Secrets Of Building Multi-Million Dollar Businesses by Adam Khoo

February 5th, 2010

I was recently inspired by a blog reader, JoV who had a niche blog, doing book reviews. She reads averaging more than five books a month!

Reading is a good habit, and the most I did was one book a month. Shameless, I know.
So, I am now determined to finish at least one a month and put up a review of it every month.

Here’s my personal take on Secrets Of Building Multi-Million Dollar Businesses by Adam Khoo.

sbmm_adam_khoo

The author Adam Khoo is a Singaporean, who runs motivational camps or training courses for corporates as well as students. A self-made millionaire by the age of 26, he is one of the youngest millionaires in Singapore. Read his biography here.

The book Secrets Of Building Multi-Million Dollar Businesses is his eighth of nine best selling books he authored.

This book has nine chapters and although I would categorize it as a business book, every chapter is written in a easy to read manner and with examples of how the topic relates to himself and the businesses he built.

Chapter 1 – The Making of a Millionaire Entrepreneur introduced how he learned business from young. He came from a wealthy family but he had to depend on himself to build his own wealth, which reminds me of Rich Dad Poor Dad. This chapter stressed that to be a successful entrepreneur, one needs to have a compelling WHY to have a business and the HOW will eventually find a way.

Chapter 2 – The Success Factors of Millionaire Entrepreneurs talks about having the entrepreneur skill sets. Adam shares about taking responsibility and facing challenges and used some of his clients as examples. Failures are important and innovation is needed for the survival of a business.

Chapter 3 – The Million Dollar Business Idea invites readers to think about their passion and that it is with love of the work that successful entrepreneurs do not stop working.

Chapter 4 – Building a Business That Works Without You guides you on the importance of letting the business run independently without the need of the owner running it. A good example of this is the founder of McDonald’s, Ray Kroc. Adam uses McDonald’s as example in his book quite frequently as it is one of the most successful international business.

Chapter 5 – Multiplying Your Business Profits teaches the readers about Sales, Leads, Conversion Rates, Average Dollar Purchase and the likes. All of these are illustrated in a easy to understand manner even a programmer like me can easily catch the concept. :-)

Chapter 6 – How To Generate Millions in Sales & Profit talks about marketing strategies and how to retain customers. The biggest mistake that most small businesses make is to focus all their attention on getting new customers and take it for granted that their old customers will return. How true!

Chapter 7 – Building a Championship Team shares about the pain of getting good people into a business and the four essential roles that are required in any business. Eventually, the idea is to get good people to join your business as a company is successful only because the people working in it are successful people.

Chapter 8 – Mastering Your Money reveals that most people does not care about their cashflow and how important it is to have good money management. This chapter guides on a six-month budgeting and forecasting in order to build a successful business.

Chapter 9 – Growing Your Business Empire basically talks about the need to grow your business once it has made profit and to stay relevant in the industry instead of losing out to the competition.

Personally, I would think this is a value-for-money type of business book as compared to the other famous authors talking about their money making adventures. This is because besides having it written in a simple to understand manner, Adam also provides a honest and frank story-telling guide on how to build a successful business and maintaining it, using himself as an example.

After finishing his book, it appears that he is a man of his own words, providing value to keep customers returning. I think I will get another book of his soon enough.

You can download the Chapter 1 for free from Adam Khoo’s website by providing your email in exchange for the download link here.

It’s also available for sale in Singapore and Malaysia, and can also be purchased online from MPH Online.
Or you can have a book exchange with me. :-)

So that’s my first book review in this blog and I hope you like it.
Let me know if you have read this book before and your opinion on it below this blog posts.

I’m quite sure my once a month book review will work, the worst is to get a thin book and finish it in a day. And just in case you thought this is one, no.. it had 290 pages and I’m not a speed reader.

Books, Review , , , ,





MyFm DJs & Astro主持人 Chinese New Year 2010 MTV – 大日子

February 2nd, 2010

This 2010, MyFM and Astro have once again collaborated in a project for Chinese New Year. This time around, and for the very first time, both produced a Chinese New Year Movie together: 大日子 WOOHOO!

大日子 WooHoo! or Tiger WooHoo! is showing in Malaysian cinemas and is by far the best local Chinese movie that I have watched.
It is primarily a comedy movie but also a heartwarming family-oriented one.

The movie is so popular its 大日子woohoo! Facebook page has over 70,000 fans.

If you have yet to watch it, check out the trailer below (with BM subtitles):


《MY Astro舞虎扬威大日子》电影预告片

And this year again like 2009, a number of catchy songs are produced as well.
Here goes:


大日子


惜福



恭喜恭喜



发财发财/贺新年



我的新年台






是不是好正啊,反薯…

Btw, if you would like to download CNY songs, you can download from Chinese New Year Songs by Astro, MyFM and 988 (via Steven)

Malaysia, Movies, Music , , , , ,





Apple iPad – something like iPhone and also tablet PC, but…

January 30th, 2010

There have been much discussion about the Apple’s new Product – iPad.

