@RachelChan wrote: Hi Referral, Thank you for your compliments. My answers may not be applicable for all situations, but I hope they will help provide some insights to your entrepreneur journey. All the best! 🙂 Being a founder & CEO at LIV3LY, where & how did you get your idea or concept for this business? There are existing platforms available out there and my "idea" is not new. Through the years of experience in a sport event company, challenges and task that I've took on, speaking to people on the ground, I've found areas that are lacking or could be done better. You loves meeting like-minded people and on a look out for business partnerships. What do you look for in business partner and usually where do you meet these potential partners? My search for partners is simple. Recognise your weakness and find a business partner who has the strength that you are weak in. To find a business partner, you can start from your circle of friends, your work contacts, networking sessions, etc... there is no limit to where you can find potential partners. I've heard of a true story where the business partner was "wooed" in the ladies restroom! You mentioned “Team sizes matter”. What’s your ideal size and what your team consist of? And what do you look for in your team? As a tech company, it's important to have the following areas covered: - Business Development, System Design & Development, Client Servicing & Support, Finance and Marketing. As a start up with a lean budget, every team member's role is crucial. You cannot afford to have a weak link that has potential to slow down/jeopardise the business growth. Some traits that I look for, other than their domain knowledge, are the eagerness to learn new things, pro-active, team player aka get along well with the rest of the team, problem solver, etc. You also mentioned “When handling money internationally, make sure you do it in a cost-effective way”. Can you share with us on this in-depth? What mistakes did you make during the startup and how do you make this more cost-effective later? My business operation is unique whereby I collect my client event's registration fee on behalf. For example, LIV3LY's business is in Singapore and the event is held in Thailand. I have to collect registration fee in Thai Bath, pay out to the event organiser in Thai Bath and the rest of the fee charges will need to convert back to LIV3LY in Singapore Dollars. On LIV3LY's part, to convert Thai Bath into Singapore Dollars, there is a cost incurred in exchange rate. On the client's part, there is a TT transfer fee incurred. I've spoken to PayPal, our banks as well as my finance team, together we have 2 - 3 workable solutions for the client to choose from. One of the many mistakes that I have made during the start up is I was too eager to hire without any confirm deals in yet. There were several months of sleepless nights watching my bank figures diminishing at a rapid rate. So, I took a risk by hiring a sale person to increase sales. I've cut cost by stopping some projects with my vendors and pass on these projects to my team, meaning they have to take on more roles than their usual scope. Drive the team to develop new features that bring in new source of revenues. With some luck, we've pulled through the difficult phrase. Yours sincerely, Rachel Hello Rachel, Thank you for your interesting and trueful answers, especially on your “several months of sleepless nights watching my bank figures diminishing at a rapid rate”. Yes, this indeed is very true for most start-up. Hope you don’t mind on these follow up questions; now that you have go through all these ups & downs, what advise will you give to your son/ daughter about their career life (with the intention of not going over the same mistakes and heart ache you went through)? And what things do you want them to learn from you? (Value, skills set anything..)
... View more
