Talking to Skali Group CEO Tengku Farith Rithaudeen is like a cross between an MBA class and a textbook on how to start you own business. It's Entrepreneur 101 with lashings of how-to and how-we should.
He is of course, well qualified to discuss the subject at length. The Skali Group, along with Tengku Farith and his fellow founders have been long-time players of 'Survivor', the Technopreneur Edition.
Despite several close shaves over the last few years, including the Asian Financial Crisis, the dotcom bust and at one point, even having to hide his car from being repossessed by financial institutions - neither he nor his company have yet to be 'voted off'.
From Merchant Banker to Making Your Own Coffee
What makes an ex-merchant banker and former corporate man (having previously been with the management of public-listed infrastructure developer Road Builder) decide to go down the bumpy and rocky road of being a technopreneur?
Perhaps it has something to do with the overwhelming urge to "build something" and "make a contribution". He charmingly sums it up as follows: "I would rather put 1 million into Skali, work my butt off, and hope to turn it in to 4 million than dump 1 million into a counter on the KLSE and contribute nothing to that company!"
Besides, dumping money in the stock market is riskier, he argues. A staggering thought to some of us perhaps - just hang on to the stock and wait for the market to go up surely? "What if it never goes back up? And what if you bought an Enron?" he counters. "I will put money into something that I can control - in that way, the risk is reduced. I know the market, I know the situation - I know how I can make money. Quite unlike a counter on the KLSE. I don't know the company that well, I don't know the management."
The Human Side to Entrepreneurialism
Then there's the reasons of 'self actualisation', 'self-enrichment' and 'getting our hands dirty'. A little hard to imagine those words coming from the mouth of an entrepreneur - after all, isn't the objective of entrepreneurial endeavours to make an obscene amount of money and preferably as quickly as possible?
Tengku Farith likes to trot out his favourite catchphrase for the New Economy - to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton: It's an Ecosystem, Stupid. Today's New Economy is about balancing humanist entrepreneurial desires (create a better product, make society a better place) with the lucre-loving-greed-driven-me-first attitude of raw entrepreneurship. A good organisation and technopreneur strives to balance this in its business practices, he asserts.
Once you understand you're part of an eco-system, then you've taken the first step towards sustainability and longevity as a business, he stresses. "At Skali, we do go for profitability - we don't do projects that are not profitable. But that isn't greed, it's sustainability, getting ROI for our investment. But, there's the other side of us which says we can have shoddy products and make a lot of money or we can have good products and bend over backwards to service our customers properly - less profits but more sustainable in terms of building a brand name and a longer term survival."
Simplified, this means that "I don't sell you a Rolls Royce when all you need is a Kancil," he explains.
A TeAM Player
His fellow co-founders handle more of the day-to-day operations at the company, while he works on the overall vision of the company and as all CEOs do, keeping the ship on course. This gives him the time and opportunity to get more involved with technopreneur development, a subject that he is extremely passionate about.
He is extremely involved in the activities of the newly formed Technopreneurs Association of Malaysia (TeAM), serving on its executive committee and participating in its Mentoring program. Thus, he has plenty to say about what needs to be done to realise the country's ambition of becoming a knowledge-based economy.
The first salvo is fired in the direction of education. "Our education system requires some adjustments. Maybe in the 80s, where we had a particular target for achieving industrial and manufacturing strength, skilled workers were what we needed. We have a pretty big skilled workforce now - we need more knowledge workers."
The population needs to understand the difference between the two: "Being able to do something from A to B to C to D is skill - asking why, how where and why should I - that's knowledge."
Funding is another area in which Tengku Farith feels improvement should be forthcoming. "Funding is not going down to the grassroots - early stage companies," he states, point blank, although he adds that moves to allow funds like Mavcap to invest in early-stage companies is a good start towards improving the situation.
Finally, he'd like to see government and local organisations being more supportive of the local technology industry and technopreneurs. "A lot of the industries and government departments should be buying Malaysia first. When entrepreneurs do a project, they are developing themselves and building expertise. That's the way to develop world-class entrepreneurs."
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