Expanding your business

Once your business start running, it is critical that you start expanding. Expanding is no longer an after-thought, it is now necessary to think ahead and plan ahead for expansion. This allows you to maximize the YEAH Income formula and bring more income not just to your family and you, but to your existing staff too.
There are 2 common restraints to business expansion

1. Skilled manpower or Talents
2. Capital

Capital

Financial capital is always an on-going business matter, from the first seed money for your untested, new business, to a much bigger amount for scaling and expansion. 

Large transnational corporations can issue bonds and stocks, and credibility for large bank loans. Extremely unique or wonderful startups may have access to angel investors or venture capitalists. Most of us, however, may have to stick to traditional and smaller ways of capital access
These are the usual way of getting capital for business, ranked from the beginning to a larger amount.

1. Personal Savings and Investments
2. Personal loans, credit
3. Spouse, family and friend loans
4.  Business loans from banks and credit facilities
5. Joint Venture capital or loan backed by partners

Personal Money

For most new businessmen, the easiest way of starting a business is via your own savings. You may liquidate some unit trusts, stocks, or even your home for the cash to start a business, or use cash from your savings or fixed deposits. You usually meet little or no objection, since these are your own money. Do note, always discuss with your spouse on this. 

Money is the #1 issue why divorces happen, and even if it is your own money from your own career, you should respect your spouse and discuss this. If you are young, you may want to consult your parents too. This is not about permission, it is a healthy form of respect that will help you as you grow in strength.

Personal Loan and Credit

This is another common way, where you can seek personal loans from banks based on your current salary. I have heard of people who have a lucrative career, borrowed large sums based on his payslip, and quit his job to start a business. The bankers would have frowned as the loan was based on his salary monthly repayment ability, but it is completely legal.

I would not suggest this though. It might be better to start off a small scale business with your own savings rather than credit or loans. The reason is that you are new in business and you have 101 things to take care of and learn. Interest repayment, credibility, may not be something you want to add on to your stress.
However, if your business is tested and tried, and you are fairly confident (there is no 100% in life), then you may consider using personal loans because your business probably has not reached the years of operation required and the great accounting needed for banks to consider corporate loans.

I personally used many credit card balance transfers (roughly 2 to 4% per annual interest rate, NOT 24%) promotion rate (only valid for 6-month loans. Not only is the interest rate much lower for short 6-month promotion balance transfer, but it also forces me to be nimble and handle my maths correctly, that I must ensure my goods get sold and I recovered the full capital within 6 months.

As recommend, always discuss with your spouse as personal loans do affect your family.
Spouse, family and friend loans

Your relatives and spouse are the biggest supporters, but please do consider carefully before asking for a loan. You will be hard-pressed to pay back if the business failed, and I have seen my own personal cases where relatives do not speak to each other due to old, bad debts. Do not let this affect your relationship with your family.

Having said that, if you do have a fairly valid business model, and if you seek family help for financial capital, do note on this:- ALWAYS HAVE THE INTENTION TO PAY BACK. 

This makes sure you are very careful with the capital and do not overspend, or over ordered the volume of goods. The biggest mistake one can get with "other people's money" is the lack of ownership and responsibility and splurge on risky business expansion and doom oneself to financial ruins. It may not be your personal money but once you lose it, you lose your reputation, your morale, your workflow, and worst of all your relatives or friends. 

Be more careful of other's money than with your own money.

Business Loans

Every country and banking sector has its preferred years of operations, but usually, banks only lend out money to a business of at least 2-3 years in operation, sometimes with the insistence of the business owners and directors as personal guarantors. 

They will check the accounts for the past 1-2 years to assess the amount of risk you possess and then offer a deal.

In Singapore, companies usually require 2 years of operation, and the business loan interest is around 7-9% from a bank, and 15% and more from finance companies. Financial companies are less strict and provide more loans, at higher rates though.

This is why when you start a business, ACCOUNTING is very important. It helps you to stay legal with proper corporate tax payment, it is also the key to how much capital banks will lend you in the future.

Talents in your business

There are 2 ways of getting talents to expand and run your business

1. Hire experienced staff and let them lead and grow
2. Hire inexperienced staff and train them.

Hiring new staff (and possibly training them from scratch)

One of the best ways of building a beautiful business culture is hiring fresh graduates. They are new to society and you can attract those who are similar to your work culture. Do note that they will have a steep learning culture to learn and adapt not just to society, but how things work in real life. Many of them are used to students' life, and non-punishing deadlines or non-serious issues, and you need to adapt to their learning curves. If not, they may leave your company soon.
Some of the best staff we have are hired are fresh graduates, and we are proud to say that because we manage to interview and filter and provide the correct incentive to the correct person to accept the challenge and join us.

