Empowering Graduates and Improving Job Market Fit w/ Simon Birkett

Simon: [00:00:00] The Thai economy has been slowed down by a lack of human capital for years. We’ve had employment around 1% since the mid nineties.

There are 100, 150,000 open seats in the Thai market. We don’t have enough people.

Finding the right people out of school, out of college to come and work for you, is going to become a new battleground.

The best graduates don’t make the best employees.

It’s about fit, it’s about humility, it’s about openness, it’s about communication skills, it’s about adaptability.

We can’t create more babies. But what we can do is have a better quality workforce.

Scott: All right, welcome to another episode of Made it in Thailand. I’m here with Simon. Simon, thank you so much for joining me today.

Simon: Oh, you’re most welcome, I’m happy to be here.

Scott: Fantastic. How About we start off with who you are, where you’re from, and why you’re here in Thailand?

Simon: Sure my name is Simon Birkett. I am a Londoner, England. I’ve been in Thailand since ’91. I haven’t been here [00:01:00] permanently since ’91, I’ve had a little bit of time away. I came here because my girlfriend at the time was posted to the embassy. I got involved with some start ups.

And they were pretty successful. And I stayed I went away and did some other things and I came back about 15 years ago and have worked on two startups since then. So that’s a rough summary.

Scott: Wow. So let’s about your background in the UK, your early life, because you came to Thailand when you were quite young.

Simon: Yeah,

Scott: And you’ve been here for so many years. I know not continuously, but, it’s not everyone that kind of in their twenties, let’s say moves to Thailand. Can we start out with your early life, what you were doing in the UK and then what kind of nudged you in this direction?

Simon: Sure. So I, my background is standard for many, but not for others. I finished high school not really knowing what I wanted to do or how I would do it, even if I did know. So I left the UK and went to France. I’d studied French all my [00:02:00] life, and my spoken French was pretty good, so I went to France for about 8 months.

And came back with pretty excellent French, spoken French skills. Came back for the hurricane that hit the north of France and the south of the UK in 1987, I think it was October. Thinking that would change the market. I should probably get serious and get a proper job. So I got a proper job and I worked in the property market for three years.

Was put on a sort of a career path with them that I fluked myself into with a project success. They started sending me to university one day a week studying surveying with the idea that I would become a surveyor and work in the commercial property market. But I was fired from that company three years in.

And took a job in a small computer company because I bought a ticket to go to New York and I had overstretched myself. Needed some income to offset that, so I took a [00:03:00] job at a computer company and by luck found my passion. I really enjoyed it. And that part of me here because, I was doing networking with Macintosh computers, which was, more complicated than it is now, back then.

All the people that made equipment for that space, they had no representation in Thailand. When I asked them if I could resell their stuff here in Thailand there’s something to do on my girlfriend I was at the embassy, they said yes. And long story short, that company was reasonably successful for many years.

And I stayed to to do my role in that. That’s how it all got started. I’d I’m a university dropout. Did three out of a four year part time course in surveying. Reasonably enjoyed it, did pretty well. But didn’t complete it because it was being paid for by my employer when I left their employ.

Came to Thailand 22. And [00:04:00] within months had met the people that became my partners. And they pulled me into the company and gave me a plan. to go from a few percent to 25 percent equity based on performance and tenure. And we did some amazing things over the eight years that company survived until it all went belly up in, in ’97 with the Asian flu, that started here in Thailand, as you probably know.

Scott: Yeah. And we’ll talk more about that. And as you had, as I, and I discussed, I think you’ve had a long history here in Thailand and we’ll probably stop our discussion today around the the financial crisis, just because we almost need to break this apart into chapters. Given the level of experience you’ve had in different places here, right? I’m really curious about the financial crisis, but I want to just make sure we start with the beginning again. Now, you mentioned that you learned French. Are would you consider yourself to be pretty good with language then, to be able to pick up French pretty well?

Simon: So when I was four, my family, three, four, five, my [00:05:00] family would holiday in Spain and they would just leave me with a maid. So I spoke almost as much Spanish at the age of three as I did English. And then at my school we studied French from the age of seven or eight. So by the time I got to eighteen, to British A levels I’d done ten years of studying French and I was reasonable at it.

My written French was mediocre plus, but my spoken French was quite good. And we also studied Latin and German. And in my sixth form, for the A levels, I also studied Russian. I’ve got, a fair background. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I studied a bunch of languages.

And I think they say if you study a second language before the age of four, you get a second language centre in your brain. It’s discovered from motorcycle accident analysis, believe it or not, so a gory beginning to a good story. But if you study a second language before the age of four, you get a second language sector on the other side of your brain.

And that’s nothing I did to do that. [00:06:00] Yeah, my French was quite good. It’s not any good anymore. It’s been years.

Scott: That’s interesting. I have a question. I have a couple kids and they are both in school doing the multilingual thing and, their mother speaks Thai with them. I speak English with them and it does seem to just come naturally when, of course, you have that at such an early age. And I know it can become an excuse.

So it’s to say, Oh, it’s easy for kids to learn it. Therefore, I’m not going to learn a language because it’s hard for me. So I know that people can use it as an excuse. But I guess just a note for anyone who might have kids that they can teach in early age, it sounds like it is a good advantage to do that.

Simon: I think so. I think I have a relatively, I have a thought out view about this. I think however good somebody is in another language, it’s very difficult for them to express the nuance and the sentiment that they can in their own native language. So it’s much better to be a listener to their native language.[00:07:00]

Even if you respond in your own native language in order to do the same, I think if your language is good enough to be able to listen fluently, even if you can’t respond fluently, there’s a great advantage, not just to you, but to the speaker, because it gives them more latitude and freedom.

But languages are great. It’s nice to be a fly on the wall occasionally when that happens. Obviously you can get yourself in and out of trouble if you speak the language enough. And it shows a degree of respect. A lot of people say that Thai is very difficult, and I can understand why they would.

Some linguists say, in terms of reading and writing, it’s one of the most complicated languages on the planet. But for conversational Thai, I think if you just put the complexity of the tones to one side for a second, there’s a distinct lack of structure to Thai. It’s relatively simple. There’s no declarations, there’s no declensions, there’s no agreement, there’s no gender.

So having studied Latin and German, Thai was [00:08:00] actually quite easy. But the tones are a nightmare and I get days where I can’t hit a single one and other days where it just seems to click and that’s, how tired I am. So, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The longer I’m here, the times that it works are more than the times that it doesn’t.

Scott: Well that’s great. Like you said. I guess it’s a lot practice. And we’ll dig into your experience with Thai. I want to think back to like 91, right? So when you first we’re coming here to Thailand and your girlfriend was working at an embassy here. Uh, was there a bit of culture shock for you back in 91? And I, cause I really want to paint the picture of number one, what it was like for you making that move.

Simon: But then secondarily what Thailand was like during that time, because I assume it was quite different than it is today. So Thailand was definitely a culture shock. Even, I traveled quite a lot as a kid. And I was used to going to different places, but Thailand was definitely a shock. It hits you multiple dimensions. It’s hotter [00:09:00] than you expect. It’s more humid than you’d expect. It’s way noisier than anywhere I’ve ever been before.

Still remains the case. The food is wildly different food carts on the street vendors selling blatantly pirated goods and copied movies, and back then it was all videotapes, right? And all that sort of thing. That was a culture shock, but obviously a pleasant culture shock.

There was nothing negative in it. Despite all of its rumours, and I think a lot of expats agree with this, is that Thailand still feels a very safe place to be a non Thai. Get yourself into trouble and you can do stupid things, but in general, if you’re behaving yourself, or even just behaving, normally, you’re going to be not looked after, but ignored and in a safe space.

It encourages you to explore and do things. do in a place where you can pick up on the vibe of people. There are, there are other sides to it. You see all Thais as equal, so to speak, because you don’t [00:10:00] understand the sort of the socio economic background to being a Thai and the differentiation.

So you see all people as just Thais, and it makes it easy just to interact with all of them regardless. You don’t bring or you can’t implement any of your prejudices. And I think if you can realize that’s what you’re doing, it helps you set up for being a more open and receptive person to all sorts of people from all walks of life and different countries.

