Graduated with degree and master of Architecture turned into a businessman
Sigma School
7th February 2024
Watch the full interview here:
In this episode of Stories of Hackers, we talked with Ashwin, he graduated with a degree and a master for Architecture but did not work in the field at all. He's working in his family office running security services. Let's hear from Ashwin on what's he doing currently while holding a degree and a master of Architecture. We hope you learned something from Ashwin's stories, enjoy!
Hi, I'm Ashwin so I'm 29 years old I actually graduated with a degree and a master in architecture but of course I didn't work in the architecture field even for a single day haha. When I came back I started working in my family office so at that time we were mainly involved in security services so I came back on the 1st of December 2013 at 3AM and on 9AM that same day I started working. Ever since then we've expanded to many things including F&B, property, chicken farming, we've got technology now but our mainstays are still property, F&B and security as our main businesses.
I think that mine was not too bad I had a lot of freedoms in the things that I could do there wasn't really an immediate boss sort of above me. I went in there with sort of a clean sheet so it wasn't really too bad but of course the things that were done there were more in a traditional sense so when I wanted to change things of course I got mad with a few roadblocks here and there but I think actually I had quite a smooth journey compared to other family businesses that I've heard of.
I think the things such as you know you being the boss's son is not something that you can shake off everybody is going to know from there yeah okay you know but i suppose it's about earning people's respect and being a good leader of course when i first joined you know i had no clue what i was doing i probably made you know 100 mistakes you know but after a while i got the hang of it and slowly started to get things running smoothly. Definitely going into a business especially one which i had no experience you know i didn't study for i mean i didn't do business or whatever so there was a lot of learning to do which took me about two years actually wow to figure everything out.
Right to be honest, i think that family business has got a limited lifespan for the fact that you know going forward no doubt that my children will be involved in the business my brother's children will be involved so after awhile once you get too many people involved they're all trying to pull the business in a different direction or they all have different views there's bound to be a collapse somewhere so it's you know if you want to have a family business that lasts generations actually i would encourage people to sort of split business up into various components or have it in such a way where not one particular person can you know be in charge of the entire thing where it'll create a lot of conflict.
Yeah of course, i think that everybody has got their limit of yeah you know how far they may be able to take a business yeah if you even look at businesses like Uber the CEO stepping down allowing somebody else to take over we work all big companies maybe they think that they've reached sort of a glass ceiling for them they're not able to take the business to the next level that should be absolutely true as well for family businesses you know I may only be able to take the business to a certain point in Malaysia, somebody else might be able to take it regional maybe somebody else might be able to take it global, so it's just something that happens.
I think the most ideas that i get pitched for is usually app-based or technology-based and what i can say about these these type of ideas is most of them have no path to profitability so they have a really great idea say it's developing a game or developing an app for itself some sort of purpose but they really have no clear path to how exactly they're going to make money so you know you may have a really great idea but if you have no path to profitability you really have to look back and think why are you doing this.
Usually, the ideas themselves will be pretty good unless you think that there's no market for it. For example, maybe you've seen an app that was very successful in the US or the UK, which you thought might be successful here, but, you know, because culturally we're not inclined to those sorts of things, and it doesn't end up working out and things like that. So, um, if I can think of one particular idea, it's execution, not doing market studies. One of the latest trends that's kicking off now is everybody seems to want to be opening a cloud kitchen or a ghost kitchen. So if you were to explore that idea, okay, you look at a company like Grab, they have gone into these cloud kitchens or ghost kitchens. You know, Grab is a massive company that basically has unlimited funds, right? Yeah, if you're coming into this to compete with them, I'm pretty sure you're gonna have a pretty tough time unless you have scale, unless your execution is good. Of course, the most important thing in business is you have to have a unique selling point, yeah? If you have no competitive advantage, you have no business, yeah? So whatever business you're going to go into, I think you have to step back and really look at what your competitive advantage is - price, is it service, is it the quality of your product, and then see whether it enters.
Honestly looking at the market right now, it never hurts to start small okay even i know people who own burger stalls and tiny home baker businesses and you know home-based bakers yeah things like that and they're generating you know six figures they're actually making real money yeah just going by what they know is just good and more importantly than that i think it's specializing on what they're good at so if you're good at baking and you want to be a baker just stay at home and focus on that and you can easily pull five six figure income a month.
I think Covid really really impacted a lot of people, they were massive F&B groups that suffered heavy losses that's included some didn't make it unfortunately the casualties of the MCO. I think that the government didn't look into things such as we didn't get rental relief from our local online business insisted that we pay up the full rent including things like worker salaries even though they took a cut on their overtime and things like that we were still required to pay all of those so when you have massive running expenses yeah you have zero income yeah there's only so long you can go for before you just collapse.
I would like to say that it's not hurt to start small, every businesses until today are all starting from zero. If they can do it, why can't we do it? So a strong mental is all you need to run your business successfully without being crushed by competitors.
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