Planning for Gold

Posted 05.25.2007 in Ying Thai

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.

It’s never easy starting a business, especially for a young Thai woman like me. For those of you who don’t know me already, I am quarter-of-a-century.  Clients who worked with me are often surprised to learn how young I was, but my youth has forced me to swallow my fears and worked even harder to prove myself.  The way I see it is this is the perfect job for me as a woman. We are cherished for being delicate, detailed, and attentive, the qualities you should wish for in your matchmaker. So I have chosen not to be dragged down by cultural perceptions but rather to turn it into a competitive advantage.

To be honest, I think my matchmaking concept was many things, but not original.  Many people had thought of the idea, but spent too much time firing up Word to write a business plan, and launching a PowerPoint to craft a pitch.  The key to an entrepreneur is to implement.  This means launching a website, offering your service, doing a marketing campaign, handling legal matters and negotiated deals – on a tiny budget.  The hardest thing about being an entrepreneur is getting started.  No one achieved success by planning for gold.  I spent about 5% of my day strategizing about selling, and the rest? Selling.  I didn’t have a lot of spare cash to test my theory, unlike big companies.  There is no way for me to develop the perfect product or service.  I practice to refine my services.  One motto I always remember is that it’s not how great you start – it’s how great you end up!

I am giving my tips here to the reader, especially women, because I want to see a higher presence of females in powerful positions.  Roughly half of all management and professional jobs are filled by women.  This is going in the right direction, but women are still not close to parity, especially in pay.  Less than 15 percent of Fortune 500 board members are women, and the rate is has been increasing by only 0.5 percent a year.  How horrific!  We won’t reach the 50 percent mark until 2076! A nice present for all females, but do we really have to wait 70 years?  I don’t know if any Thai woman will make it to the ranks by then, but I certain hope so.   

The slow progress is not only bad for women; it’s also bad for the world.  Women possess the intelligence and skills to succeed in any job.  The hindrance to career progress for women is double professional standards, in which the same behaviors that help men get ahead and prove their worth on the job are frowned upon in women.  For many Thai women, ‘ambition’ necessarily implies egotism, selfishness, manipulative use of others, pushy and aggressiveness.  Clearly, these led to the wrong sort of fear.  I credit a lot of my career to the fact that I didn’t have an option not to work, so I focused on achieving as much as I could in business.  Many I have come across are too agreeable people, who tend to sacrifice themselves and compromise their own interests in order to make other people happy, but this is likely to get them branded as a ‘lightweight”.  I succeed in the workplace as woman, in my own unique way, not as a clone copy of men 

Any other tips for a small start up? History loves the notion of sole achiever: such as Bill Gates (Microsoft Windows) and Steve Jobs (Macintosh).  What history doesn’t tell you is that successful companies are started with soulmates i.e. women.  Melinda Gates is now the top 50 women who have the potential to make a significant impact on the business in the year ahead.  She is a co-founder of the Gate Foundation, and is emerging as powerful force in philanthropy.  One person maybe recognizes as “the leader”, but it always take a team of good people to make any venture work.   

Not everyone likes MeetNLunch, and this is a good thing.  I am not offended if people take sides in the service that I have created.  The only result that I worry about is the lack of interest.  There are some personality tests out there that help you determine if you are a good candidates for starting a business, but whether these tests can really gauge who is a capable entrepreneur is a subject of debate.  Common personality traits among successful entrepreneurs may be high risk tolerance, drive and resiliency to overcome failure.  But I think both male and female with all types of educational backgrounds can become a successful entrepreneur, the only real key is they are confident that they can build a successful business.