It’s certainly I think that’s a positive influence when you move to a different culture and not understanding the socioeconomics, is you can be more egalitarian in the way that you address everybody around you.

Scott: I’m assuming there were fewer cars, more motorcycles, more tuk tuks, or was it about the same?

Simon: There were a lot more tuk tuks. Motorcycles I don’t think has changed. The, there were a lot less roads. And even if there were fewer cars, the traffic was horrendous. Absolutely horrendous. Somebody I know opened a bar [00:11:00] underneath the expressway where Phloen Chit and Sukhumvit become one, so to speak. It was an area that used to be called Buckskin Joes.

It was a Friday night, it was the rainy season, it was the month, so of course, it was, absolutely chucking it down. And somebody who prepared food, and was bringing it from, I think, Sukhumvit 105? And they left their house at five o’clock in the evening, and they made it to the party at past one in the morning.

And they had gotten out of their car and walked for an hour to a restaurant that they liked, eaten, had a few beers and had to wait another two hours for their driver to catch up with them. So three hours to do one hour’s worth of walking distance. It’s just unbelievable. But that’s what that’s what Bangkok was like in those days.

Taxi drivers would get out of their cars and go and buy water for their passengers because they were just sitting in the heat for too long. It was it’s gotten, I think it’s gotten better.[00:12:00]

Scott: Interesting. So people need to think,

Simon: Chill out.

Scott: it good, right? We have the options for the BTS and some other things here now. And,

Simon: The expressways have made a difference. The BTS has made a difference. Obviously, the financial crisis the traffic was great. And no one could afford the fuel to drive their cars. It wasn’t quite that bad, but there was enough of a reduction in traffic, or cars on the road, to make traffic better for, a good hour or two.

Scott: Always looking on the bright side. So

Simon: Absolutely.

Scott: Now, I’d also like to touch on how the business environment was different because it sounded like you applied the skills that you had and, you brought a lot of these skills to Thailand and you had a couple of business partners when you were starting up.

But how was that business environment? Was it a little bit easier to talk to people of different other people? Different with different credentials, with different levels in business, things like this. Was a little more flat back then?

Simon: It was.

Scott: the sense of expats, or what were your, what do you

think?

Simon: I think it was. I think can’t speak to any other [00:13:00] industry but tech. Doesn’t matter where you were on the planet, the late 80s and early 90s were a period where tech went from a few computers at larger, medium sized companies to everybody having computers on their desk.

And that was true here. It was behind, but not massively. And so there was an explosion in the requirement for tech. The tech industry was growing at 30 or 40 percent per annum. From, the late 80s through to the mid 90s. And so there was lots of opportunity and lots of money to be made.

And there weren’t a lot of expats. There were sufficient, but, a large number, but not like it is now with many tens of thousands. And so it was flatter. You did have access. If you could spell IT and look confident, you could get to see a company and see a decision maker at that company.

Whether you made an impression or not was really up to you and what you were flogging. But access was easier, I would say. And, you take advantage of that, and obviously you have to deliver. [00:14:00] And if you deliver, then you can go and do it again. And you get a reputation. So it depends on what you were doing.

Once you’d shown the way, there were lots of Thai companies with money that would come in behind you and compete for the next rounds of whatever it was that, that you were doing. And that would make it difficult. But if you were doing new stuff, then you had it a little easier, I think.

Scott: So can we talk about the tech side? What is it exactly that you were doing with your business partners in these early days? What sort of deals were you making? What sort of projects were you working on and what are some of the, maybe the projects and things that you’re most proud of during that time?

Simon: I was twenty two and I bumped in to two guys in their early forties who were just way smarter than I could ever be. And obviously, with 15, 20 years of experience under their belts. And they had formed a company that they didn’t actually work at. They had three local staff and it was [00:15:00] supposed to be selling networking equipment to connect Apple Macintosh with PCs and Sun Microsystems in what was called a peer to peer network. So point to point. Everybody can see everybody kind of thing. And that was the idea, and it was a reasonable product. It was a product from Sun Microsystems. But they were not actively marketing it, and it’s a limited use product, because Sun was not popular in Thailand.

Thailand The Thailand market was dominated by the IBM AS400. And hats off to Khun Hamrong at IBM who, hopefully now, but was terribly successful with that. But that computer is is a pig’s ear of a computer. And one of India’s great advantages is that they kicked IBM out. I think it was during the 70s.

And that was one of the reasons why in India they have such good Unix knowledge, which is the operating system that runs the internet today. Of course they didn’t [00:16:00] learn RPG 400 and Cobalt to run on mainframes and AS400s, which is like a baby mainframe. So that, that was the market. Thailand was completely dominated by AS400.

Desktop computing that we know and love today was a rare thing. What that company did, that company. It was called Net Siam, which was partly a joke, Nets I am, as in I am networks. That was the founder’s. It was, what we decided to do was to focus on where the biggest networks were, or potentially were, and that was in publishing houses. Publishing houses put everything together on Macs. They were all connected via what’s Jovialink. called Sneakernet, where you copy what you want onto a floppy disk and then you run it around to the next computer, wearing your sneakers and plug it in and copy it back to the hard disk in that computer, if it had a hard disk, remember the 90s were light on hard disks and memory.

That’s how they put these newspapers out and they were [00:17:00] fraught with disasters and our first customer was Manage Magazine’s head office at Bang Pratik, which is on the river downtown.

We networked that building. There was no cabling, so we had to install cabling and then connect the controllers to the cabling and all the devices, all the Macs, printers, scanners. And that network grew to about 17 locations in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and other locations in Thailand. They had big satellite dishes and we put in the routers and the bridges because the quirks of Apple talk as it was, we had to use these sort of strange equipment and we supplied all that equipment.

Those were the companies that I sold in the UK. I didn’t sell them, but I was the technical support guy for those products in the UK. [00:18:00] And I only did that for a year. But my boss left very quickly after I joined, and so I had some big shoes to fill. He was a very competent guy. They tried to get someone to manage me, but they couldn’t find anybody, so I just filled the gap as best I could.

And within a year, I felt confident enough that I could do that here when given the chance. So we did Manager Magazine. We did some stuff with Daily News. That’s a whole story there. And so if you were one of the publishing houses in Thailand, we networked them. And that got us a reputation for doing networks.

Networking became a commodity product slowly not instantly, but it slowly became a commodity product. And we moved from doing physical networking to doing the software that ran on networks to then providing data that makes, the data that other companies have interesting to compare with. We had a sister company that did digital mapping.

So if you think of Google Maps today, Google Maps is very much a [00:19:00] routing, traffic, where do I find a hotel, a car, a tire shop, or whatever it is you need. Digital mapping for business is more about showing data and how data, can be compared with itself, so if you’re looking at selling toothbrushes for Colgate, for example, where do I sell the most toothbrushes and who’s my vendor who does that for me and how many orders do they place and so forth.

You get to see a map of where you’re selling things that we were doing that kind of mapping. And then we were doing connectivity, which will cross platform connectivity, which is connecting Macs and PCs to AS400s, or mainframes or suns running Oracle. Or all of the above at the same time. And we were able to pull data from those sort of big systems and put them into a map so that a customer could see where they’re selling what.

And then with partners, [00:20:00] we built data sets of geodemographic data so we could compare those sales with the underlying population, their income, their car ownership, their education level, their drive times, their average drive times for commuting. And so we could overlay what you were selling or what you were operating.

Telephone towers, for example. And how that mapped with the population. We had forecasts of population change. So we could help companies plan what they had to do to support growth opportunities in the market. And that was really fun stuff. And it took us several years to get there. And being young and keen and deep down a bit of a nerd.

I loved all of it. Absolutely loved it because by then, networks were a commodity. We’d lost our distribution for most of those principles because people had come in and bought, two million dollars worth, or two million bahts worth of stock. We couldn’t compete with that. We were buying as we sold it.

The principles moved away and [00:21:00] we moved up the stack from physical networking to selling data and software to understanding. And it was great. We did some really cool things.