Getting Great Talents In

My favourite would be hiring people that have great experience and help you jump start the business. Unfortunately, this is not easy. Let me share why it is difficult to hire great talents

1. Your salary offer cannot match what big Transnational companies can offer
2. He may not share your same vision, business culture
3. He will be concerned (rightly) of the future of your company

For reason #1, unless you are already making high margins and high volume, usually we are unable to match the corporate perks and salary that he may be able to find in other companies.

Business vision

The future of the company and the business culture can be attractive and compelling to pull real talents to join your business.

Business Culture

Small or new businesses have the luxury of starting a brand new business from scratch. There are talents out there who love the challenge of starting something new and learning new things. This can be one of your attractive traits.

Small family and cozy culture

Large companies lack the warmth and family closeness of what small business can offer. You may be surprised how many people may choose a cozy working environment with a small knitted group than over any larger salary increase in a colder, corporate workplace. Many of our existing staff are comfortable and happy with the culture, and we dare say that they are working hard and happily here not because of our salary offers. 

Our salary offers are competitive but nothing to crow about. Our pantries are full, but not to the level of tech unicorns with 10 different ice cream flavours and 20 tea bags brands.

They stay because they are comfortable, happy, coming daily to a workplace that has a culture that is suitable for their characters.

Sharing our business culture

Our biggest draw:-

1. Simple or NO Dress code
2. Flexible working hours
3. Evolving Job Scopes

Wear what you like!

When we first started, we were really small, so we started with a casual dress code. Our dress code is: Dress Sensibly. I do not think that there is a need for an office shirt and pants or skirts for the ladies.

Work anytime you like!

I set a simple working hours rule, come at 8 am, finish at roughly 5 pm, and all staff has the flexibility to adjust your working hours, the only request is please check with us and give us your reason.  Currently, I have a staff that comes around 5 am, finish at 3 pm or 4 pm, another lady that finishes at 4 pm so that she can go for extra school lessons, and another staff that works longer shift daily so she can have an extra day off for her personal chores.

Evolving Job = More Learning chances!

In evolving job scopes, what I am highlighting is that there will always be different challenges in different stages of growth. A person in charge of marketing may have to cross over to customer service and learn good responsive customer service. A graphic designer may need to go through email marketing training with us to understand what is needed for that 1-second hook.
This is the biggest advantage small businesses can provide for staff:- simple dress code, flexibility and accommodating to each staff's personal needs, and evolving job scope descriptions. 
Use this to your advantage to recruit people that you can work with, for the long term.

Features can attract or repel different people

During the interviews with candidates, I pointed out this dress code, the flexibility of time, evolving job roles, and their reactions will tell me a lot about their characters and preferences. I can guess who will be keen on this job and who I will consider hiring.
There will always be talents that you love, but their eyes do not light up at the mention of simple dress code, great flexibility, and evolving job scope. In our case, I will not hire them no matter how talented they are. They will only reject your offer or leave in a few months' time because the advantages that you are providing is a mismatch for them.
These 3 features, dress code, flexibility in timing, and different job challenges are just features, they are advantages to the correct candidates but they can be vast turn-offs to some. I know of candidates who do not like evolving job scope, they have the mindsets that they are specialists and should not be doing other duties. For example, a digital marketer may frown that he needs to create an excel sheet to track sales; he will prefer working for large corporations where each staff's duties are narrow and focused.

Retaining your talents

Besides recruiting staff into your company, you also need to retain your staff. If your staff is capable, he or she would have no lack of opportunities outside to work for higher pay or better opportunities. And irony enough, we are in a sector where our staff can learn our eCommerce process and then have their ambition to jump out and start up their own businesses.
This is normal and you should take joy in this. If your staff can go out and make more money, this means he is giving you a lot of value-adds and you are getting great profits from this. The key to retaining them:- give them more value add.

Growing with the company

One of the biggest contributions you can give to your staff is to grow your company. People take pride belonging to a business that is growing by scope, horizontally or vertically. If you stay stagnant, then they are not participating in something new and they will grow tired of it. If their intention is just to make daily living and live day by day, this is not an issue. If your talents want to feel excitement and fulfillment at their career path, they will soon leave you for exciting prospects.
This is an exciting feature for you. If they work hard, you will work harder, if they work smarter, then you will work smarter. Healthy competitive and healthy pride will encourage both bosses and staff to push the company to higher levels.

