UUM activities : HIDROPONIK SAWI & PAK CHOI (22 APRIL 2016)

  

UUM activities : HIDROPONIK SAWI & PAK CHOI (18 MARCH 2016)

UUM activities : HIDROPONIK SAWI & PAK CHOI (1 MARCH 2016)

Introduction

The concept of entrepreneurship has a wide range of meaning. On the one extreme, an entrepreneur is a person of very high aptitude who pioneers change, possessing characteristics found in only a very small fraction of the population. On the other extreme of definitions, anyone who wants to work for himself or herself is considered to be an entrepreneur. The word entrepreneur originated from the French word, entrepreneur, which means “ to undertake “. In a business context, its means to start the business. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary presents the definition of an entrepreneur as one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risk of a business or enterprise. There is no such thing as a typical entrepreneur. Some entrepreneurs are quiet and hard-working while others are more outgoing and flamboyant. The key to being a successful entrepreneur lies in the ability to take an idea and then, through the process of innovation, develop it in such a way that it becomes a marketable product or service.

There are many different ways to define an entrepreneur. They are the most multi-talented and diverse people out there as they are the project manager, an accountant, a salesman and so on. They monitors and controls the business activities. According to MJ Gottlieb, co-founder of Hustle Branding, an entrepreneur is someone who can take any idea, whether it can be a product or service, have the skill set, and have courage to take extreme risk to do whatever it takes to turn that concept into reality and not only bring it to market, but make it a viable product or service that people want or need. Therefore, an entrepreneur can be defined as a person who exercises initiative by organizing a venture to take benefits and decides what, how and how much the product or service needs to be produced. They need to have a good understanding of their markets and find out what their customer want and modify their products in line with market requirements.

Entrepreneurship is a discipline requiring skills and skills can be developed. Entrepreneurial skill is a combination of technical skill (communication, problem solving, organizational skills, etc.), management skill (planning and goal setting, decision making, etc.) and personal skill (self-control, innovation, leadership, etc.). In order to be successful in business, entrepreneurs need to have a certain set of qualities such as open risk taker, visionary, observant, team oriented and so on. Entrepreneurial skills are important to an entrepreneur such as communication skill and personal qualities like creativity and initiative are useful to everyone neither in their working responsibilities nor daily existence. Other than that, technical and business skills also help those who choose to be self-employed or to start their own venture. Therefore, entrepreneurial traits should be applied in the business by entrepreneurs in order to get successful.

1) Networked

Frustrated with his lack solid employment opportunities after graduation in the early 1990s, Ma relied on his English to teach at the local university he had attended a few years prior and to start a translation service business. Upon his first visit to the United States in 1995 as a translator, Ma got introduced to the Internet, and to his shock after looking up beer from various countries, he learned that there was none from China (a country of about a Billion people) on the World Wide Web. Ma immediately saw the potential business opportunities of the internet and how it could facilitate the way small and medium Chinese enterprises could do business with the rest of the world.

Then, he and his friends decided to lunch a site about China and Chinese products online, known as “China page”, that listed Chinese businesses and their products. Within the same day, he began to receive emails from people around the world requesting that they partner up. That experience taught Ma about the incredible power of connectivity, especially how the internet can greatly impact global trade, especially for SMEs.  Later, believing that "China page" will get better funding, Ma partnered with a government entity that had majority control. Unfortunately, that entity brought along the rigid bureaucracy that stifled away many of Ma's visionary projects and frustrated him; which led to Ma’s eventual departure.

Thereafter, Ma took up a government job for a short period of the ministry of foreign trade and economic cooperation in the latter half of the 1990s. There, he also built important connections with influential people that would later impact Ma’s life and business venture; one of whom is the founding member of Yahoo, Jerry Yang. Jerry would eventually get yahoo to invest USD 1 Billion in Alibaba in 2005.

