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CHAPTER 9 GROWING YOUR BUSINESS EMPIRE

The reason is because there is less pressure for primary school
kids to perform in the exams (since there is no streaming) and
parents in Indonesia would rather wait for their children to
be more mature before sending them to personal development
programs like mine. At the same time, the average income
of a middle-income Indonesian family is the equivalent of
S$2,000. And so we are only able to target the upper middle-
income and rich for our programs. As a result, our advertising
and marketing strategy is Indonesia is very different from the
one we run in Singapore.

Step 2: Setting Up
The next step is to decide on how you are going to set up
your operations. You have a choice of starting a wholly owned
subsidiary, establishing a joint venture with a local
partner/company or to franchise your business to independent
business owners.

While starting a wholly owned subsidiary will give you total
control of the foreign business and give you 100% of all the
profits (if it makes money), it is certainly not easy to run an
overseas business as a foreigner. When we started our
Malaysian company back in 2004, it took us two years to
figure out how to succeed in the Malaysian market and to
start making a profit. This is because we did not fully understand
the intricacies of this new market and could not devote all of
our time to build this new business. The staff we hired could
only run the simple operations and were not experienced
enough to build up the company.

However, when we entered the Indonesian market in 2006,
we managed to achieve phenomenal success within the first
year of operations. By establishing a joint venture with an
existing training company in Indonesia (in fact, one of the

284 SECRETS OF BUILDING MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR BUSINESSES