Scott: So it sounds you were still pretty young at that time. You were in the UK, you learn some skills, you were a little bit underutilized during that time. Then you’re jumping over to Thailand, seeing an opportunity, working with a couple of business partners and already leveraging the skills that you had built up previously in the UK.

Is that right?

Simon: I think the more honest answer is applying the skills that I had to, to what they could do. The guys that I worked with were older and smarter and more experienced than me. One guy was the country manager for Sun Microsystems.His name card said technical support, rest of world.

And that’s when Sun was based, we’re still based where it is today, almost disappeared. They had one guy in that office who was tech support for everything outside of the U S and that was this guy. And he moved to Singapore and then moved up [00:22:00] to Thailand. He was I knew a Unix techie. The other partner was a software development guy.

He was a meteorologist. So he did. He did fluid dynamics and weather forecasting. And he was doing a PhD in the application of chaos theory to short distance, short term weather forecasting at MIT. And I got myself in there, cause I had some boxes to sell. So I was very privileged to have access to people with genuine, big system computing understanding. And they dragged me along with them and they taught me, some of them taught me stuff directly and.

Others taught me stuff by exclusion, what not to do and that’s a whole different topic. But, there was a third partner, ex U.S. Air Force, who had worked for, three letter agencies doing signals analysis and all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff, and he was an electronics engineer who the Air Force, in their wisdom, had [00:23:00] pulled him off the flight line at Udapau during the Vietnam War and sent him to John Hopkins for a bachelor’s He has a master’s degree in electronics engineering and he played a role in several significant projects for U.S. Defense and built Thailand’s. He was the project manager for Thailand’s air defense system, radars along the border and then microwaves sending the data back to Don Mueang military air force base. That was a project in the 80s and it was in the 7 or 800 million dollar range. It’s today’s money, it’s a, 4 billion dollars project. And he knows more about networks and security than, he’s forgotten more about networks and security than most people will ever learn. Yeah, it’s nice to think that that I played a major role in that, but it was definitely a supporting role.

Scott: I think you might also downplay your own skillset. You said that you were, you had a few boxes to sell. You could fill a gap, but what do you think they saw in you?

Simon: Keenness and energy, perhaps. You really have to ask [00:24:00] them. I think the simplest what they saw in me is they had a company that they wanted to sell networking stuff through. And I turned up with the number one vendor in every sort of dimension of networking available, effectively in my pocket.

Before I came to Thailand, when I knew I was coming, I went to Glasgow to see my ex boss. She helped me with some planning. I flew to California to went to Apple World. I saw all the principals. Came back, went to Glasgow, gave her a debrief. Flew to Bangkok. Saw Apple represented through Sahaveria. I saw some distributors.

I then flew to Hong Kong to see Apple’s headquarters and met them. And tied it all together in, in a business plan, that was a little embarrassing when I look at it now. But it was my first attempt at the age of, I was 21 at the time. And I turned up with literally a document that said this is, these are all the products we need to do proper [00:25:00] Mac networks and connect Macs to big computers that I knew very little about in those days.

And they looked at it and they said that’s it, that’s fait accompli, that’s everything we need all in one place. All we have to do is be nice. English kid, which is what they did, and they took me under their wing and made me the deviant that I am today.

Scott: Now, there were good times, which later led into challenges, I’m sure. But even during the good times, I’m curious, are there any big challenges that you face? Let’s say during that time where it’s these deals with like manager magazine and it’s doing all these networks, would you say were some of the biggest challenges that you faced during that time?

Simon: I think the biggest challenge as I alluded earlier was the first time you get a free run and then second time there’s a large Thai organization standing literally in the lobby as you walk out saying whatever they said minus 10 percent. [00:26:00] And that was literally the MO. Even the people that were selling Apple computers had set up a foreigner as their education dealer. He would go into an international school, present a deal, having negotiated the prices.

If I buy, 200 of these and 100 of those and 10 of these, what price will he give me? And then, so they then knew what the volume was. He’d walk out and someone would be sitting there, some cute sales girl from this, big Thai conglomerate would be sitting there saying, whatever he said, minus 10%.

And that’s what we struggled with was keeping the conversation on value rather than price. And if I’m to be negative about doing business in Thailand, I think value over price is a lesson which is still being taught and is still not as well understood as it could be. And so that is a, it’s not even a layer of complexity, it’s a removable, it’s removing [00:27:00] all layers of complexity and sticking to the facile.

that makes doing business in Thailand complicated. Now, there are probably verticals where that doesn’t apply. I’m sure that friends in the legal space they get hired because of value over price. But there are commercial or user centric businesses, that touch on retail, so to speak, where, price is pretty much the be all and end all of discussions.

And that’s disappointing because I’m a solution salesperson, it turns out. Over the years I’ve honed some skills in that space. And solution sales are almost never to do with price and all to do with value and feeling assured that when you buy something you’re going to get more than what you’ve paid for in terms of support.

And someone to talk to about what to do next. And if it comes down to talking about price, all of that stuff has little [00:28:00] value.

Scott: So you’re competing in this market, which is, it’s just getting undercut left and right, right? So you’re always having to compete with the 10 percent less gal in the lobby. Now, if you were to do anything differently, I understand that your solutions based salesperson, you understand that, value rather than just focusing on price.

But was there anything that you would do differently if you were to go back during that time that you think would have set your out yourself up for more success?

Simon: I don’t know, I think it, to be honest, I think it all worked out very well. I think the one thing that we lacked was a core, sort of staple product that we could rely upon for regular business to keep the lights on and keep the staff paid and all of the fancy, highfalutin stuff that we were doing would be gravy money.

Turns out that those projects, they kept the lights on and paid the staff and provided us some pretty good margin at times. And [00:29:00] our, revenue was very, peaks and troughs rather than stable with the occasional bump on it. I think we could have done with something more stable.

As a product or service to do, but that, that’s really, I don’t know if this is a good time and segue into the financial crisis, but that’s what happened. We got to the financial crisis having built a reputation for doing new stuff. So the first one number food delivery system in Thailand was Pizza Hut.

And I’m going to say it went live in 94, 95. I do remember it was a Sunday, and I do remember that we took 40, 000 orders on the first day of operation. Which is a lot. And, we did it. It was successful. And we bid for McDonald’s and we lost it because someone offered a 10 percent discount on whatever we said.

And when the financial crisis turned up, all of the work that we’d be doing, connecting maps to computers and that sort of thing, that was all high [00:30:00] risk budget from the perspective of our client. And all of that budget just vaporized overnight. And we were left literally a kid at the game, dancing, running with chairs.

We have to sit down, that one.

Scott: Oh yeah. Got it.

Simon: Yeah, we were left with no staple product to fall back to. We just had all these, fancy projects where they said, yeah, we’d love to do it. And we would absolutely do it if it wasn’t for this dictum that said thou shalt not buy anything but pencils, razors, and toilet paper.

Scott: These big deals, when you land a very big deal you’re flying high, you’re living the good life, but it sounds like you just, that baseline wasn’t built up to where you you feel the big high and then you fall down to nothing as opposed to falling down and falling back to some baseline that you’ve built up of recurring revenue, something maybe less sexy, less, it’s just something that, as you said, put, keep the lights on. That’s interesting. Now, can you explain a little bit more what it was like to [00:31:00] live in Thailand during this time? Now there’s obviously the very big downside on the business side during the financial crisis. Is there anything else notable that you can share during that time that was unique or maybe interesting that you experienced?

Simon: The most obvious lesson that I learned was that Thai people should be in charge of parties anywhere and everywhere on the planet. When the economy was growing as fast as it was, there were happy people enjoying themselves. Nowadays we see people sitting, drinking beer on the steps outside 7 Eleven.

And that’s because they want to have a drink, but they don’t want to spend the extra margin to have it in a restaurant. That, the 90s weren’t like that. The 90s, everybody was, everybody seemed to be making more money today than they were yesterday. And in a country with the lowest retained earnings ratio in Asia.

