The World Business

Posts Tagged ‘first’

Malaysia has a rich man by Forbes Magazine Malaysia 2010, Robert Kuok. The magazine noted, Robert wealth reached U.S. $ 14.5 billion this year. Malaysian tycoon was a business in various fields, ranging from enterprise rice, sugar, shipping services, real estate and media. In 2007, he also went into palm oil companies resulting from the merger of Indonesia and Singapore, Wilmar International which carried his nephew.

Robert who is now aged 86 has a fascinating story how he pioneered the business from the bottom. Robert Kuok began life by working at Mitsubishi for 3 years in the shipping division of rice. After his father died in 1948, three brothers founded the company with the name of the Kuok Bros Sdn Bhd. The company specialized in selling agricultural products, and success in 1961 when he bought a cheap sugar from India, where the price is then inflated.

He then founded the Malaysia Sugar Manufacturing, the company’s first sugar refinery in Malaysia. It made Robert has many relationships with big players and refined sugar. In the same year, he built the first hotel in Singapore, Shangri-La Hotel, and after that he built Shanri-La Kowloon in Hong Kong. Not stopping there, Robert also acquired 30 percent stake Sucden Kerry International, a French company that controls much of the world sugar trade.

Then get into the business of oil trading, by buying 67 percent shares of oil trading company of Hamburg. Not only that money was also invested into the media business, by buying 18 percent shares of TVB, which publishes the South China Morning Star.

The 2008 crash caused a lot of soul searching among American experts, particularly economists. One famous academic was heard to say, “Everything I’ve been teaching, for all these years, was wrong.” A lot of businesses have also been re-assessing, and the state of the American job market is hardly a secret, with a new need for upgrading the domestic economy and career environment to meet the demand of competition and income requirements. Every form of employment market function, from leadership training to performance training and team building, is now under the microscope.

The gigantic American economy, the biggest in human history, was well insulated until recently. It could ignore new trends, and capital flowed through the markets regardless. That’s all over. The business and economic culture which created 20^th century America is utterly obsolete in the 21^st century.

Notwithstanding the all too well known vagaries of American politics and domestic policies, many of which are as responsible for America’s latest walk off a financial cliff as the Rip Van Business motif, real upgrades are now essential.

The High Road approach

One of the first of these new initiatives is the High Road, which began its existence in the somewhat unlikely setting of the Rust Belt, America’s Elephant’s Graveyard. This decaying museum of an environment was the home of a machinery making business, Bucyrus International Inc, which looked like it was about to follow its neighbors into oblivion. It was in debt up to its grandchildren, losing money, and losing orders. It was uncompetitive, and like many old style businesses, quite out of touch with the market realities.

The solution: Incentives. The company stopped playing office and started paying its boilermakers, top tradespeople, top dollar. Productivity skyrocketed, and when you’re producing top quality product, that means you’re making big money. This company is now also offering apprenticeships, hoping to get more local talent. From being half a billion in the red it went to a billion in the black, and improving.

The New Economy approach

The New Economy is all about low overheads, and outsourcing to the best people in the world. The global job market is now truly global, but if you consider the amount of untapped expertise in the US, you can see a huge potential, and an extremely cost-effective way of doing business. Outsourcing is often accused of being the death of the American worker, but it could also easily be the American worker’s salvation. New economy jobs are based on skills, not merely mindless office rituals and turning people into high stress crash dummies for X number of days a week. New economy workers are contractors, and interestingly it was the professionals that first jumped ship into these working modes. New Economy workers are businesses themselves, and they’re extremely highly motivated. They don’t even need business equipment, they supply their own, usually much better, pro-standard, equipment.

Management training is also changing to meet this new business mode. The new frontier needs people that can think on their feet, not on their backsides. This is the mode that will get America running again.

An art form that provides meticulously manicured gardens and lawns for the business’ backdrop is known as professional landscaping. The subtle and delicate use of lawns, tree lines, flowerbeds and shrubbery are the first thing both employees and clients will notice. To ensure you provide a favorable image of your company to prospective clients and employees, proper maintenance and upkeep of the business premises is vital to your success.

Though sometimes clients and employees may overlook aesthetic arrangements made in your business premises, for those who notice them, it will speak a thousand words about your business. Make sure you hire landscape contractors to take care of the premises. Their duties are watering the flowerbed, making sure the grass is properly trimmed etc. You must also let them know of the magnitude of keeping well kept premises and that they have an enormous responsibility on their shoulders.

It is the business owner’s responsibility to ensure adequate assistance is available on all floors and that the receptionists have good diction and are well trained to handle queries. If you neglect the overall upkeep of the premises, there are high chances your business will be spoken poorly of during meetings and small conferences. Like they say, “first impressions are last impressions” and the role of a landscaper and receptionist is as important as a top level management executive. Sometimes, the subtle things can have a drastic impact on bigger, more important things and these subtle things could be a weed free lawn, an aesthetically designed flower bed, adequate customer support mechanisms and knowledgeable receptionists.

Tips for your Email Marketing Campaign

Email Marketing Campaign is the toughest as well as the simplest form of marketing. If we say that carrying out an email marketing campaign is the easiest form of marketing, why is there a sharp contrast between the two words in the first two lines? Carrying out an Email Marketing Campaign is the simplest form of marketing. Email Marketing is easy to operate and send mails but then every art has its nuances.

Email Marketing Campaign is a marketing tool which has to be used effectively. If used in the wrong way, your email marketing campaign can detrimental for your business. To make it more successful, you have to be aware of certain factors like what is a spam mail and also have a few more tricks up your sleeves to convert all those mails that you send into real business.

Here are a few of those tips:

Say no to database mailing lists which are detrimental to your email marketing campaign.
Opt-in – perhaps the most basic tip that would give you a trouble free experience in your email marketing campaign. Opt-in lists where users accept receiving emails sure define your target.
Use the name of the recipient to address him.
A boring mail is an immediate spam but if you can create interesting content, subject line and design, your email marketing campaign can be assured of success. Hence, short and sweet messages which are interesting will do the trick.
Attachments are an aversion which eat up space and make it difficult to be opened.
Place opt out option at the right place which makes your email marketing campaign a more sophisticated one.
No broken links and all links in your email should work.
HTML mails can help at times in your email marketing campaign even though its space consumption is a thing that annoys users.

Take all these tips and launch your email marketing campaign to taste that elusive success.

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