Be a CEO
I believe that everyone should try to have a business, act and think like businessman or CEO. Even if it is not profitable and we eventually are forced to close the business, the learning process would be priceless.
With the technology that we have today, setting up business can be very easy and very cheap (if not free). Forget about formalities tax etc… government will forgive you if you still small… just go a head and produce products or services. Read more
Promosi Tanpa Budget
Waktu bertemu rekan rekan di UNPAD, seorang mahasiswi bertanya, bagaimana menjual produknya tanpa ada budget untuk promosi. Pertanyaan yang sangat menarik… Bisakah?
Kenapa tidak? Untungnya di jaman sekarang pelaku bisnis kecil-menengah memiliki akses terhadap potensial konsumen yang jauh lebih mudah dibandingkan dahulu. Sebagai pelaku bisnis kecil, kita memiliki beberapa keuntungan diantaranya adalah: Read more
The Importance of Giving the Best Price to Clients
As part of my job, I have been in consistent negotiation process with some of the clients. Somehow I do not like it, because sometime it really can “wreck” friendship that I built over the years with some clients. I want to have more friends not enemies and life is just too short for the endless argument about pricing.
In the past few years, I am trying to give all my clients the best price or fair in the first proposal that I submitted to them. To me this serve some purposes very well
- This will cut down the negotiation process and we can focus our time, energy and money for something else that more useful for both party.
- If I lost the business, I will not regret it because I know that if I take the business, it will do more harm to me or company, unless if we are in the survival mode.
- If I do not give them best price, it means that I am not doing my job as their account handlers.
Similar analogy: you may prefer to buy in the modern trade, you do not bargain, just take the product according to your need and pay. But there are downside to it:
- At the first, you will be seen as a person who are very hard to deal with, it will lead to a perception that you are snob or arrogant. Yap.. been there few times..
- When the clients have what so called “purchasing department” the best price strategy as above may give you headache because their KPI is to lower down the cost, and I tell you they are very-very tough.
It took quite a while to your client to understand that you are in a good will to give them the best price. In my case I need around 4-5 years for some giant local clients.
I usually politely ask them to compare it Apple to Apple to the competitors . When the pricing is no longer an issue and client believe that we give them a good price already, we can have fun to work with them and have a closer client servicing relationship.
We got the advantage..!
Opportunity is wide open for all of us in this era.
- Before, only big corporation can have portal like presence on the web, now I can and you too, For free
- Before only big corporation can reach thousand or million of potential users to communicate their product, now you and I can, for free
- Before only big corporation can intensely communicate with their consumers, now you and I can, for free
And many more things that it used to be a monopoly of big industry, we can do it now relatively free.
The example is this blog. To be honest, I am quite surprise that this very blog is very powerful, it has the same engine (if not better) than big corporation use. I can use it to communicate and try to offer my product to millions of potential consumers. We can use facebook and twitter too
In some points, we have the advantage, we are lean and agile, we can offer better rate than big corporation who are fat and too many overhead cost. So the game is somehow level up with this new technology… either we want to use it or not… our choice
My first entrepreneurship attempt…
Believe it or not, I got my first money at the age of 5 years old. The story goes like this: when Lebaran, our family got quite a lot of biscuits as present from other family. Hence after Lebaran we have enough biscuits for many months a head. I can not remember how it was started, but me and my older brother had ideas that we can make money out of it.
We took one can of the biscuit (sandwich type) I can remember it was Khong Guan biscuit. We open it up and insert a small piece of paper in each of the sandwich biscuit. The paper will tell the buyer what kind of bonus(ses) they will get. We bring the biscuit to the play ground, and sold it per pieces. To my disbelieve it was an instant hit. All the biscuits gone in very short time.
Happy… we went home, and one of our little sister bragging to mom.. ” Buu… Mas Wi entuk duit..!!” she said… Means “Mom..the bros got money!!”. Me and my older brother follow her with can of money… very proud. Unexpectedly Mom disagree… I do not know (remember) the reason, it just that we end up have to give back all money to the other kids who bought the biscuits, we just don’t remember them all.
So we go back to the play yard and tell the kids that the biscuits meant for free, and they can take their money back. We put the can on the ground, leave it there and go home. After that, no serious attempt for another entrepreneurship… till now.
The above is true story, you can ask my brother or sister.. . I hope that it can give us (me included) inspiration that we can be an entrepreneur. If 5 year old kid can do it… I am sure we all can do it. As you see, it don’t need much money to start the business.
Starting now, from time to time I will blog about entrepreneurship, kind of missed them after so long. If you have story of your very first attempt of entrepreneurship.. I (and I believe many others) would like to hear it…