All of that money was spent on having fun. Thai people are very good at having fun. [00:32:00] And if it was a job, they’d be doing very well. Thailand was rambunctious during the 90s. The expat scene was also quite rambunctious during the 90s. And we all had a lot of fun. And we all worked pretty hard. And we all played pretty hard. And for some, the play became too important and they lost the plot. And for others they settled down. Having kids changes your willingness to go out four or five nights a week. And it all the financial crisis obviously took the wind out of everybody’s sails. But, yeah, I just remember everywhere you looked there was building, there was growth, there was positivity, there was people pulling themselves out of their prior situation into a new level of [00:33:00] happiness.

And Thai people are very hardy and they’re very good at dealing with issues. I remember when I was doing food deliveries during the big flood ten years ten years ago, whatever it was, ten, twelve years ago, I had a, I had three Land Rovers and all of them were rigged for deep water. So we would put literally a tonne of tuna in the back of one and a tonne of rice in the back of the other and drive out and hand it. And people who hadn’t, didn’t know when their next meal was coming from, who were turning up at the pu yai baans house in a boat, were still, all happy to see you and positive. And it was, I found it very emotional that these people who were still who were struggling and didn’t know where the end was. There was no end in sight.

The flooding was there for months. And they would come in, old women, they would come in and you’d give them something and they would wire you as if you’d, if you’d helped them out [00:34:00] dramatically and all you’ve done is drive 40 kilometers and given them a bag of rice. And I found that emotional.

So between the partying and the being very hardy. Thai people have a distinct character which is most of the time great fun to be around.

Scott: Now we talked a lot about sort of business lessons that you experienced and taking advantage of opportunities. You mentioned being Active during that time you were a young up and comer that your business partners were seeing was just do anything to make it work, right? So I think a lot of these were business lessons, more generally. And I want to know in your opinion, if you were a new founder coming into Thailand, maybe starting a business here or starting a new office here Are there any lessons that you’d have or guidance you’d give to someone trying to start an operation here in Thailand. Beyond just making sure that there is a Thai leading the party planning committee.

We got that. Is there anything else that you’d recommend?

Simon: This is, I recommend this to anybody anywhere on the planet who’s starting a [00:35:00] business. Starting a business there’s a large, emotional quotient involved. You have an idea, you have maybe a prospective customer that validates your idea. Product-market fit, as they like to say. And there’s lots of positivity.

A lot of people just dive in and get on with it, which there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think a step that is necessary is that the partners involved need to declare to themselves and then to each other how they will react to the company going reasonably and then plateauing sort of mediocrity or a lack of growth, right?

Or it starts well and then it peters out and starts to drop off. Or, if you’re lucky and everything, goes to plan goes to dream it just continues to grow. And I think those three scenarios, each partner needs to document how they would react to that so [00:36:00] that the other parties involved have some expectation or understanding of what will happen.

What kind of conversations they will have when things don’t go to plan. And they won’t go to plan. It’s a question of how much off plan they are and knowing what to expect and being able to plan for your partner’s reactions to that is critical. Because when things are going good you need no structure you’re just grabbing money hand over fist and growing. But when that stops then that’s when there are negative emotions involved and that can often spiral out of control.

So if you have some sort of a baseline of expectations, we’ve been flatlining for six months, Bill has said that if it goes on for nine months, he’s going to walk, he’d probably walk away. At least you can work around that. But if you, if the eighth month Bill turns up and says, I’m [00:37:00] sorry I’m out of here.

It’s everybody’s blindsided by it. So I think it’s communication, upfront honesty and setting it, it’s also important for yourself. I know that with the NetSiam, ViewSiam project or company is true. I should have bailed. Hindsight 2020 and all that. But I should have bailed earlier taken the money that we had and I should have gone back to the UK and finish my education and then come back.

But I didn’t because I was having way too much fun and I was doing things that that at that age I shouldn’t have been doing. I was, I was a shareholder of a company at the age of 22. I was nominally in charge of marketing and sales from that point. I had a team of four or five people working for me, which is, nothing wrong with at the age of 23, 24, but I was there at the management meetings and at the board meetings and all of that sort of thing.

And it was above my pay grade and it helped me become who I [00:38:00] am, but I don’t think it helped the company as much as it could have done. They could have done with someone a little older and grayer, the new me. I should have taken what I had and consolidated it with a formal education.

And but,

Scott: It’s interesting that you say that I wouldn’t have expected that from you because as much as you say, in hindsight being 2020, you could have spent that time to go back to school. But from what I understand, you didn’t love school when you were in school.

Simon: No, I didn’t. I’m, see, I’m not a classroom learner. But I think sometimes you have to do things you don’t like. I think that, that comes with getting older. You just have to buckle down. Buckling down and doing things I don’t like is not my strength for sure. And which is probably why I didn’t do it, because I knew what it would be like, and I stayed here instead.

I should have taken a different path. But that’s okay. I’ve, learnt the lesson and I’ve tried to apply it to what I’m doing now. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left school, which is why I went to France. And I didn’t [00:39:00] want to work in the commercial property market when I took that job. I didn’t know, I didn’t know it from a hole in the ground.

I did know that I needed to do some work, wherever it was, and experience, that whole environment and what it entails, before I decided what I wanted to do. And I lost the plot with that. I got very excited working in the property market. I lucked out. I saved one of their big customers a lot of money. That’s what got me on the radar, and they moved me from one department to another, and put me on this, as they call it, day release program to become a surveyor. And then I got into computing by luck. They had a network of Macs in the research department, and they had a data general computer running everything else, which was mainly word processing.

And they also had a database of valuations for every retail property that the UK has ever had. And the irony of it all, [00:40:00] I got fired from that company for conceiving of an idea of taking their proprietary copyrighted maps that they’d drawn themselves of every high street in the UK, and colouring those maps in a computer with the values. The rental value, or yield, or change of yield, or change of rent, or occupation type. Is it a service, is it retail is it food? And visualize that data. And it turns out, two years after I got fired, I’m working in Thailand on thematic and digital maps. And actually using a tool that I’d conceived of, and turns out it, it was an industry that existed.

I’d never heard of. In the UK, and two years later I’m making maps and making money with maps It’s a little weird.

Scott: It doesn’t make me think too of things like Hip Flat. I was just talking with someone who was involved in Hip Flat here in Thailand and it just shows you it’s just another application of how you can visualize [00:41:00] data. You can see the changes you can see for people that aren’t familiar with hip flat. It’s, you’re able to look on a map, find all the apartments and condos for rent and for sale.

Look at the valuations over time. What are those condos selling for? What is the average rent price? And yeah, Just being able to visualize that it can just give you so many key insights. But as you mentioned, if you write rewind so many years, it’s that people weren’t necessarily thinking that digitization of this data and the trends and the changes and the price changes and that turn this red, if it goes down and turn it green, if it, that maybe wasn’t as commonplace back then, is that fair to say?

Simon: It’s very fair to say. It was very much an emerging market. It was, like most things in technology, it was a US centric market. The company MapInfo that we used was based out of New York. And reselling MapInfo in Thailand. We’d made our own maps of Bangkok and Thailand. We partnered with the Bangkok Guide Company to make a map of Bangkok.

And [00:42:00] then we used other source data for maps of Thailand. And the sort of stuff that we were doing was pretty revolutionary. Let me give you a unit of measure to see how revolutionary it was. We partnered with a regional transportation company called Sindhu Pike Bodell. And they’d heard about us through, we got a lot of press coverage in the 90s Tony Waltham at the Bangkok Post was a great asset to us.

He put a lot of stuff in the Bangkok Post in those days about NetSiam and Usiam and they read about us. They came to see us and they invited us to their office and we went into a conference room with a table that seated about 12 people. You could only just get into the room because the walls were waist deep in A, I think they’re A2 sized books of spreadsheets.

Just the, all four walls. And this was data that they had been paid to collect by the [00:43:00] Bangkok government to do long term transportation planning for the city. So a lot of these transport lines came out of that research. They’d collected data on who lives where? They’d broken Bangkok down into some 500 and something zones that were quite, really small for finite analysis.

