Everyday's life.

My daily routine is almost the same for everyday.

Start working at 530am and go home at around 130-200pm.
And then I'll mostly watch tv series or take a nap after my shower.
Of course, I'll do my online business whenever I have time for it.

So, that's all for now.
Having this simple routine makes time past really fast.
It makes me almost forget about my study part.
I guess it's true when people said that you won't want to get back to study when you started working.

Maybe the texts are getting boring or stressful that I want to try and escape from it.
Not only that, my classes are mostly at night and sometimes I only having it once a week.
Speaking about motivation!!

But until last night, I realised that I shouldn't give in now, not at this FINAL year.
I should always put study ahead of everything else, or maybe ahead of my online business.
I'm going  to end this course very soon, in a few months' time.
I want to graduate asap.
Most importantly, I have to put more effort into it.

March is coming which means the exams are coming real soon!
I only have 3 months left to do all the hard work and I must not let myself regret of anything.
Not to forget, I've decided to study P1 paper on my own.
So yeah, it's going to be tough but still DOABLE!

Back to online selling.

If you know me for awhile, you would've know that I was doing online selling few years back then.

My first online business was mainly selling bags.
God-knows-why I started it but yeah, I did.
I was quite regret that I didn't do enough research on the products which I was selling.
What I considered that time was, how much profit can I make?
So anyway, I started to post online, create new page and stuffs.
Surprisingly, my business was much better than I expected.

Due to my concern on the product's quality, I'd started losing faith for what was I selling.
And if you're a online seller, you would know how important it is to believe in your products/services that you are providing to customers.
How could you sell something that you yourself don't like/trust and expecting others to buy them from you?

And that, really pressured me a lot. So, I decided to quit.
(FYI, the profits were super LOW)
That's my first.

For the second one, it didn't go so well either.
I was having this partnership with my sister but I guess we both weren't communicating and delegating the jobs well.
This time I was satisfied with the qualities but again, a real business will never only have one problem!
I think the supplier issue is the biggest challenge we were facing at that time.
It's hard to find a good supplier nowadays.
When I thought we finally found one, but there were more problems.
The supplier is having too much agents, and the postage is too high for us.
Having too much agents caused the stocks sold out too quickly, having higher postage means we have to pass it on to customers which mostly make them refused to make the purchase.

So once again, I quit.

Somehow, I tried to get back into the business again.
Not sure if it's my interest to do this or I wanted to make extra money for myself.
Either way, this lead me back to online selling.

And now, I'm happy with the quality and the supplier.
But problems never end right?
The greatest challenge for now is to do the sale!
I've to be bold, brave enough to approach others and also improve my communication skills as much as possible.

I'm happy to see the supplier share her knowledge and skills for us on how to do the marketing.
And those skills are what I want to learn from doing online business.
One thing I like about it is that, she asked us to always think from the customers perspective,
When you do in that way, you will gain their acknowledgements and that's how you make the business better.

Making profit is essential but make your customers happy is even crucial!

Anyway, I'm still new in this industry, skin-care industry.
Just have to keep my finger-crossed that the hard work will eventually pay off :)

Tony Fernandes's top 10 tips for entrepreneurs

Saw this from my Facebook yesterday and thought that it might be useful for me in the future. I might not start a big business as Air-Asia but there sure is something valuable that we all should learn to start a small business :)

Tony Fernandes's top 10 tips for entrepreneurs

1) You don’t need to know everything

I came from the music business. I knew nothing about planes. To all the entrepreneurs out there, you don’t need to know everything about what you want to do. It’s all about the idea, it’s about passion, it’s about implementing it.

2) Just do it!

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it. You’ve got one life, so you can’t press the rewind button and say ‘I wished I had done that.’

So I recommend to all of you out there, just do it. Live your life to the utmost, be positive. If you fail, at least you have tried.

I have failed miserably at Formula One, but I have no regrets because I got to stand with the greats from Ferrari, McLaren, and others.

3) Passion is a key problem-solver

Dreams do come true. Don’t worry about failure. You have one life, make the most out of it. Nine times out of 10, if you have the passion, you will find a way to work through it.

4) Invest in marketing

If you have the greatest idea in the world, please, please, please put some money on marketing. This is because if you don’t put money on marketing, nobody is going to hear about your great idea.

There are so many great ideas that never took off because of a lack of marketing.

Marketing is not about the dollars, it is also about public relations (PR). In AirAsia, we had no money. So I ran around with a red cap on and said controversial things so that the press would always take a picture of me. That was our marketing in AirAsia’s early days.

We have been through so many issues, and marketing played a key role in overcoming them.

Remember SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome)? At that time, nobody wanted to fly; we all thought we are going to die.

Everyone cut their advertising, but I told my guys not to cut because this was the best time to build our brand. In fact, we tripled our advertising and everyone looked at me and said, “Are you on drugs?” I said, no, it is the best time because no one else is advertising.

When the first Bali bomb attack happened, everyone cancelled their flights. I said to the guys, we cannot let the Bali route die. We must continue to fly.

