Self-Leadership

I am hands-on to build more depth into our portfolio of products/services, so that I can plan for marketing and design of the brochures.

One of the core competencies for my business is to provide turnkey solution for office automation:

1. Electrical/Lighting/Air-Con Works
2. Voice/Data Cabling and Wireless
3. Interior Design and Office Furniture
4. Fire Alarms/Smoke Detector
5. CCTV/DVR, PA, Security Access system
6. Desktop PCs, Printers, Scanners etc and other computer peripherals/supplies
7. Servers - new/old, maintenance, setup, administrative support, spare parts etc
8. Networks (switches/routers) as well as Storage Solutions and Media

I am also need to expand on our pool of reliable partners and suppliers.

To improve my power of persuasion and influence, I signed up and attended a 2-day Self-Leadership workshop by Andrew Bryant last week, it was enlightening but still harbor some linger doubts of how to put what learnt into practice.

Newsletter Debut - April Issue

Finally, we managed to publish our debut newsletter. It is not as easy as just doing the publishing.

We have had a couple of customers that bought the solution as well as the supporting services from us. That more or less convinced us that there is a market for such lower-end NAS products.

We contacted the local distributor for Buffalo Tech, convinced them to loan us the Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices for evaluation. Then we have to negotiate hard to secure reseller status for the products, so that we can obtain sizeable profit margin yet able to sell at Sim Lim's retail prices.

Is selling is an art or science? It is not the second nature of technical people like us, who are trained by profession as an engineer to market and sell. Now, we as business owners, we need not only to sell products, we also to sell our services and ideas. How to make the company stand out among the crowd?

Hmmm, I am thinking to get the consumer TrustSG logo to reinforce our customer-oriented services. Think it will be add a little more spice for our newsletter.

Busy, busy, busy!!

During the day, I worked on projects and assignments. After work, I am helping my wife with the household chores and taking care of my two children. Then here and there, squeezing all the remaing time to work on the latest series of Buffalo Technology's LinkStation and TeraStation Pro Network Attached Storage for our debut newsletter.

Buffalo has an almost 27% share of the U.S. NAS market (source: NPD TechWorld April, 2005). At a price of US$1.00 per Gigabyte, it offers an affordable storage solution to home and small business users. The TeraStation Pro especially, has marked improvements in its features compared to its predecessor.

Interestingly, the embedded kernel is Linux based, probably allowing technically-inclined guys out there to hack into its kernel and do some modifications to its firmware.

Watch this space, the newsletter will be out soon. Just some finishing touches to go...