They had car ownership, they had education, they had number of people per household, they had where do you drive for work and what is your average drive time between the cells that they had created. So these are, some K in Bangkok would have four or five of these blocks. And it was, those blocks were based on transport and driving habits rather than rather than administrative. There’s no way they could have sold that data. They had millions of data points. If you put it in a spreadsheet, you’d just lose your marbles trying to look at it. But we could put all of that data into a map and put it on a screen and people would go, oh wow, look at that. And people with no idea of how to use a spreadsheet could look at the map and realize that [00:44:00] there was something in the data that was of interest and needed to be drilled out.

Visualization capabilities were great. Anyway, the story is, we did that, MapInfo knew about it. When the company in New York, a company called Penn Shurn Associates, they were contracted by the Clinton administration to help with planning where to do promotion of his re inauguration, or his re election campaign.

Sorry, re election campaign. They called MapInfo and said, we’re having trouble using large data sets with MapInfo, can you, do you have a specialist? And they said, no, we don’t. But, believe it or not, if you go to Bangkok, you’ll find the people that do it, do the biggest data sets in our system, on the planet.

And so they came out to Thailand and they spent a month with us and we were teaching them how to use object relational database technology and plugging it into MapInfo. And they went back and got [00:45:00] Bill Clinton elected. And actually we didn’t have anything to do with that, but that was all them. But we were a leading light in that space for a few years.

And that was really cool to know.

Scott: that’s really interesting. I don’t want to draw a connection where there isn’t one, but one thing that think about when you share that story is, it is strange for them to be coming to Bangkok to learn this. And part of me thinks that when you have more of the Wild West days, I know it’s the East, right?

But essentially a time where there’s less barriers to entry, there’s more things going on, there’s potentially more innovation. It seems like when there’s less red tape, let’s just say, and things are just working, you’re just doing whatever you can, then you end up with this innovation in Bangkok that that didn’t come out of somewhere else. And do you think that had anything to do with it that, you guys were able to innovate more and do more? Maybe it’s because you’re smaller or whatever, but it’s strange for Clinton’s campaign to have

Simon: It is very strange. It is very strange, there’s no doubt about that. I [00:46:00] don’t know, I don’t know, there, there was a lot of tech savvy in Bangkok during the 90s. There were foreign experts. It’s doing the Thai Meteorology Department’s rollout of a national weather forecasting system. They licensed the BBC, or is it BBC, it’s the weather service out of the UK has a very advanced one of the big, used to be one of the biggest mainframes on the planet back in the 80s and 90s doing weather forecasting for the British Isles.

And the Thais licensed that, and they ported it from one computer to another computer. And these guys, a lot of Canadians were over here doing that, and we bumped into those. So there was those guys, and they were super smart meteorologists, and big database kind of guys. There were the people in the hard disk industry who were over here.

There were chemists and engineers and process engineers. And there was us and there were a whole bunch of people doing software related stuff. [00:47:00] And we all found out about each other and we all used to hang out on a regular basis and we would just nerd out and listen to other people’s war stories about niche little things that they were working on that kind of made sense to us but we couldn’t repeat it as we cross pollinated.

There was a real buzz to Bangkok’s tech scene in the 90s that was I know it was a contributing factor to why I hung around because I was still one of the younger guys in the group and all these people that could do all these things that I’d previously only seen on television and now I was standing among them and talking about it and it was great, really great.

So I, I think when it comes to our company, I think there’s just a lot of luck. We had guys with hardware experience, database design, software development and large data. And when, that comes together and you’ve got a toolkit of, we can access any data on any kind of computer, and we’ve got maps of Bangkok and [00:48:00] streets and shops and the rest of the country.

Yeah, if you talk about it enough ideas definitely just drop out of it. There’s definitely there’s definitely an element of luck, the coincidence of of everybody together talking about it and then was the general, there’s nothing we can’t do attitude the tech sector, the tech bro kind of mentality started back then.

Technology was going to take over the planet and we were leading the charge. That was the sort of the thought pattern, whether it was declared or not, everybody felt it to some degree.

Scott: I’m going to ask you for a quick forecast here. Just since we are in this space of innovation, technology digitizing data, things like this. When is your forecast for when someone will be able to go into a bank in Thailand get a bank account and or get banking done without signing 27 pieces of paper manually each time.

When’s that going to happen?

Simon: The rumor that I always [00:49:00] thought is that the people that make those policies have large shareholdings in the paper manufacturers, so that’s the conspiracy theorist in me. I don’t know. Maybe inside of ten years. When I moved to Singapore, someone gave me a sort of compare and contrast tidbit. They said, if you go to court in Singapore, all your documentation must be submitted in PDF. That was, when I moved to Singapore in 2001. My phone is, a company account from a previous company.

And when I want to change promotion, I need to take a board resolution.

It’s a little, yeah, so I haven’t changed my promotion in a while just because I cannot, face the amount of signatures I have to do just to make that happen.

Scott: Yeah, I think it just plays to the point of you have to laugh about it, right? So that’s

Simon: You do. You do.

Scott: out of it. I think you can get grumpy about it, but you can also just say, okay, [00:50:00] I just have to dedicate a day to to changing my phone promotion.

Simon: Right.

Scott: more in your case, cause you’re coming in with an old plan, clearly old promotion.

Simon: It’s that old phrase, it is what it is, we’re not going to change it, you can rant and, howl at the moon, it’s not going to change there it does. There are lots of ways to improve it. I spent years of my life working on process. The process of managing change for software, which is a niche in the change space.

But it’s a process, and if you run a business that’s dependent on technology as most people do these days, it’s actually quite important now. But, so I’ve thought about this quite a lot. There are ways, there are lots of ways to do it better, but it needs the political will. And it also needs bigger fires to have been put out, right?

A lot of people ask when they come to Thailand, they say, how come it’s so dirty? How come there’s trash? People just stop their pickup trucks and throw trash into a, an abandoned plot of land. In [00:51:00] a developing economy, there are much bigger fires to be put out. and that’s the downside.

That’s, some things just are free for all and other things are regulated and regulated.

Scott: Yeah, I think sometimes people think that, to your point, they’re not thinking about the other fires to be put out. They’re not thinking, they might just be thinking problem solution, right? And to your point, it’s problem solution plus politics, plus, priority list, right? And I think sometimes people that, that is the naive view in my mind as well, it’s just seeing a problem and thinking, oh, I’m here, I’m new and I’m here to fix it.

It’s it takes a little while to get acclimated and realize. Yeah. It’s not, I don’t think we should give up on that problem solving mentality. it’s good to always innovate, come up with new ideas, but you also need to know that sometimes that problem hasn’t been solved for other reasons, and sometimes there’s not political will to solve it, and sometimes there’s just, it takes a little bit longer being in Thailand to start to realize what you can change and what you can’t change. But [00:52:00] I want to focus on the things that you can change, and that brings me to what you’re doing with Tinman.

So you had shared how the start of your story here, so You know, you had this career path, but you probably didn’t know the way to go. And I think it worked out for you, but you had to go through these very interesting paths, right? It’s you’re learning a little bit here, learning a little bit there, coming to Thailand, applying some knowledge that you knew, being there at the right time, having the go getter attitude, right? And so it worked out in the end, as you said, right? it was hard, and maybe it wouldn’t have worked out. So I think that might bring to the topic of what you’re doing today what problem you’re trying to solve. For others, that might not be so fortunate otherwise.

Simon: Two years ago a chap that I met in Hong Kong, while I was in Hong Kong, came to me with a plan that he was working on for what sounded like a recruitment product. He’s a recruiter. He was a high school teacher in New Zealand, head of science at a public school [00:53:00] moved into recruitment and has been doing recruitment in Asia for 30 years.

Was in Hong Kong for many years. And he came to me with an idea that I just considered was recruitment. And then on, further detail, it’s a way to help fresh graduates or undergraduates transform into workers by getting them, career relevant work easier and faster. And when he explained it to me, it suddenly resonated because it was I remember that I didn’t know what to do or which direction to go.