Apple introduced its iPad as the most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.

In a sense, it is very honest and accurate as speculators expected their iPad would be somewhere around $999 but it’s officially announced to be selling from $499 only. Well, $499 is for the lowest specifications, and it’s priced between $499 to $829. So in some way, it’s pricing could be unbelievable.

And in case you did not know, the name iPad selection was also a popular joke in the cyberworld and among geeks once it was announced. News on that can be found on yahoo, msn and gizmodo as well.

To be fair, it’s like a notepad, so with products like iPhone, and iPod, the name iPad is actually quite suitable, probably better then iTablet.

I wasn’t particularly amazed by it’s features though. The slimness and design of it, as much as has been expected, is just like a bigger size of iPhone.

If you go through the iPad’s features page (and check out the Specs too, I wouldn’t need to reproduce them here), things like Safari, Mail, Photos, Video, YouTube, iPod, App Store, Notes, Calendar, Contacts, Home Screen and Spotlight Search are not something that surprises me.

It’s just the form factor, a larger screen for use, a bigger iPhone screen, without the phone capability.

A few things that I think would be fun and interesting, is playing games that uses accelerometer, which is small on the phone, now gets bigger and better on the iPad. Now that YouTube provides video in High Definition, watching HD videos on a bigger screen will definitely beat the 480-by-320-pixel on the phone too.

Have you seen the accessories yet? I am particularly interested with the Keyboard dock and the iPad case. They seems to make typing (that supports wireless keyboard) and watching video easier, and does it looked like it multifunction like a iMac too?

Which then brings me to the question: What is the target market of this device? Who would actually want to buy them?

Due to the fact that Apple has been very successful with products like iPhone, iPod, iMac etc, and now iPad (which is the most revolutionary product as introduced), I am a bit interested to know.

Of course, there are so many Apple fan boys and fan girls.

How about its usability?

Until I see an actual iPad, which probably would really amaze me, but from what I have seen and read up until now, I can’t help but wonder on these features:

Battery

Sure, the battery can last 10 hours, which is a good one, but why built-in battery again? Taking iPhone for an example is my best guess, but if it’s suppose to take the lead like a tablet computer, most, if not all tablet computers have removable batteries, like a laptop.

Flash Player

After the many years of iPhones without Flash Player, this revolutionary device also does not incorporate Flash Player support. It’s no more a 480-by-320-pixel screen, but still no Flash.

No multi-tasking

Again, just like iPhone, this iPad doesn’t multi-task, probably also the reason why the battery can last 10 hours because you can only run one task at a time. If you’re reading ebook means you can only read, no listening to songs, and while watching video, do not do anything else?

No HDMI output

Not a major problem that I see, but if you are selling it as HD device, it would be better to be able to output the device screen to a HD TV, right? Well, probably Apple leave this as room for improvement for the future generations of iPad.

Operating system

Now, I think this is the main problem that I see in this iPad. Why would Apple make a new OS for iPad, and not use Mac OS? Ok, maybe not exactly a new OS but iPhone OS, since currently iPhone developers can start to make apps with the iPhone SDK 3.2 beta today.

I mean all tablet PC are using Operating system that is the super set of their PC compatible OS. Like Windows XP Tablet PC Edition is actually the superset of Windows XP Professional, the difference being tablet functionality, including alternate text input (Tablet PC Input Panel) and basic drivers for support of tablet PC specific hardware.

But Apple chose to use iPhone OS. Fine… but?

No Phone capability

If you’re using iPhone OS or getting your developers to use iPhone SDK, why don’t Apple just make the iPad runs like a phone too?

I know, i know it’s sickening to start seeing people sticking their ears to the iPad screen to make phone calls.

iPad comes with 3.5-mm stereo headphone jack, built-in speaker and microphone, wouldn’t those work?

Now some iPhone developers might need to make two versions of their apps if they uses camera and phone. Why? Because iPad has got no camera and phone capability. Now you know why iPad will run almost 140,000 apps from the App Store. iPad will work with almost all of the apps designed for the iPhone.

I might be offending many Apple fans with this post. Somehow, I just couldn’t get pass it, why a bigger iPhone without phone functions and not a smaller iMac instead?

Just so you know, there already exists an iMac after-market device which is an iMac in tablet form. It’s called the Axiotron Modbook. The iPad with Mac OS.

Maybe it’s the pricing factor, but to me the Axiotron Modbook might be more appealing than the iPad now.

What do you think?

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