I turned 40 at the end of 1999, which was the low point in my life overseas, given the financial rock bottom and difficult situation. However, necessity is the mother of invention, and the next 8 years saw a remarkable recovery.
I had achieved the PERMANENT website and book, and I think the essence of the concept was now out there on the internet. I have no regrets about that. It was a main motivation in my life, and people can always make excuses to postpone such contributions. The website is highly respected and fairly famous, and it is clear from some of the literature I've read that it inspired a lot of people to get involved in this career path. Donations and book sales were not enough to support me or PERMANENT, and I wasn't lucky enough to get a major philanthropic investor, but that's luck and experience. The base of volunteers and also wasn't enough to get far, and the vast majority of volunteers were quite unreliable.
Therefore, I was left to focus on getting my own business going.
Notably, if I measured the time I spent fundraising for PERMANENT to sell books from the website and get donations, I actually made a lot more money by focusing my attention on local business again in the same amount of time spent.
This time around, I decided that I had to set up a company and train staff, which would operate fairly autonomously taking care of customers. I had to stop doing everything myself.
One of the things I needed was a competent and reliable Thai partner. I went thru several candidates, but was not satisfied with any of them.
I moved back to Bangkok, and found a Thai real estate agent who was willing to work with me. I went to a lot of effort to create a website, and I brought in some serious foreign customers, but I was shocked to find that he would miss appointments, or come unprepared, e.g., without appointments with landlords. I made some money on my own by bypassing him, but I could not be a one man show property business in Thailand, given the language barriers, especially written.
I was still getting by largely on I.T. consulting and occasional private investigations (a sideline I had started after the 1997 crash).
I teamed up with an old friend who ran her own business successfully. She had been a journalist before, but had switched to running her own business and was a proven success story, thru sheer hard work, 10 hour workdays 7 days a week. I was also impressed with her ability to analyze independently and come up with creative solutions. She was someone who actually thought of things I didn't, which is rare in Thailand.
One thing I've learned is that you hire people based on their track record of proven experience, not based on just verbal commitments and enthusiasm at the moment.
Sam had proven himself as one of the most reliable volunteers for PERMANENT, consistently producing useful work of high quality, and on time, even when he had to work hard to learn new things.
Sam finally arrived in late 2001. We actually spent the next few months putting together a final version of PERMANENT. We were starting to accept that PERMANENT would be put on hold for a long time, and it should be fixed up properly once and for all in terms of programming and some artistic changes which Sam wanted to make.
We incorporated as Export Quality Services Co., Ltd.
Our first line of work was to try offshore labor, starting with web design since that was something we could do well, and even though it was already a saturated market with a lot of cheap competition, especially from India. We thought that we could compete in terms of quality. If Sam and I did the websites ourselves, then we surely could, but the idea here was to hire and train staff, not do all the work ourselves.
We had a few PERMANENT volunteers offering to find work for us, and a little bit came in, but not a lot.
As we created websites for customers, but Sam and I were always dealing with the issues of micromanagement and quality control with new Thai staff to an excessive degree, we thought.
Like me, Sam has uncompromisingly the highest standards of quality. It's just a personal value / philosophy / way of life.
Also, we had the problem of spending a lot of time giving sales pitches and proposals to strangers overseas who had found our website, only to have them go to a cheaper outfit in India which had great samples on display (but which almost never produced websites anywhere near their samples, as witnessed by the customers' websites later which were far less quality than we could have produced).
We also had a problem with local customers having executive staff listening to our sales pitches, then hiring a friend to try to copy us. We had tremendous frustrations selling Thai companies, just wasting our time, effort and money. We decided resolutely to stick to foreign customers, as was our original plan. Never mind that there are so many Thai customers with crappy or no websites whose businesses could greatly benefit from a better website. They are just so way behind the times...
Sam and I weren't the cheapest guys in town but we were very economical, and we pushed quality issues. We didn't put up bullshit dishonest samples of our work, unlike so many others. When people didn't buy from us, we later looked at their domain's website, and most of the time they had poor quality websites, and the web designers (who usually put a link to themselves at the bottom of the page or somewhere in a credits section) were usually cheap operations.
In our advertisements for employees, we always stated that we weren't interested in educational qualifications, but we were interested in samples of their work. We had a LOT of job applicants who cited samples of their work, but in the interviews couldn't produce it. It turns out that their "samples" were not really theirs, and people had covered for them.