In 1999, after leaving the government job, Ma took a second bite at internet-based business ventures by grouping 18 people (including himself and his wife) at his home and sold them a dream to found Alibaba with the goal of facilitating international trade for small and medium ventures based in China. Alibaba was born out of Ma’s unfulfilled dream of using the internet to facilitate business activities for Chinese SMEs and frustration with the bureaucrats he worked with in the preceding joint venture (China page), where his suggestions to use the internet to facilitate a trade of Chinese-made products in the international market were repeatedly rejected.

In the early stages of the Alibaba, Ma tried to raise funds in Silicon Valley, the tech hub in the United States and was met with denials, and his business model was criticized to be unprofitable and unsustainable by many at the time. Eventually, Ma succeeded in getting Goldman Sachs and Softbank to invest USD 5 Million and USD 20 Million in Alibaba, respectively.

In 2003, still unprofitable with Alibaba, Ma and his team lunched an online auction site named “Taobao.com”, charging zero commission, and took on a multinational e-commerce giant, eBay, which already had the lion share of the Chinese online auction market. Determined to win against eBay, Taobao remained a commission-free marketplace for millions of online traders, and that did put Alibaba under significant financial strain. To stay afloat while maintaining the platform's commission-free policy, Ma and his team began offering peripheral value-added support services (e.g. custom webpages to online merchants) for small fees. Ma and his team won the Chinese market in less than five years, and eBay subsequently withdrew from China. Jack Mack reflected on this challenging period on a YouTube video of his interview with Charlie Rose, stating “If eBay is the sharks in the Ocean, We (Alibaba and Taobao) are the crocodiles in the Yangtze River.” Since then, Alibaba has created many subsidiaries through organic growth (such as Tmall and AliExpress) and acquisitions.

As the "dot com" boom period came to an end after 2000, Alibaba faced serious challenges due to its aggressive expansion into international markets (which Ma admitted to being a mistake). Jack Ma successfully reorganized the company's operations, including closing many international branches and focusing on strengthening Alibaba's position in the Chinese market. Thereafter, Ma expanded the services of Alibaba and reengaged its international expansion strategy.

After Ma and Alibaba reorganized their operations and made their Mark by driving eBay out of China after just a few years in business, with the help of Jerry Young of Yahoo, Ma succeeds in getting Yahoo to invest a sizable USD 1 Billion for a 40% stake in Alibaba in 2005. Besides getting crucial funds to help Alibaba to execute its international growth strategy, that Investment earned Alibaba (a six years old company) a valuation of USD 2.5 Billion.In 2014, in what turned out to be the largest initial public offering to date, Ma and his team successfully raised in excess of USD 20 Billion for Alibaba by listing it on the NYSE stock exchange in the United States. That made Alibaba,  15 years old e-commerce company that has its origins outside of the United States, one of the world's largest companies as measured by its market capitalization that was approximately USD 200 Billion. Ma and his team are turning Alibaba holding group into a massive conglomerate by acquiring many smaller companies from technology related to logistics and beyond.

2) Open Risk Taker

Business is a risk and risk is something most people dread. Avoidance of risk is the reason why most people shy away from building a business; it’s also the reason why most people choose to remain the same. But risk taking is also the reason why Bill Gates, Henry Ford, J. Paul Getty, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller became the richest people on earth. High risk bearing capacity is the reason why some people become billionaires and others remain average.

Some see him as an innovative visionary who sparked a computer revolution. Others see him as a modern-day robber baron whose predatory practices have stifled competition in the software industry. Regardless of what his supporters and detractors may think, few can argue that Bill Gatesis one of, if not the most successful entrepreneur of the 20th century. In just 25 years, he built a two-man operation into a multibillion-dollar colossus and made himself the richest man in the world somewhere along the way. Yet he accomplished this feat not by inventing new technology, but by taking existing technology, adapting it to a specific market, and then dominating that market through innovative promotion and cunning business savvy.

