Nikki Blog

Becoming a full-fledged Matchmaker didn’t just happen to me overnight. So this week, I’ll be telling you a little bit about how I stumbled into it. Well, no one really knows if she is an entrepreneur until she becomes one – and sometimes not even then.  I didn’t think of myself as intensely ambitious when I started my career, but I knew I needed to keep working to support myself, and that knowledge bolstered my goals.  The first question I asked myself when I started this venture was “Does it have any meaning?”  Meaning is not about money, power or fame.  Meaning is to make the world a better place, to improve the quality of life, to undo the wrong, and to prevent the end of good cause.  And UNICEF didn’t pay me to promote its slogan!

Making meaning is the most powerful motivator to be successful.  In early 2006, I wanted to setup up a service to help busy single professionals to meet in a safe environment, and to change the perception of dating service in Thailand.  It took me quite some time to get comfortable with the notion that people were going to have a stigma around a dating service.  I spent a few nights obsessing over this, but finally the lightbulb went on in my head and I realized that I would succeed by offering Bangkok singles an alternative.  Soon I set out to come up with a brand of matchmaking that would be fashionable and hip.  I had no interest in becoming the Queen of the Undatable in Thailand after all.  The only way I could make my business work would be to find people who were socially adept and desirable and to convince them that this is a great way to meet new cool people. Continue Reading »

Here is an amazing concept; a female English ex-colleague of mine is going on 52 weeks of maternity leave! Yes, that is one full year! She is entitled to 39 weeks of paid leave, with the first six weeks at 90% of full pay and the remainder at a fixed rate. I am jealous!!! We all know a pregnant Thai female colleague who at some point went away for three months to have her baby and then returned to work. This period that she takes time off work, paid or unpaid, to care for a child is called parental leave. These 3 months paid leave are often not enough, so some moms decide to extend this period by taking unpaid leave. Of course with such leave her salary stops and causes the family to tighten its budget. So I got curious and investigate further to see how Thailand fares on the global “parental leave” scales, and the findings are very revealing…..

Some countries are extremely generous with parental leave. Lucky Scandinavian!

In most countries parental leave is available for those who have worked for their current employer for a certain period of time. Scandinavian countries are well-known for their generous parental leave. In Sweden, for instance, both parents are entitled to 16 months’ paid leave per child the cost which is shared between employer and government. Men are encouraged to greater parental involvement in child-rearing by requiring the father to take 3 months of out of 16 as a minimum. The Swedish government is also pushing for an equal 8 months-split between both parents. Norway also has a similar generous leave, and requires women to take a minimum 3 weeks leave before the due date.

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