And if I studied this, what are my paths? And if I study that, what are my paths? And it’s, I think it’s worse here. And it’s also worse because of technology has increase the cadence at which jobs appear and disappear on the market. There are jobs that are popular today or a high volume today that will have disappeared in several years time and there are new jobs that we haven’t thought of that will come up in their [00:54:00] place. And even those may be only several years before they disappear because of the impact of technology automation and eventually not today artificial intelligence. So Tinman was instantly attractive to me because it solved the problem that I had gone through myself in not knowing what to do or which direction to go, and not being prepared for that transition from being a student in a protected environment to being kicked out the door and working in a place where instead of getting detention, you get fired. Or you, your, they let you stay but your promotions are never going to happen or they’re severely delayed or whatever and your salary is crimped. It’s a very significant transition for almost everyone. And Tinman is there to make it better and I’m really happy to be involved with it because not only do I bring my personal background but I bring my own [00:55:00] some technology understanding to, to turn their idea into a product. It’s taken longer than we thought. It’s more complicated than we thought, but we are launching we’re launching right about now talking to universities polytechnics or vocational colleges and talking to companies that hire anybody, between the age of, you 18 and 24 trying to help both parties find the right people who will stay. People who are incentivized because the work aligns with the things that they care about or the work activities that they find enjoyable.

So we want young people to find career relevant work more easily. We know that if they stay in their first job for several years, it will impact their earnings in their their mid-life, dramatically. And that might not be a message that’s easy to get through to young Thais who are perhaps not the best long term planners and on the planet [00:56:00] But it’s a fact and you can’t avoid it But there’s also the pain is in from the corporate side. Companies struggle to find young people to do work, and when they do, they leave.

In a market or an economy like Thailand, where the population is collapsing, finding the right people out of school, out of college to come and work for you, is going to become a new battleground. And we’re very confident that Tinman will be the mechanism by which companies find the right people more easily, and students find their right way forward more productively. yep.

Scott: So here in Thailand, I guess this is everywhere, right? But there’s typically lean on things like job boards or sorry, job postings, whether that’s LinkedIn jobs or jobs, DB, whatever. So the common ones here. Or there’s for some jobs and these aren’t the new coming jobs, but there’s like the head hunting. And I have a little bit of experience with both hiring on the through posting a job on a jobs board as well as working with headhunting companies. [00:57:00] Now on the jobs board side, I think a lot of people have this spray and pray approach, right? Get a lot of applicants. Some of them don’t even want to do a very basic assignment or an introduction because they’re just hoping they can get a job, right? And sometimes there’s not a good alignment there, it’s just, there’s a job opening, let me see if I can get it. Fingers crossed, right? And, that does lead to a lot of wasted time on both sides. Additionally, something that can happen, Is that people sometimes accept jobs because, hey, wow, I went through the whole, I’ll go through the whole interview process.

I’ll yeah, I’ll get a job and I’ll have a paycheck. Great. But then, maybe they never actually wanted that job and maybe they told the employer what they wanted to hear to get through the door. And then, there’s the saving face stuff here. So people are going to be less direct over. Maybe it’s not their passion.

Maybe it’s not what they care about and they might not show up to the second week of work. And there are some of these things that can happen. So I just reinforce that there is a pain point there. Both. I’m really emphasizing the employer side of it, but there’s a pain point there when there’s not a good [00:58:00] alignment and on the headhunting side.

And I know you mentioned your business partner is maybe has some experience on the recruiting side, right? I’ve seen that some people in this space also have a little bit of a spray and pray approach. So they might go to an employer and say, I’ll get you all these great candidates. They’ll go to the to the individuals and say, Oh, I’ll get all you all these great jobs. And sometimes there’s not a planning, a lot of planning there either. Sometimes it’s okay, they say these, they need this technical certification. This guy has that technical certification, know, let me just fingers crossed and hope it works. And I’m sure there are better headhunters and recruiters out there, but I’m just saying some of them are just working on commission and especially new headhunters. have that mentality. I just need the volume up. So let me just talk to as many people and then pair up as many people and hope that one of them lands. And so that can cause a lot of chaos in the market. So it

Simon: That’s,

Scott: doing with is maybe addressed, addressing a lot of those problems because it’s about getting deeper with maybe the employer need, and it’s getting deeper with the skillset of the potential employee. [00:59:00] And hopefully I’m doing better grounded matchmaking. And I’d like to maybe dig a little bit into that about how you go about delivering a better quality connection or fit the two methods that I described.

Simon: That’s very accurate observations and a great question. Let me just answer that before I tell you how Tinman works. LinkedIn, not a lot of jobs on LinkedIn for fresh graduates. So fresh graduates, there are kids on there. But it’s difficult for them to find stuff. Thai students are hesitant to use the job boards because it exposes their email and their phone number.

And there are companies that just scrape that data and call them and offer them insurance sales, tele sales jobs. And there’s a lot of negative sentiment in students because of that. And so they hesitate to get on to those [01:00:00] boards. The way, and then for recruitment, It takes the same amount of effort, the same amount of man hours to place you or me as it does a fresh graduate.

The commission, the industry average is six weeks of salary. I’m gonna hope that you and I would get paid more than a fresh graduate here in Thailand. If there’s a recruiter out there that they would focus on placing us because the payback would be much higher. And so not a lot of recruiters focus on fresh graduates.

They’re pretty much on their own which just compounds the problem. It’s the significant transition. They’re going from a mollycoddled environment at school to easily get slapped for making a mistake at work. And there’s no one building a bridge between the two and helping set expectations and pointing them in the right direction.

So they’re less likely to make errors or, have made the bad choice. You hit the nail on several, several nails on the head when you talk about the reasons why they take the [01:01:00] job. They take the job because they have debts. They need the money. It’s a brand name company that they think would be a good employer, which is often not the case.

They know that there’s a good training program involved. They take the training and then they stop turning up. So it’s six months in after they’ve been trained in a warehouse management system or a customer relationship management tool or SAP training. And then they’re out the door with that training, leaving that company spinning its wheels, having expended the money, reduced the efficiency of several resources by applying them to training that person, and then they get no long tail to get the reward back.

So everybody’s losing out. It doesn’t look good on the kid’s resume, as well. It reduces their employability over time if they keep jumping jobs. I know recruiters that if they see someone who’s changed job three times in two years, they disregard them, just out of principle, because they’re not reliable.

Recruitment requi [01:02:00] typically requires, if someone leaves within a year, that you find a replacement for free. No one will do that if it’s a graduate, because there’s a high chance, 25%, graduates will change job within six to twelve months. So they won’t take on the risk. The reward isn’t there anyway. And they don’t have the skills.

All they’ve got is a grade in a course from a school. And that’s very difficult to work with. Because of all of the above, what Tinman does is, Tinman uses seventy years in the market psychometric analysis to help kids understand themselves. The kind of work activities that they are going to be more comfortable with.

Those align them with roles, jobs that they are more likely to be happy at. And if they’re happy at it, they’re more, open to learning. They’re more accepting of correction. And they’re more likely to stay. If they stay, they benefit and their employer benefits. And that’s the sort of the mutual goal that Tinman [01:03:00] is striving to do.

We don’t do matching based on, you studied engineering, go talk to companies that employ engineers. We do it on the basis that these are the role types that you match with. You’ve studied engineering, so in that list of 30 odd roles that we’ve suggested for you, which of them leverage your engineering knowledge? Go for them.

And we’ll connect you with all the companies that employ those roles. And that company will be able to see you. But companies that, want you because you’ve got a 4.0 from Chula, but don’t employ roles that you align with, they won’t be able to see you. Because they’re being distracted by the carrot, which is, Oh, he’s really smart, and we went to a really good school, and he did a complicated degree from a good school and got a good grade.

That doesn’t tell you about the guy’s work ethic. It doesn’t tell you about his team, collaboration skills. It doesn’t tell you about his abstract reasoning or [01:04:00] his, verbal verbal reasoning skills. We measure those things on the basis that we know that the quality of the graduate isn’t up to par and they need training and real world experience anyway.

So you want to apply it to the people that fit and have the capacity to learn and grow within the roles. And we make that 3D map of do they fit and how far can they go. We do the gap analysis, so this, this kid could go further if you give him, additional numerical reasoning skills or put him on a communications course.

That will increase his capacity, lengthen his legs his potential tenure at your organization and then we’re working to integrate skills. Thai universities have been mandated to do a skills transcript as well as an academic transcript. So we will integrate those skills transcripts. So you get what is the kid capable of doing now?