Training and skills

I offer all our staff time off for them to learn anything, even when it may not be useful to the company. I allow my customer service officer to learn accounting, and promised her a wage increase and a promotion when she has graduated with accounting credentials. Allow your staff to grow with you, both in skills and wages.
Do allocate time and resources to train your staff, both new and old. Let me share this quote:-

CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave?

CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?

We provide all our staff with opportunities to learn. As a boss, you must be generous to share and train your staff. Do not worry about them leaving, that is an old and traditional mindset that will handicap your company growth. Out of 10 good guys you train, surely 1 or 2 will still leave you. However, those who stay will be able to perform a lot better with the additional skill sets and attitudes.
When your staff knows that you are generous in training, they know you are not keeping special knowledge hidden from them, they will appreciate this and learn more and work better for your business.

Your staff is your multipliers of you. 

With good skills and knowledge, they can be even stronger multipliers of your revenue and profits.

Top 5 Forums in Singapore and Malaysia (#1 won't surprise you)

We love forums, where we can ask anything under our nicknames and not worried about privacy and being embarrassed. And this is a great way to destress at office hours ;)

What are the top forums in Singapore and Malaysia where we can seek advice or just have fun chit chatting? Let us check out the top 5 forums in Singapore and Malaysia!

5) Petalbytes for Women in Singapore and Malaysia

Remember Cozycot or Flowerpods? Those were the old forums in the past that cater to the women's topics. Ladies flocked to them for the best deals, sharing their fashions, health and love stories. Now, petalbytes.com is the new Singapore and Malaysia forum for women, including motherhood and family sections where women share stories of and seek advice.

Their top section? No doubt about it, it is their Love and Romance subforum.

Fun fact: Petalbytes even has a work-friendly SAFE MODE to discreetly use the forum and looks like you are using Office word editors.  Just toggle the Safe Mode at the top right corner for the forum.

4)  Malaysia's number 1 forum- Lowyat

Lowyat is the name of a shopping complex in Kuala Lumpur that is famous for electronics. A forum pops out for tech discussion and evolved into Malaysia's number one forum.

The topics are diverse and interesting, with many Malaysians participating and giving their two-cents worth. Some debates get hot and heated and you will welcome the diverse views in society. Manglish is widely used, with English, Malay and Cantonese making Lowyat home-sweet-home to all malaysians.

Lowyet, Malaysia's #1 Online Forum

Top section in Lowyat beside their huge mobile phone section? Their Kopitiam section where you can discuss anything you can discuss over a hot cup of kopi-O or milo dinosaur.

3) SG Talks

http://weblisting-img.freetemplatespot.com/img/620x313/s/sgtalk.org.png

(caption SG talks)

One of the oldest forum around in Singapore, SG Talks has seen its ups and downs. Over the years, it has evolved and has a regular group of people who talk about stocks, politics and current affairs.

Top section:- Their Market Talks! discussions about how the market is, costs of living and the average man's savings and investments

Fun fact: There is an android app for using SG talks to make it convenient for mobile phone usage.

2) Hardwarezone (owned by SPH)

Hardwarezone started off as a tech forum, where people logged in to discuss about their PC builds, their graphic cards, sounds cards etc...

It eventually grow big enough to have such a huge diverse variety of subforums, from travel subforums (and many subsections on different regions), health and fitness to money mind, where people debated on the benefits and costs of stocks, ETF, funds and insurance policies (insurance agents trying to find business are rapidly exposed there). Many of the subforums have grown so large into its own battalions of regulars and experienced seniors.

SPH which owns the major newspapers in Singapore, took notice of Hardwarezone.com.sg and bought it in 2006 and has since incorporated management with its digital media.

Their top section? Hardware section. Yup, they have lots of great sections on mobile phones, laptops, electronics part. Actually... their biggest traffic zone is a non-hardware section... a section so huge, it deserves a mention on its own as its own "forum"

1) EDMW

EDMW forum, aka Eat Drink Man Woman, is the huge beast in the room. Not just in term of users, but the amount of time each average user spend in this forum. (Goodbye office productivity). As the name implies, Eat-Drink-Man-Woman, this is the coffee shop forum where everything goes, be it food, drinks, man or woman ;)

It has evolved so huge that it has a life of its own in hardwarezone, and where other users at different sections even frown upon EDMW users and their lingos. EDMW users have their own subculture, lingos that seems funny to most and annoy to some. Even celebrities, such as actors Tay Ping Hui or father of Singapore bloggers- mrbrown has revealed that they do surf EDMW.