Gates' first exposure to computers came while he was attending the prestigious Lakeside School in Seattle. A local company offered the use of its computer to the school through a Teletype link, and young Gates became entranced by the possibilities of the primitive machine. Along with fellow student Paul Allen, he began ditching class to work in the school's computer room. Their work would soon pay off. When Gates was 15, he and Allen went into business together. The two teens netted $20,000 with Traf-O-Data, a program they developed to measure traffic flow in the Seattle area.

Despite his love and obvious aptitude for computer programming, and perhaps because of his father's influence, Gates entered Harvard in the fall of 1973. By his own admission, he was there in body but not in spirit, preferring to spend his time playing poker and video games rather than attending class.

All that changed in December 1974, when Allen showed Gates a magazine article about the world's first microcomputer, the Altair 8800. Seeing an opportunity, Gates and Allen called the manufacturer, MITS, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and told the president they had written a version of the popular computer language BASIC for the Altair. When he said he'd like to see it, Gates and Allen, who actually hadn't written anything, starting working day and night in Harvard's computer lab. Because they did not have an Altair to work on, they were forced to simulate it on other computers. When Allen flew to Albuquerque to test the program on the Altair, neither he nor Gates was sure it would run. But run it did. Gates dropped out of Harvard and moved with Allen to Albuquerque, where they officially established Microsoft. MITS collapsed shortly thereafter, but Gates and Allen were already writing software for other computer start-ups including Commodore, Apple and Tandy Corp.

The duo moved the company to Seattle in 1979, and that's when Microsoft hit the big time. When Gates learned IBM was having trouble obtaining an operating system for its new PC, he bought an existing operating system from a small Seattle company for $50,000, developed it into MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System), then licensed it to IBM. The genius of the IBM deal, masterminded by Gates, was that while IBM got MS-DOS, Microsoft retained the right to license it to other computer makers.

Much as Gates had anticipated, after the first IBM PCs were released, cloners such as Compaq began producing compatible PCs, and the market was soon flooded with clones. Like IBM, rather than produce their own operating systems, the cloners decided it was cheaper to purchase MS-DOS off the shelf. As a result, MS-DOS became the standard operating system for the industry, and Microsoft's sales soared from $7 million in 1980 to $16 million in 1981.

Microsoft expanded into applications software and continued to grow unchecked until 1984, when Apple introduced the first Macintosh computer. The Macintosh's sleek graphical user interface (GUI) was far easier to use than MS-DOS and threatened to make the Microsoft program obsolete. In response to this threat, Gates announced that Microsoft was developing its own GUI-based operating system called Windows. Gates then took Microsoft public in 1986 to generate capital. The IPO was a roaring success, making Gates one of the wealthiest people in the country overnight.

When Windows was finally released in 1985, it wasn't exactly the breakthrough Gates had predicted. Critics claimed it was slow and cumbersome. Apple wasn't exactly pleased either. They saw Windows as a rip-off of the Macintosh operating system and sued. The case would drag on until the mid-1990s, when the courts finally decided that Apple's suit had no merit.

Meanwhile, Gates worked on improving Windows. Subsequent versions of the program ran faster and froze less frequently. Third-party programmers began developing Windows-based programs, and Microsoft's own applications became hot sellers. By 1993, Windows was selling at a rate of 1 million copies per month and was estimated to be running on nearly 85 percent of the world's computers.

Microsoft solidified its industry dominance in the mid-1990s by combining Windows with its other applications into "suites" and persuading leading computer makers to preload their software on every computer they sold. The strategy worked so well that by 1999 Microsoft was posting sales of $19.7 billion, and Gates' personal wealth had grown to a phenomenal $90 billion.

But with success has come scrutiny. Microsoft's competitors have complained that the company uses its operating system monopoly to retard the development of new technology -- a claim Gates soundly refutes. Nevertheless, the U.S. Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company in 1998 over its practice of bundling software with Windows.