So we came up with ‘Love Bali’ campaign, giving away 10,000 free seats, and it worked. All 10,000 seats were snapped up in like under one minute. And all those who got those seats told all their friends about it on social media. Your best advertisement is your customers.

5) Leverage social media

When Malaysians get a good deal, they will tell the whole world about it. So the 10,000 people who went and had a good time in Bali, told 10,000 people that they had a good time. That was the early gestation of AirAsia’s social media.

We realised the power of social media very early on, so when Facebook and Twitter came up, we latched onto them. We were early adopters. We now have 32 million people on our various social media platforms, and 7 per cent of our business comes directly from social media.

The Bali campaign taught us that our best advertisements are our customers.

6) Don’t be scared of complaints

Complaints are actually free market research. Someone took the effort to write to you to tell you where things went wrong and how they should be improved. These are things that companies pay a lot of money for consultants to tell them that same thing.

So we treat every email preciously.

7) Focus on one image when it comes to branding

During the early days, there was the word ‘AirAsia’ and a logo of a bird in our branding.

If you look at the top brands in the world, there’s only one image that comes to your mind. When I say “Shell,” you think of the Shell logo. When I say “Coca-Cola,” you think of the word ‘Coke’ in italics, and when I say “Nike,” you think of the swoosh.

So, back to our earlier AirAsia brand, we said drop the bird – we felt it was facing the wrong way anyway – and we used ‘AirAsia’ as our logo. Just one image. Why spend double the money to promote two images?

We also dropped the blue and the green colours. I tried very hard not to go with red, because everyone thinks that I want to be Richard Branson [the Virgin Group founder and Fernandes’ former boss] ... but it was the best colour, so we picked red.

So yes, the colour does make a big difference!

8) Go on the ground

What I used to do – although I don’t do this anymore – was that once a month, I would carry bags, I would be a cabin crew [member], and also at the check-in counter.

I did this for two reasons. The first is that you can’t be an effective CEO (chief executive officer) unless you go on the ground to experience the real situation.

Here’s a true story. The baggage handling team told me that they needed belt loaders. I told them, “No, we can’t buy that as it’s too expensive.”

So one day when I was tasked to carry bags, they put me on one of the Indonesia flights. People who fly with us generally bring their house with them, but people who fly to Indonesia bring their neighbour’s house as well!

So there was a lot of bags. I broke my back in the process, and I told my team that they were right and I was wrong, and let’s buy the belt loaders.

If I didn’t do that [go on the ground] and just sat comfortably in the office, I would have made a wrong decision, damaged a lot of bags, and probably started a union.

The second reason [for going on the ground] is that I wanted to look for talent. I wasn’t looking for the talents from Oxford or Cambridge, I was looking for the Grade 3 SPM [O Levels equivalent] kind of guys who needed a second chance.

9) Never underestimate the potential of your staff

I broke all the rules in terms of hiring people. To me, as long as you have a dream, you can do anything.

There was an ex-cabin crew member – she came up to me one day and told me that her dream was to become a pilot. I told her to go for it.

Then she called me up one day and asked if she could take part in the Miss Thailand [beauty pageant], and I told her okay, as long as I get to use her photographs in our marketing materials.

She won the [Miss Universe Thailand] pageant and recently became a captain – so we are the only airline in the world with a Miss Thailand flying with us.

The moral of the story is that we have such a flat structure that she was able to tell me what her dreams were, and we were able to make a raw diamond into a diamond.

Another one of my boys, a baggage handler in Kuching, told me he wanted to become a pilot. I told him to go for it. He passed all the exams ... he had the top marks in the flying academy. Today, he is a captain.

We have many of such stories at AirAsia.

Your biggest assets, besides your ideas, are your people – because at the end of the day, it is the people who will deliver your ideas.

10) Data is king

We have a huge amount of data that we don’t know what to do with it, but everyone else wants our data ... so we figured it must be something very valuable and there must be an opportunity there.

We are investing in a few ventures. We plan to launch our own version of TripAdvisor, a travel dongle, a new YouTube-type of channel and more – data will be playing an essential role in these ventures. Data will be king. —

Full article from www.digitalnewsasia.com

Money Saving Challenge!

I'm a person who is really bad at budget but I really wanted to be financially free asap.
One weaknesses of mine, 'promotions' really works on me. I mean, I could spend for something on promotion even if I don't really them. Besides that, I always want to reward myself with good things and those really cost me a lot (as compared to my current income)

Ever since I was more aware of my financial situations, I decided that I should really work something out to help myself. I started to invest in some books, and also started the trending "52 weeks challenge". I did complete the challenge but the thing is ... I rewarded myself again! I spent more than half of the savings and now I'm still struggling.

I wasn't really ready to face this problem (which is me myself being so uncontrollable at times) but I guess it's time to start now. I have been reading relative posts that really hit me and I know that I should think about it seriously.

I'm now 21 and I should be more financially stable than I am now.

So in one of my 2017 resolutions, there will be def a money-saving challenge!
Words are not enough, I should plan something and work it out.

I would probably keep myself on track by recording my progress here as I'm thinking it might help to remind me from time to time and also keep myself moving on.