What does he align with? And how far can he go? [01:05:00] And if you buff him with this skill set and this skill set, How much further could he go? That kind of data should empower recruiters to find better I’m going to use the word candidate, we don’t like the word candidate because it’s so recruitment centric, but to find better resources.

And then we encourage interaction, not just in the final months as they’re getting ready to leave. We want companies to get involved with kids in their second and third year through cooperative and internship activities. CSR activities, training activities, so that companies can influence the quality of education outcomes and create the workforce that they need today and tomorrow.

And by doing it in volume, and there are tax incentives as well, they can do it very low cost and create the quality of people that they need. And even if they don’t go and work for them, they’ll be in the industry and there are, there are future potential [01:06:00] candidates. And every company benefits from an increase in quality of entry level workers.

There’s no doubt about that. And given that we’re getting less and less each year, improving their productivity across the board is to every employer’s benefit.

Scott: Oh, absolutely. I love the concept of it. And again, I’ll share something else that I experienced recently that only plays to your points here. I received a message on LinkedIn from someone who was saying, Hey, I’m at a good university. I have several students that want internships. Are you open to a free intern?

And as much as, your point, these individuals still going through school, looking for internships or graduating soon, they have a tough road ahead, right? They have to crack through. But me as an employer, I’m thinking I can’t just take a person like a human body, like just telling me, Hey you take this human body and train them up because it’s not free to me. It’s not free to me. And so I’m not saying it’s not [01:07:00] good to train fresh grads or to help people in their first job or whatever else, but I’m thinking, I don’t have the capacity to take a body and then turn them into a productive something. It’s that’s a ton of my time. Now granted, if this was an individual that already showed that they are skilled in this way, really interested in this, able to do this, able to they probably can’t help a lot day one, but still, there’s more of a long term view, because I think, fine, I’m going to be taking it a bit of a risk for the first three months, but I know this isn’t just a body.

This is a human being that wants to do this thing that probably could help. Then it’s mutual benefit, right? And then I’m maybe willing to invest more time into them. Another thing that I’ve experienced in the past maybe not directly, but I’ve heard of some of these individuals working for those six months.

You mentioned someone on boards, you train them on some, logistical system or whatever, some proprietary software or whatever, maybe not proprietary in fact, but they learned SAP or something. And then, okay, they’ve got that. Now they then apply it to their business. Their family business [01:08:00] right. So you can see why people would say I’m gonna go to the name brands. Or I’m gonna learn these name brand things and then I’m gonna go back and help my family business. Totally fair I get why someone would do that. But those individuals are less likely to go through the process that you just shared with Tinman. Like they’re not gonna say let me make sure I got a job that I’m really gonna that has this kind of career trajectory that makes sense for me that is aligned with this like the fact that they even go through that process with you almost ensures that they’re thinking more long term.

looking for a job for three months or six months because if they were, they would be wasting their time. So I’m guessing that you’re going to be ending, working with a different, not caliber necessarily, but a different type of person that’s motivated and thinking more long term to go through this path.

Simon: We hope so. To be honest, I think it can benefit everybody, but it is, the first student users are going to be the ones that are, more bookwormish type, the thinking forward planners who’ve seen and heard career [01:09:00] advice and taken it on board. Unfortunately in Thailand universities are only mandated to give four hours of career advice to students, and from what I’ve heard from some students is they put all graduating students in one lecture hall with one teacher for four hours, and no questions, because you can’t take questions from that many people.

And that’s it. So they tick off the minimum mandated level. Vocational schools and high schools actually have better career advice infrastructure. They have a career advice teacher. But universities don’t do it so well. And they just assume because they’re university kids, they’re going to get jobs anyway.

It’s not about getting a job. It’s about getting the right job. There are 100, 150,000 open seats in the Thai market. We don’t have enough people. We need more Burmese and Cambodians and Laos to come in to free up Thais to take jobs that add value. And, that’s a [01:10:00] political thing. But. The Thai economy has been slowed down or slowed down by a lack of human capital for years. We’ve had employment around 1% since the mid nineties.

So unemployment around 1% for 30 years. And it’s not, that’s not a good number. You need slack in your labor force. How do you invest a billion dollars in a battery factory in Thailand? If there aren’t people to man the stations in it. Now if it’s an automated factory, it’s less of an issue.

But Thailand is behind the eight ball on automation. And a lot of stuff is manual. And there aren’t the people to do it. So it’s an anchor slowing down the entire economy. So the, we can’t create more babies. But what we can do is have a better quality workforce that can do more. more quickly in its career.

And hopefully Tinman can help move the needle, among others in that [01:11:00] space.

Scott: Now, what’s the experience like on the resource or, I you don’t like the term candidate, but let’s say students at the time that are going into the workforce. What is the experience like for them? And then potentially on the employer side, what is the experience like for them?

Are they, is this like a platform that they’re joined the platform and they’re seeing a select number of people? Is there someone that’s guiding them through the platform? Are you, again, working with schools and helping them get their students in it? I’m just trying to better understand tangibly what this is like working with Tinman, or if there’s an employer or a school that’s thinking about working with you all, does that look like for them?

Simon: Okay, so let’s start with the schools. It is a platform. We work with faculty to help them get their students on board. We will also be, directly marketing to students to get them on board. They don’t need their faculty involved. They can connect to companies directly without students, without teachers being involved.

But the teacher’s role within the [01:12:00] platform is to be able to, firstly, leverage a new understanding of their students by knowing what their students align with. There’s a very two dimensional grid that exists. You’ve got the courses that they study and the year that they’re in. And what Team Mandate does is give you a line through that finds all of the people that align with this role and that role.

And then because we’re using workplace psychology and we have, repeatable data in that, that gives a platform that’s data based for the faculty to communicate with employers. Dear HR person. I have 187 kids who actively selected this role as something of interest to them after they matched with it using Tinman.

Let’s start talking. It’s literally that Tinman doesn’t get involved. We don’t do guidance. We don’t do any sort of manual activities in that. We just provide the connectivity over third party repeat data, repeatable data. [01:13:00] It’s not authored by the student and embellished or, modesty kicks in, as if but it’s a foundation to talk about what can we do with these kids.

You employ this role, they’re interested in this role, either we come to you for a site visit or you come down here and give a lecture about what the day in the life of a so and is and the ones that pay attention you can stay in touch with all of them, but the ones that pay attention are probably suitable for you to carry, mature the conversation over time with. So we are talking to your point about taking on an intern. You have a very small company. So the percentage of total man hours taken away to look after that person would be significant. But in a large company, it’s less significant and they can handle that.

If they’re doing internal training for their staff, having a few students sit in on that, the incremental cost is basically zero. It’s a, lunch, [01:14:00] right? And giving some background information to them beforehand. It’s very low cost. Companies should not have to indirectly support education because they’re unable to target where their money goes.

But if you can find people that align with the role and have shown interest in your company and the roles that you have available at some repeat interval going forward, that is a good reason for a company to step up and say we’re going to interact with these kids, we’re going to make them understand that even though we’re an invisible company, We’re still top of second tier in our space and we’re a billion dollar company that they haven’t heard of.

That’s their problem, not ours. We’re a great place to work. We have a career path. And once they get in the door and they realize that, then, we have a chance of getting good candidates. Students here in Thailand, they look for companies where their seniors from university are [01:15:00] working.

The experience of getting a job in Thailand is so daunting that they are looking for a theoretically friendly face. They may not have even known that the guy from four years before them at school, but they went to the same school. So I’m going to go hit on them and say I want to work for you because you and I went to the same school.

That’s a very tenuous link. That to me shows how daunting it seems. They just want. to be near someone who was at the same school as them. I don’t want to be near anybody I went to school with. That’s a totally different story. If kids are afraid to go out and seek their own path because of the lack of friendly faces they need to be given confidence about their own skills, their own knowledge, and their own capacity to grow in those roles to put such I’m going to use the word facile again, worries, to one side.

Scott: I can’t help, but you might not like this connection, but I’m thinking about [01:16:00] dating, right? And there’s some surface level dating, right? So let’s just say that there’s a, what is it? One of these swipe sort of apps

Simon: Tinder.