In November 1999, a U.S. District Court ruled that Microsoft indeed had a monopoly in the market for desktop-computer operating systems. The court also found that Microsoft engaged in tactics aimed at snuffing out any innovation that threatened its dominance of the multibillion-dollar computer industry. A court settlement was approved in 2002 with Microsoft consenting to curb some of its objectionable practices. Microsoft has since been the focus of antitrust actions from the European Commission and private litigants. 

Attempting to explain his tremendous success, industry experts have pointed out that there are really two Bill Gates. One is a consummate computer geek who can "hack code" with the best of them. The other is a hard-driven businessman who, unlike most of his fellow Silicon Valley superstars, took readily to commerce and has an innate instinct for the marketplace. This combination enabled Gates to see what his competitors could not. While they were focusing on selling software, Gates was focusing on setting standards, first with MS-DOS and later with Windows. The standards he helped set shaped the modern computer industry and will continue to influence its growth well into the next century

3) Observant

Another characteristic of a successful entrepreneur is observant. The meaning of the observant can be defined as good at watching, listening and good at noticing what is going on around you (Merriam-Webster, 2016). Another meaning that describes by Vocabulary.com (2016) for observant is quick notice, showing quick and keen perception. Many successful entrepreneurs have this characteristic when they’re having their business. But, the best example of an entrepreneur that are having this characteristic is Bryan Loo Woi Lip who is the CEO for the Chatime brand in Malaysia that make waves and doing it very well.

If you’re a bubble tea lover in Malaysia and you’ll know what’s the brands that are running well in Malaysia and the CEO of that brands. The answer will be answered as Chatime by Bryan Loo Woi Lip. He as a managing director in LOOB Holding Sdn. Bhd and now as a master franchisor of Chatime brands in Malaysia. Regards thanks to Bryan Loo who recognised a void of a culture of the brands in Malaysia and make it grow beverage and ring the bell in this country. He also makes this brands have the fastest grow in the ASEAN region in his entrepreneur venture towards the whole world. As his responsibility and the observant towards this brands or business make him become more success in his entrepreneur business (Wikipedia, 2016).

Bryan Loo Woi Lip is one of the young entrepreneurs who successful let the Chatime brand be so popular in Malaysia. He was born in Perlis, Malaysia which is the smallest state in Malaysia and raised up at there. In his childhood, he loves to draw some comics and this started his business venture in his life. After he has done to draw the comics, he sells it to his friends that are willing to pay for it and read it. The payment for the each comic that produced by him is about RM 0.50 to each of his friend that willing to pay to read. This has begun his venture to earn the pocket money until he had enough the pocket money since his comics is selling well among his friends (Timothy Tiah, 2013). From this lifestyle, the observant characteristic has

been showed by Bryan Loo in his childhood life that selling the comics to his friends.

 In his study life, he was a biochemistry student in one of the universities in Australia which called Monash University in Melbourne as a degree holder and successfully graduated in his biochemistry course at there. After he graduated as a biochemistry student, he didn’t come back to Malaysia and started to find his first biotech jobs in Melbourne as a salesman. The product that sold by him at that time is a ladies product which is a pregnant lady water bag. During the period that as a salesman, he met many failures as most of the women didn’t have much knowledge about the product and some women treated him as a conman. This had become a bad and embarrassing experience to him when the time he selling the product to the women in hospitals (Asiapasificbusinesses, 2013).

After 2 years that becoming a salesman, he decided to quit and come back to Malaysia and purpose his dream and interest for starting his business. With his father’s encourages the guidance, he decided to start his business life in F&B industry but he had no idea to start his new business life (Timothy Tiah, 2013). After some consideration, he decided to start his business life in selling the bubble tea as he realised Malaysian nowadays more focus on drinking coffee or milk tea and selling milk tea or bubble tea will be acceptable to the Malaysia customers. So, he had gone to Taiwan along with his father to find the sources for his business life as selling the Taiwanese bubble tea or milk tea in Malaysia (Asiapasificbusinesses, 2013). The observant characteristic has been shown by Bryan Loo is the way he starts his business life in an age of 24.

