After starting and selling two successful companies, I was ready for a new challenge – starting a company in another country. I began with a round-the-world scouting trip going to the most ‘business friendly’ countries. In the end, I chose Singapore due to its tax and business strengths and logistical position.
With my business contacts, start-up money, local residence set, and lots of paperwork, I received my coveted entrepreneur pass from Singapore called the “EntrePass”. This allowed me to set up a new company in Singapore. After all the work to obtain this, I thought I had set myself up for success, but actually it was the opposite.
1. Plans change, so role with the punches
After my first few years of struggling, I thought maybe I’d underestimated the amount of money needed to establish myself. Maybe it was a problem with my business plan, or target audience. Maybe it was a problem with my partners, implementation or even my entrepreneurial skills.
Even though I felt like a horrible failure in the beginning, I don’t regret the attempt, nor my time in Singapore. Now a few years wiser, I realized the real failure of this endeavor was an underestimation of the cultural view of time (time management) that eventually did me in.
You see my business plan required me to show a strong web presence to make the business successful and to raise sufficient start-up capital. The bids we received in Singapore seemed quite high, so we looked to Indonesia for our solution. Which leads to our next part.
Time is money, and time costs more in a foreign land
Chris Rither
2 Cheap is not necessarily inexpensive
Back in Singapore, the programmers, web developers and visual design artist’s fees were a fraction of the cost of the Singapore bids. This sounded great because we thought we could save a fortune and still get the same results. The problem was Indonesian culture basically views time though the lens of the past, while the western tend view time towards the future.
Many of the ‘eastern cultures”, especially Indonesia, revolve around the present, with the belief that one should enjoy the day, because the future is not certain. Now, this is a great approach to life, when you have a lifetime to accomplish your goals, and aren’t under the time restraints of a deadline.
The real problem wasn’t noticeable in the beginning. The first few months, we stayed in contact through Skype and email. However, I noticed with the passing of each deadline, their response was “no problem, it will be done in a few weeks”.
After a few months of this “in a few weeks routine” I had to fly back to Indonesia and work with them every day for a month. When I was with them things got done, until I left and everything went back to the same excuses and pushed back deadlines. Flying back each time brought us nearer to a working model, but not without wasting time and draining our start-up capital.
3. Counting the cost – not as easy as it seems
The problem was not the cost of flying back and forth, but the cost of running the other aspects of the business back in Singapore. When I was busy in Indonesia, the things needed to be done in Singapore were put on hold. But the cost of business never slows down or stops, just because you do.
In the end, their “in a few weeks” turned into a few months. A few months turned into a year. And after a year of dwindling finances, I still didn’t have an operational site, nor the ability to show off what my business had to offer. Without this, or any sales, I wasn’t able to raise the capital needed to continue on.
So I shut everything down, cut my losses, and moved to Korea. The moral from this story: “Time is money, and time costs more in a foreign land”.
The good (or bad) thing about this story is that not everyone has to move to another country to find business failure. They are all around us. The only question is – Do we learn from our failures and move on, or use them as an excuse to not try anymore.
Today my failure did morph into OneMeanDream.com. If you’re still reading, you can see my efforts weren’t entirely in vain.