Scott: yeah, Tinder. Okay. If let’s say you’re a very attractive male or female in Tinder, you’re going to get a whole bunch of connections.

And I’d argue those are those very surface level connections. Oh, that’s great. She’s pretty, he’s handsome, whatever, right? So you’re scrolling past and unfortunately those 10 type individuals, they got bombarded with applications, right? the 10s maybe don’t, right? They’re less well known. To your point, they could still be a large company, right? Taking this analogy. They could still be a good person but they’re not necessarily getting the attention they should get and we’re just focusing everything on very surface level. And by the fact that you’re basically saying to someone hold on, this company has this skill, I’m sorry, can help you in this skill.

They’re of a certain size or whatever. They basically have a good personality. They’re going to be good for you long term, right? And so therefore, you might want to go on a [01:17:00] date with them. You might want to check them out. You’re giving them that backing and then you can probably end up with much better connections, long term relationships, it’s not just based off one image of someone. And as you said, it’s data. The fact that you’re not allowing someone, sorry to continue with this analogy, you’re not allowing someone to take a picture, get it at the right angle spruce it up with whatever, with Photoshop, make it look perfect. And instead you’re basically saying, these are the classes they took.

These are the grades that they got. These are their interests. You’re just getting the data. This says who the candidate is and give them a try. And Hey, this is who the employer is. Maybe give them a try and you’re making these connections that might not otherwise have happened probably going to form a longer term relationship.

Is that a

Simon: It’s a, that’s a very fair analogy. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. I’m not, no negative reaction from me on that. It is exactly that. It is past the superficial, she’s cute, he’s hot, whatever, reaction, to, you know what, he’s actually quite [01:18:00] smart, and he drives sensibly, and he makes me laugh.

Those kinds of things. Whey you talk to, when you talk to older people about why they’re still with their partner, it’s fun, dependable, makes me laugh reliable, smart, doesn’t make brash decisions, doesn’t drink like a fish from six in the morning kind of thing. Those are the things that float to the top.

And very few people in their forties say, Oh, I’m still with my wife because she’s smoking hot. Unless she’s, unless she’s 18 that, that’s not. Not the response you get. Yeah, we try and get past that superficial. There’s much more to becoming a good employee than getting a good grade.

Interestingly enough, I was at an AmCham event, I guess it was six or eight weeks ago, where the, the ticket, the top of the ticket of lessons learned was the best graduates don’t make the best employees.

It’s about fit, it’s about humility, it’s about openness, it’s about communication skills, it’s about adaptability. Those are [01:19:00] the criteria that people look for, and no one has that. Except Tinman. It’s exactly the kind of stuff that we track. Because those things are, go with you across, they are transferable skills.

In the tests that we provide is called transferable skills. Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning, Numeric Reasoning and so forth. And they are independent of the job you do. And they do change but they change slowly over time. So they change with training. So we are just trying to provide that accuracy of finding people.

We provide more data than most companies will need to use to find people so we have nearly 20 coefficients of data. Most people will use three or four. What that means is that they can make a bunch of hiring using these four, and then next year they drop this one and they add that instead and they see how it works out, and they can continuously improve the way [01:20:00] that they engage with young people and, get better at it.

Thai people, don’t spend time to understand value as much as they could. And they also don’t dive much beyond the sort of the headlines when it comes to companies. Yeah. So everybody wants to, if you’re an engineer at a vocational school, you want to work for the people that make Toyota or, or Miss BMW now and, Ducati, but there are lots of second tier companies in Thailand who are suppliers to Ducati and BMW, who are excellent employers and world leaders in their space and billion dollar companies.

But because they make a part that you don’t see. It’s not the badge on the front of the hood of the car. These students don’t know about them. And in many cases, they’re better places to work. Knowing that company exists and being able to connect to them based on alignment and fit should not only help students find work that they’ll stay at, [01:21:00] but will help a lot of these non brand name companies get access to people who will support their, their vision and mission and so forth. Hopefully we’re burning the candle on both ends in terms of delivering value for both sides of that platform.

Scott: I love that too. I’m thinking of your example of Ducati. It’s that if you are applying to work at Ducati and you have, there’s a long line of people that want to do that or that are applying. And then you may or may not get the job. And if you get the job, the point is you’re somewhat replaceable because there’s a long line of people that want that job. And as a, as a recent graduate, you really need to prove yourself. And it almost is maybe even hard to prove yourself in Ducati because you’re going to have an entry level position. Whereas if you maybe go the side door, which I’m always proponent of, it’s don’t necessarily go down the path that everyone else is going down. And if you instead go to a, maybe lesser known employer, as you said, it could be a great employer could actually be very prestigious and ingrained and well known in the international market, maybe just not headline [01:22:00] as, as well known. And then so you work for them. in one scenario you work for them and you love it so much that you stay there. Who knows? That could be a ten year career or whatever. Or maybe You learn a ton, provide a ton of value and prove yourself over two to three years. Then if you moved over to Ducati, they probably really want to work with you because you’ve already proven yourself to work for someone that, indirectly is working with them or is a supplier to them or whatever it may be. And you’ve already shown that you can do this thing. And now you’re probably going to get a much better position in Ducati than going in the front door. As you said it’s important to look past the headline or the name in some cases. Sometimes it goes a slightly different approach, and you can have a much better career, and it’s really a win, because like I said, as long as you can prove yourself, now you’ve got that first job that you needed, now you enjoy it, you’re probably getting treated pretty nicely, because maybe that employer doesn’t get as many applicants or whatever else, right? And you shouldn’t use that employer, but what you should do is, give that employer a benefit, because that’s going to help you get another job if you do choose in the future to leave. Think a little more long term [01:23:00] on this, but if you do, payoff is there, right?

Simon: I, I agree wholeheartedly. I’d also say that smaller companies are just so much more fun to work at than large companies. There’s so much protocol and process and paperwork. It’s like going to the bank at some companies, the amount of paperwork you have to sign. But small companies are more dynamic.

Small companies are the source of innovation in any market, big companies just continue to do what they do because it takes a long time to, to change their direction. You like excitement dynamicism, don’t go work for the big banks and the big manufacturers. Go work for their, their number one supplier of some component part.

That’s critical to a car or a motorcycle or whatever and make your name there, for sure.

Scott: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I do a lot of consulting advisory and part time leadership for small businesses exclusively and it’s because of those reasons that you mentioned. It’s that it’s a lot more fun. You can have a lot more impact. And so for me as an advisor, I can actually steer the ship [01:24:00] more.

I can actually make sure that company’s headed in the right direction as opposed to, checking boxes or whatever, which isn’t as rewarding. So you actually want to have a little bit more of an impact. Yeah, totally agree. With that, I really appreciate the time, Simon. I think you’ve shared a ton.

Your experience here in Thailand is great. Hopefully we’ll get you back on another episode to talk through some of the other history you’ve had, because we ended at around 1997 or so in terms of your history here in Thailand, but I want to leave it with your the best way to get in touch with you.

So if someone is either looking to learn more about Tinman, what’s the best way to get in touch? Or if they’re just, want to sit down with you for a few beers and in here some very interesting stories, which there’s some we didn’t touch on yet. There are a lot of interesting stories you have.

What’s the way to get in touch with you for that as well?

Simon: So I think people interested in Tinman they can find Tinman Asia on LinkedIn, or tinman-asia.com for our website. And then Simon Birkett at LinkedIn.

There’s only one. There’s more than one Simon Birkett, but there’s only one in Bangkok. And it’s the guy with the great haircut. Reach out to me and I’ll say [01:25:00] hi.

Scott: Thanks again, Simon. Really appreciate it.

Simon: Not at all. Thanks for having me.

Scott: Well, I hope you enjoyed the episode. A big thank you to Simon for sharing his journey with us. If you are a business owner looking to hire recent graduates, or if you have any connections with local universities that are trying to help their students get better matched to employers here in Thailand, be sure to reach out to Simon on LinkedIn or visit tinman-asia.com

I’ve included links in the show notes. If you got value out of this episode, please subscribe, share, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. I hope you learned something and I’ll catch you on the next one.