IORESOURCES | Strategic Growth Consultancy for Businesses and Leaders

When you know what you want, you know what you need

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 09:12:37 -0700

Some make decisions based on what is needed. Some decide based on what they want.

Which camp do you belong to?

Going about life based on what you want sounds a tad wilful….or is it not?

Science has shown that human make decisions largely based on emotions, then justify with logic.

A quick introduction: I am an ex-corporate dog, second time entrepreneur, entrepreneur and executive coach, a connector, a self-learnt and circumstance-made business strategist.

For as long as I can remember, I always pride myself for being a rational decision maker. Yet looking back, my journey has been littered with a lot of regrettable decisions that went against my will and motivation...haha!

I always make decisions based on a “need to basis”. In my business, I’ve pursued clients and projects I didn’t like because I needed the revenue and credentials.

The result? My work and engagement were soulless.

Truth is, our emotions ‘leak’ in forms of energy, passion and enthusiasm. I hated what I was doing, the clients sensed it and the perceived quality of work and relationship suffered backlash. Did the clients come back again? Nope.

If you are a business owner, likelihood is, you’ve been there or you are still there. In the end, instead of owning a business, our business own us. Our original intention of creating a financial and lifestyle freedom was lost in our pursue.

In 2018, I decided to take slow down to reflect. I practiced self-coached and applied the same intervention on myself like I did with my clients — I asked myself what made me want to start my own business in the first place….What do I truly believe in, value and enjoy, where do I want to be years down the road.

When I got to my answers, the fog lifted and everything was as clear as...Read More

Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 23:47:29 -0700

Natalie Fratto, Vice President, Firmwide Strategy at Goldman Sachs brought up the concept of Adaptability Quotient (AQ) at TedTalk.

Representing GS as an investor, she has interviewed 273 startup founders just in 2018 alone. She asks herself everyday how to best assess which founder has the biggest potential.

Instead of assessing founders based on their educational background (IQ) or EQ, she chooses to look out for one single trait, which believes is the most important: Adaptability Quotient (AQ). By that, she meant

"How well a person reacts to the inevitability of change, and lots of it".

Natalie believes we can suss out the level of AQ in a person by:

1) Asking "what if" questions to understand what would a person do in a simulated situation.

The ability of a person to go beyond just retaining information and instead, be able to manipulating information to achieve a specific goal, is a sign of adaptability.

2) Looking for signs of unlearning what they already know and "overwrite" that data with new data.

To that, she gave the example of a guy who reconstruct a bicycle that rides left when he turns right. She also quotes Ghandi, who wrote in his autobiography: "I must reduce myself to zero." as an analogy of being able to adopt a beginner's mindset.

3) Does the person values exploration over exploitation by infuse exploration into their life and business?

Quoting the Blockbuster CEO, Natalie pointed out that his previous success became the enemy of his adaptability potential. By not going beyond the accepted, successful models, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010 . A classic example of "What brought you here, won't take you...Read More

Gambler vs Investor

Thu, 04 Jul 2019 23:23:34 -0700

I had an interesting conversation with a highly accomplished funds manager. He is is well known for his precision in reading high risk markets like China and Brazil, and ability to churn up to 30% returns for his clients within a short period of time.

We were comparing the gamblers and investors. According to him,

“Both gamble. But the key difference is: gamblers invest without knowing what’s the odds and possibilities; investors have clear awareness what are the possibilities they are betting on.”

The gutsy gentleman shared that he's never made it to the Dean’s List back in his university days. However, his sharp ability to spot opportunities and multiply his investors’ portfolio well exceeded his academically acclaimed peers. To this, he lauded his studious efforts in making technical analysis and forecast.

In his work, he scrutinises the fundamentals of the markets; studying all the ups and downs they had for every 7-year cycle. With that, he would identify trigger points on the respective percentiles. This allows him to act fearlessly even when markets get buoyant. His ultimate fall back - time. He will stay in the portfolio to ride off the losses should it occur.

Of course, we end the conversation in about 2 hours, with me agreeing to open an account with him. Fantastic salesman too, isn't he?

I thought there is something in this story that is worth sharing with you.

What do you think made him fearless?
What did you takeaway from this story?

When was the last time you made a high stake decision? What frame of mind were you in when you made the decision? How did your frame of mind impact your actions and the outcomes?

Changes at IOResources

Thu, 04 Jul 2019 20:15:43 -0700

IOR is going through a re-alignment and streamlining exercise.

In the past 4 years, IOR has been offering services around general leadership development and workplace learning. In the process, we learned that the No. 1 challenge that keeps our customers awake at night is how to continuously generate sales and keep their businesses healthy. Any learning and development that is not targeted to enable this purpose will be met with limited motivation or impact.

2019 has been a watershed year in our opinion. With the upsurge of technology advancement and heightened volatility in the global market, business owners and leaders are feeling more and more overwhelmed. The duration of 'stability' is getting so short, business innovation becomes the make-or-break factor for business to survive. Being able to gain the trust of customers and selling from a customer centric perspective has become critical to thrive.

Unlike the multinational corporations (MNCs), most small and medium enterprises do not have the resource to set up different departments for business strategy, marketing, sales, account management...etc. It is often handled by the manager or boss directly.

Having been a business development person for the past 20 years, I decided this is probably where I can add the most value to my customers. And the micro, small and medium size enterprises are the ones that can benefit most from a boutique consulting practice like us.

With the new focus, our customers can expect to walk away with:

Leadership Alignment: Setting the vision, mission and values (VMV)
Strategy Design: Insights into how the market works; identifying a differentiation strategy that is aligned with the VMV
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Accelerating Employees-to-Market

Sat, 11 Aug 2018 03:48:55 -0700

Digitising training ecosystem to enable productivity and scalability

Background

GIANTECH Engineering is a well respected one‐stop service station for many global marine and offshore equipment makers, assisting shipowners and fleet managers with their tanker needs.

Founded in 2001, this Singapore based enterprise is now helmed by the second generation leader. The current CEO has doubled the revenue of the company since he took over in 2011 and he has an aspiration to grow and expand the business regionally.

The Problem

In the marine equipment servicing industry, training is typically unstructured, on-the-job and discipleship-based. On an average, it takes 8-12 months for a Giantech engineer to be fully proficient in a new system before he could be sent to work onboard a vessel independently.

In order to grow and expand its footprint, Giantech is on a quest to represent more brands and systems. However, the long training time required for its engineers to pick up a new system greatly limits Giantech's ability to scale up its business. To overcome this challenge, it needs to accelerate its employee-to-market.

The Solution

Between April 2016 to January 2018, IOResources was engaged as the consultant to help Giantech to accelerate the learning process from 12 months to 6 months. Partnering Gnowbe, a Silicon Valley and Singapore based mobile learning app, we were on a mission to digitise Giantech's institutional knowledge and learning experience of Giantech engineers.

We designed and develop a micro learning program to put the engineers on a structured learning journey. The content is bite-sized and delivered in different formats - video, images, words, diagrams, etc. The app would automate the learning process, ushering the engineers to different learning sources and...Read More