My partner and I just had a meeting recently with a prospective investor in one of our new ventures. As we had all the business plan writeup and powerpoint slides ready, it went well. Our experience reminded me of how important having good computing and presentation skills is to the entrepreneur. Somehow, convincing potential investors or customer is so much easier when you have your thoughts prepared in a concise powerpoint presentation.
Powerpoint skills - One of the first is knowing your way around a powerpoint presentation. Most of the time, busy business people, especially prospective investors in your venture would not have time to ready your business plan, so powerpoint is concise and help guide your thoughts. But it amazes me sometimes why entrepreneurs do not bother to learn this skill. I was in a conference last year where one speaker gave his entire presentation in edit mode, instead of slideshow mode. Another time, the speaker did not know how to flip his slides backwards or turn on/off the slides.
Good executive summary - The second is of course, being able to come up with an executive summary less than 3 pages with concise explanation of your plan. Handing the exeuctive summary to the prospective investor is much better than printing the entire powerpoint slides and giving it to him.
Hide your desktop - Please make sure you remove all folders on your laptop desktop, and while you are at it turn off all email reminders and pop ups. It would be quite embarassing for the prospective investors to see folders like "jokes", "you tube videos" or worse other confidential folder names on the desktop, when your powerpoint closes & your Windows desktop is revealed. Better yet, just create a New User in your Windows, and use that user profile everytime you need to do presentations.
A good projector helps - lastly, it really helps if you have a good LCD projector and more importantly know how to use it. Learn how to make simple adjustments like brightnesss, zoom, focus and image shifting for the presentation environment. Almost always, most small offices will not have a projector ready and even in meeting rooms where there are projectors installed, chances are no one around knows how to operate it. I happen to own the HP 3130, (unfortunately HP discontinued it) http://www.ciao.co.uk/HP_Digital_Projector_Mp3130__5784143 one of the few small projectors on the market that stands upright. Its small to bring along, easy to operate and setup. I remembered once, the person I was presenting to was so impressed with my HP projector that he liked my presentation even before I started....
To me, getting these basics correct will help the entrepreneur sell his ideas to potential investors. So, may your next big pitch with powerpoint is a good one...
I visited the Menara Sunway, the corporate headoffice of Sunway Group http://www.sunway.com.my/ for a meeting, and was pleasantly surprised as I drove into their visitor carpark. Most office buildings in Kuala Lumpur would make all their visitors drive down to the basement carpark, usually in B2, B3 or worse (as in the VisionCity building) B4. In Menara Sunway, visitors gets to park in their B1 lots, sparing me the head spinning effort of spiraling down 3 or 4 down ramps. Instead, the folks at Sunway have made their employees and staff park on the lower floors and in the outdoor parking lot. This is indeed a refreshing change.
Actually, it really does make any sense to put visitors on top. After all, most visitors would be spending 1 - 2 hours in the building, why make them spiral down 3 or 4 floors of parking. Until today, I still do not see the logic of building managers making their visitors do that.
Visitors on Top makes economic and common sense :
1. As tenants of buildings will know their way around the lower basement parking floors as they are there each day, rather than visitors getting lost trying to find empty slots. Their constant driving around generates heat in the basement car parks.
2. Tenants driving into the building in the morning will park their cars and by 10am or so, their car engines will probably have cooled therefore causing less strain on the carpark ventilation system for the rest of the day
3. When visitors are forced to park at the lower basement floors, they are actually causing more wear and tear on the up/down ramps and as heat rises, their warm engines will cause more strain on the ventilation system throughout the day. The heat generated makes most basement car parks unbearably hot in KL, especially in integrated office cum shopping malls.
4. It can easily be proven that the ventilation fans in the basement care parks can account for more than 10% - 20% to the total cost of running a typical office building.
5. A B1 or B4 has no relevance to tenants who usually drive in & out once each work day, and besides the different floors is just a push of a button on the lift panel.
6. Even worse is the bosses, senior managers or main tenants of buildings have their parking lots right on the upper floors, when they are usually the ones that needs it the least, as they usually have their personal drivers in tow.
7. Besides, VIP or anchor tenants are usually the ones paying the least on a per square foot for their office space (due to the space they occupy) so why give them convenient B1 parking.
Unless someone has a good argument for NOT putting visitors on B1, I think there should be a law that building owners have to allocate the top basement floors to visitor parking.
Building with the worst visitor carparks in Kuala Lumpur are Phileo Damansara, Phileo Avenue, Central Plaza (its reverse - you have to spiral at least 7 floors up, before you can find visitor parking!), Vision City towers... anyone has more to add ?
So, if you have the power to change, please make visitors park on top!!
Just had an old business associate drop by my office earlier. He and his identical twin brother is involved in a successful business of locks and locksmithing. Over the years, they have supplied locksets to a few of my wife's property projects, including our office.
Anyway, he dropped by to share with me his new venture, http://www.cartridgeworld.com.my/ which is a franchise to refill printer cartridges. Immediately, I think he will do really well considering the importance of laser printers in offices today. Just a quick check on my Hewlett Packard laser printer - the printer cost us approximately RM2,699 when we bought it, but I think for the past 1 year I have spent double that amount for ink cartidges replacements. Each cartridge (and we need 4 of them - black, magenta, cyan and yellow) cost approximately RM350/=. That's nearly half the cost of the printer, each time I print 400 - 500 pages of documents.
Best of all, the cartridge refilling business has low inventory (only powder), requires scalable manpower and recurring revenue. So, next time you wanna go out and buy new cartridges, consider saving the old ones and give Eric at Cartridge World SS2 PJ branch a call at 03-7877 9988.
He will not only come by your office to pick up your used cartridges but will refill and send it back to you in good condition, plus with guarantee too. Now, that really makes sense and $$$.
One of the newest restuarants near my office in Desa Sri Hartamas is a new place called EXOTIC started by a nice Vietnamese chinese lady and her husband. They moved from Canada and settled in Malaysia over 10 years ago, and started their new restuarant venture a month ago.
Being one for trying new things, I have been having my lunch there quite regularly. They have a simple but delicious lunch menu and slowly they have been attracting the office lunch time crowd. Its an efficient and clean little place and food is reasonable. They have also renovated the public place next to their restuarant and upgraded the sunshade awnings too. Generally, they have made the corner brighter from the previous mamak restuarant which was really badly run and had non-edible food.
Anyway, here lies the entrepreneurial challenge for the EXOTIC owners.
Around 3 weeks ago, the neighborhood had the priviledge of being visited by the mayor of Kuala Lumpur followed by an army of city hall officials supposedly to clean up and improve the area. Instead of making positive changes to the neighborhood such as getting rid of the illegal parking companies, haphazard parking, poorly installed meters and dirty streets, the officials have picked on one aspect of the neighborhood - unauthorised renovations. Many corner restuarants in order to increase their al fresco dining space has expanded into the public space next to their rented shoplots. As there are no proper guidelines from City Hall (or DBKL) these are considered illegal renovations. So, the DBKL officials came by last week and handed the EXOTIC owners an official letter to remove the illegal renovations.
It is SAD that enterprising restuarants owners who take the trouble to improve an otherwise dead public space by relaying the flooring, planting flowers, install lightings and awnings has instead been give 7 days to tear down everything. Of course the EXOTIC retuarant owners are banding together with a few others in the neighborhood to protest against the tear down of their renovations.
So typical of DBKL - and while the real problems of the neighborhood remains unsolved.