We found some very good artists and programmers. However, they would only freelance. They were very good in the Thai market and knew it. They didn't want to work fulltime for anyone, and I had to agree with them. A lot of creative people are this way. We didn't have the volume of work to support their employment at their required rates for fulltime.
We didn't want to outsource, but wanted to run a company with fulltime internal staff, so we dropped Offshore Labor, based on the supply and demand situation inside Thailand. If we wanted to do Offshore Labor in the web design field, then we would need to go to India, and that's not something that was feasible.
The Offshore Labor website was created in 2002 and pretty much abandoned after that, www.offshorelabor.com , and most of our website work is not cited as examples (such as many of our own websites, not even Thailand Guru).
We had ideas to expand into other areas besides web design, and had a lot of inquiries for various "offshore labor" things, but we didn't want to expand into fields in which we had little or no experience.
What put an end to the Offshore Labor effort was simply that other areas of work were taking off and paying better.
I was successful in getting a large multinational British travel agency to give us a very large contract. That was our first big break, and from that point in time onwards, our financial situation was much more stable.
Thai-English translation was something the Thais could do, and it was just a matter of setting up standard operating procedures.
At the same time that I created the translation business, I also went public with my private investigations business, with a website. It had previously been very discreet. Not any more, though we limited our areas of work to morally acceptable and non-dangerous things. Again, private investigations was something we could train Thai staff to do, though they needed some problem solving skills, too. We came up with some good field agents. This business helped with income. It's not a great business, as it's a series of one-off customers rather than repeat business, and business is not consistent, e.g., many days with nothing to do, and some days with more urgent work than staff to do it, but it was sufficient income to make it worthwhile. www.thailandpi.com.
From my old website Thailand Guru, www.ThailandGuru.com, I was getting a good number of inquiries, mostly in fields which I didn't want to serve, but I did like meeting entrepreneurs, so I considered starting a division to help foreigners get legally set up in Thailand -- company setup and office setup -- and giving then advice and guidance along the way. Many of them had gotten poor quality of service from lawyers elsewhere, as witnessed by translation of their company setup papers from Thai to English. So I set up www.ThailandCompany.com.
The Thailand Company division turned into the most interesting division to me, mostly because of the kinds of people I was meeting. I also learned a lot from their stories and experiences. There are so many stories I could tell here... but I learned a lot from helping them set up their businesses and go thru their own experiences.
This Thailand Company business went well for awhile, but our best lawyers, who were serving us on a case by case basis, got involved in other projects whereby they no longer had any time for us, either incurring delays or else delegating to their sub-par staff. We had a difficult time finding good quality lawyers, so I eventually just started passing customers along to a competitor who I knew and trusted as regards quality of service, Steve Sykes of www.indo-siam.com, in 2006.
The two main businesses I wanted to do were property and exports. When the Thailand Company division started running into lawyer problems, I just switched my efforts into property, which our internal staff could do.
In 2004, we started to get back into property, me leading the way. This business took a long time and a lot of money and skill to develop and become profitable and stable, but we have developed this business quite well, and set up a second company, a property company which I have since given away (longstory) and started a new one. Our first website had a lot of limitations and problems, so in late 2005 we hired a German programmer who created www.kkBkk.com though we had a major drop-off in business while the old website was neglected and until the new website was completed and working on-line.
All of the above businesses started more or less like this:
Profits from each business were always plugged back into the business for growth, and invested into the next business, one by one. Sam and I live frugally.
There are many businesses I have wanted to do but haven't started yet, due to one or more of the following factors:
There is a rule in our company: "If someone else can do it, don't ask Mark." This is a key to giving me enough time to grow our business.
The key to success is finding quality staff, who are few and far between.
I am also always open to potential strategic partners anywhere in the world.
I would like to find good expats in Thailand to help out, but they would need to share the same longterm vision, and not just come awhile and then leave.
Our main office is in the Bangkok suburb of Muang Thong Thani (MTT) -- see my website www.MTTBKK.com for photos and the story of this suburb. We have a branch property office in central Bangkok on Sukhumvit 21 (Asoke) which we opened in August 2006.
This page is continued with a short page on my current outlook at age 47