After he quit his job, he used 3 and a half months to travel around the countries to find out the sources about the bubble tea or milk tea with the supportive from his father in his venture. Finally, when he travelled to Taiwan, he had found the sources about the milk tea with his fathers. He had done the research about the brands that can be brought back to Malaysia to start his business life in Malaysia. After that, he had listed down 160 brands of bubble tea in Taiwan. After he comes back to Malaysia, he filtered out the brands of bubble tea or milk tea in many ways, he had chosen the best 5 brands. After he filtered the top 5 brands, he started to approach to the directors and managers of those 5 brands bubble tea or milk tea in Taiwan and have a discussion with them about the collaboration in Malaysia market (Asiapasificbusinesses, 2013).

    After he tried many times, the proposal about the collaboration might be lacked to attract their interests towards the collaboration and it makes him failed to have the agreement with the directors and managers of the top 5 brands in Taiwan. So, he goes back to Malaysia with the disappointment with his father. They had travelled around 10 times as they want to find the brands of bubble tea that can be brought back to the Malaysia market. But, they still failed to fulfil their wish. After he came back to Malaysia, he meet with his cousin and showed his cousin the pictures that he had captured in Taiwan and the experiences that he had during the days in Taiwan. His cousin saw that Chatime brand in one of the picture and told him that Chatime brand is going to expand their business in others country (Timothy Tiah, 2013)

    Once he has been motivated, he googled the contact number of the Chatime brand     and contact the CEO of Chatime brand, Henry and talk about the business plan to Henry about the collaboration and he successfully obtained the approval from the Henry, CEO of Chatime in Taiwan. The result comes out unexpected and so successful (Asiapasificbusinesses, 2013).The entrepreneurial journey has been started after the approval by Henry. After 2 months of the agreement, Bryan had opened the Chatime outlet in Pavillion, Kuala Lumpur in 10th of August in 2010. After started the journey, he used about 6 months to learn about the business and make it become a big hit in Malaysia. He believed that a franchise to do well and to do the brand justice, it has to be controlled by only one owner (Timothy Tiah, 2013). So that, the observant has been shown by Bryan in his journey of entrepreneur that full of failure and also the success.

In 2011, Bryan Loo had been nominated an award which is organised by Malaysian Retailer-Chains Association (MRCA) and 8 TV. The name for the awards is called MRCA 8TV Entrepreneur Awards. This means that his successful is had been confirmed when receiving the awards. Besides, he was the winner of The Best Master Franchiser awards in 2012. After that, he had beaten the other two finalists and won the Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Awards in 2013. He has been featured in many of the magazine and new stories. He was featured as the cover story of the August 2013 edition of Malaysian Tatler (Wikipedia, 2016). With these awards or the prizes can be concluded that the characteristic of observant which is showed by Bryan Loo has made him move towards the successful way in future.

 With the responsibility of being the master franchiser of Chatime Malaysia, Bryan Loo also has given his responsibility towards his family who had become the lucky one in his life. In early of 20, Bryan has given his other half of life to share with his first and only love who is Sally Quah. They got married and together in handling the Chatime brand in Malaysia. His wife is being a Financial Controller for the Chatime brand and he believed that the relationship will make the things become easier and more smoothly. He can go out all the time for the meeting without any worries or get distracted about looking for love (Jean Khoo, 2016). They have two cute and the pretty daughter named Kylie Loo for the first daughter and Hayley Loo for the second daughter (Wikipedia, 2016).

Based on these evidence, we can conclude that Bryan Loo Woi Lip is one of the successful entrepreneurs that is having the observant characteristic in the journey of the entrepreneurial. The reason why he is having this characteristic is the way he faces the problems and able to pay attention to anything that he face.