One of the more enduring cultures of highlighting how local dramas tend to "eat medicine" and using this line on one another in EDMW if his opinions differ from the rest. You will love the humour as they whack government officials, celebrities etc.

Well, hope these forums will bring you joy and fun when you are stressed or while travelling to work. Don't get sucked up mindlessly surfing and get your work productivity wrecked. Have fun!

Insurance 101 in Singapore

What is insurance?

Protection Money paid. You go temple (or church, or mosque) and you donate a sum of money monthly.
If nothing happens, the money is gone.

What is TPD (total permanent disability)?

1. Take a brown paper bag.
2. Throw in 2 arms 2 legs and 2 eyes into the brown paper bag.
3. Give it a good shake.
4. Take any 2 out of the paper bag.

Any two, and you are considered TPD, total and permanently disabled.

What is insurance endowment plans?

Money given to a big boy who take your money and buys term protection for your life and then give the rest to buy stocks. He earns from the stock, and return you a little money and expect you to be happy about it.

So its like compulsory savings, but with a big chunk to the salesman.

What is the best way for buying insurance?

1. Buy hospital insurance. (if you are singaporean, get a good private medishield plan from insurers using your CPF Medisave money)
2. Buy some critical illness.
3. If you have parents or children who depends on your salary, buy some term on your life.
4. Buy some personal accident plan
5. Do NOT buy any endowment nor life insurance plans. They are wasting your money.
6. Take the money saved and buy stocks, or if you do not know how, go buy stock ETF. 
7. Google for stock ETF.
8. Go Robo investor=  StashAway, MoneyOwl, etc etc

Where do I buy personal accident plans?

NOT from life insurance companies like AIA, Prudential, Great Eastern, NTUC Income, manulife, AXA, etc.

Buy from a general insurer, where the personal accident plans are so much cheaper. Its the same general insurers that handle insurance for motor cars, travel insurance, home content insurance etc.

What is personal accident and what is covered?

So should I buy whole life plans or endowment plans?

No. you have not been reading well.

Buy term plans (only protection with no cash value) and invest the difference in ETF or robo-advisors funds.

Do NOT buy whole life or endowment from insurance companies.

Should I buy any ILP or Investment linked Plans from my insurance agents?

If any agents recommend you ILP, stay away from them.

These plans are the worst in terms of charges, and has the highest commission for the agents.

Google them. ILP are the worst villains of this industry. 

Any agents who promote them are considering their very high commission level.

Maldives and my sore feet

just back from the Maldive beaches.

and oh boy. I have lots of cuts in my feet and legs. cut from snorkeling, from walking along the beach.... the beach is not exactly pure white sand.

but mostly from stumbling on the rocks just in front of my room.
heehee.

Foot Spa for my feet?

I was wondering my feet is so painful and toughened from the barefooted walking and thinking and pondering on getting these foot peel masks in America. (click on the link to see what i mean)
Hows that? :D

anyone tried foot spa for your tired feet?

i believe its those type of foot care exfoliating masks that help to peel off the hardened layer skin. lol sounds painful.

btw, these stingrays are really cute seeing from far.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/UBeXjoLHja2wXVDB9

and yes, Baby Shark... do do dooo.....

Private Post for Bloggers Jan 2019

For all instagram influencers and bloggers who love to review products (and receive these products for free)

Even if you are not Singaporeans, it is alright, I can pay for shipping, and courier these goods to your address.


I will recommend these items if you want to do reviews. At least 1 from HoneyCity
Quinoa = anchor word:- Quinoa
Chia Seed = anchor word-  Chia Seed
Honey = anchor word- Honey in Singapore
Vit C = anchor word- Why you should eat Vitamin C?
Aloe Vera = anchor word- Aloe Vera Vitamin E for skincare

At least 1 from SeniorCare
Fish Oil = anchor word- Fish Oils Omega 3-6-9 Flaxseeds and Evenings
Glucosamine = anchor word- Glucosamine Chondroitin Supplements
Cantley Wet Wipes = anchor word-  Wet wipes vs Toilet Papers





If you have other items in mind for reviews, maybe some other items from the websites do drop me an email cedricsoh@gmail dot com or WhatsApp me if you know me directly.

I have lots of ecommerce websites in USA too, will be happier if you are an American and able to use Prime Shipping. 

Have lots of fun to all bloggers and IG influencers!