Here's how you should tune your mind set.

You never want to work for anyone. you hate the word "job." Every time you think about working you get frustrated. As an entrepreneur you going to have to work but not like an employee works who work for steady income. you will have to work my brain to create my business and get people to work for you.

I will continue to post on this topic. Feel free to leave me a comment and let me know what do you think.

Do you want to be an entrepreneur? Stop thinking like an employee!

Expectations, most of the time, have a bigger impact on business development than many first time entrepreneurs realize. Many advised that it's better to set higher expectations over the areas of a business which we can control and be more conservative in other areas that are market driven. In staying with your expectations, you may need take away a lot of unnecessary worry and stress while keeping yourself from making impulsive decisions out of frustration.

These are 7 expectation you need to think through as a first time entrepreneur:

Nobody starts off perfect, it's your attitude that matters.
I remember when I first started exploring my online publishing business ideas, I wasn't very confident. Just like with anything else you do that's new, there's going to be lots of learning and mistakes along the way. It's important to keep reminding yourself that you should learn from failure instead of letting it bring you down or cause you to quit trying.

No one else around will share your expectations of your business.
You're the only person who best understand what you are doing. You should not let everyone else's expectations have too much control over your decisions. When you seriously decide to run your own business, you're no longer normal in this current society. You have the potential to make it big, but at first you often have few “nay sayers” telling you that you're not going to make it.
And it's normal. Some are well-meaning and really care about you, while most of them just don't want to see change and dislike the fact that you're beginning to grow personally.

Stability is your primary financial goal! (When you're starting out)
Getting your business paying for itself is even more important than ever when you're starting out. Your profit may come immediately or take you several years, every industry has its own standard. Thus you may want to see the other players in your industry. Over time, however, your business should make progress with increased profits and decreased expenses.

Results in business are not like results in a job
One of the things that first-time entrepreneurs need to realize is that results in businesses take a lot longer to show up than a typical employment situation. It can be months or years. However, the trade off in being patient is usually a much higher income over time. Unfortunately, most people give up before they ever really get started as they think business results should be like those in a job.

Borrowed money is not always the best solution for growth.
Impatience gets a lot of people at this stage, especially when it comes to debt. Most first time entrepreneurs have expectation that what their business really needs is simply a burst of money. But once the money is used up, interest payments take up all the increased profits (and sometimes even more). Get someone who understand in what you do to put their capital in your business. Alternatively, do search government support in funding like SEEDS funding or YES! Startup capital from SPRING Singapore which is less risky than loan.

That's 7 tips from me for those first time entrepreneurs, do you have any tip and advice to share for first time entrepreneurs? Share with us here!

7 Expectations of First Time Entrepreneur