How to Build a Sellable B2B Asset in Thailand (Avoid The Operator’s Trap)

[00:00:00] Scott Pressimone: If you run or lead a business in Thailand, the chances are you have faced the operator’s trap. This is a presentation that I gave at the Australian Thai Chamber of Commerce but I thought I’d give a really shortened version of this here just so everyone gets a quick glimpse about how you can actually overcome this challenge that again, is far too common.

[00:00:19] So to lay out the context here, There’s the external pressures, that’s the local market, that’s the competition,

[00:00:26] But what I’ve seen, and certainly something that I faced myself, is that we sometimes neglect the internal struggles Now as a result, what ends up happening is we build these really high maintenance machines. And if we’re doing that, that of course, what sort of business are we creating if it depends solely on us?

[00:00:44] So today what I’m gonna be talking through is how we can actually transition to a lower maintenance machine. One that may require some inputs from us, but not something that will require us to work all the time to make sure it’s running. And the reason we’re trying to do this is because if you’re a founder that of course our end goal is to build an asset that we can actually one day sell or that we can hand off to someone else.

[00:01:07] And I think something that can often happen though is, if we’re building a very high maintenance machine, then it’s actually difficult to sell our business. And it’s also difficult to hand it off because if you have a leader within your organization that you think you’d hand the company off to, well, you really have to ask yourself, is that a role that they actually want?

[00:01:26] Now, why do we actually face these problems? Why in Thailand, why as business owners or leaders?

[00:01:31] I believe that the big reason that we have these internal struggles within our companies is because we have battle scars. Because when we started a business, we had to, of course overcome a lot of financial risk.

[00:01:43] we’re used to essentially taking all the weight on our shoulders. And the case that I really wanna make today is that as much as that is in fact, what got us to succeed, right? The fact that we persevered through these really tough times.

[00:01:55] but I do believe it’s different than what’s gonna get us to the next stage.

[00:01:58] So what I wanna talk about today are these three pillars, how we can take actionable steps to really fix some of these things so we can build that lower maintenance machine that I talked about.

[00:02:07] And of course, the pillars are gonna be communication systems and innovation. Now for communication. we often say, my door is always open.

[00:02:18] If you have a problem and you say this to your whole team, then you can come to me. Now here in Thailand, we’d say, you know, send me a Slack message, send me a line message or a WhatsApp message. Anything goes wrong anytime, any day, go ahead and let me know because I don’t want these things to be buried under the rug.

[00:02:32] I am accessible. I am here for you. And we think that’s gonna keep us fast and connected. And again, it has its benefits, but it also has its downside if that’s what we’re trying to tell the people that, that that we manage.

[00:02:44] Because the result here is that we end up with this distraction policy. If you say that your door is always open, then people are always coming to you as an escalation point.

[00:02:53] And what it means is it means that you’re gonna constantly be distracted by people coming in and asking for help.

[00:02:58] Now another thing that I’ve seen working here especially is let’s say that you are an owner or a founder and you have a problem or you wanna have a meeting, right? And you ask your team, Hey, do you have a minute? Can you come in? Can you come into my office?

[00:03:10] they’re not gonna say, no, I’m too busy. Can I come later? Chances are they’re gonna say, sure, yeah, of course I have the time.

[00:03:16] But in their mind, they’re probably thinking, oh, the boss is gonna distract me again. When am I gonna actually get my work done? So I think the distraction goes both ways. It’s you distracting the team and also the team distracting you.

[00:03:28] So how do we actually go about solving this? Well, the first easy fix here is to have a daily standup meeting.

[00:03:34] This 15 minute meeting, maybe at 10:00 AM in the morning, and for everyone to stand up and to talk through what’s going on in their day. What are their wins, what things are going well, what’s their main focus for the day gonna be, and do they have any blockers? Is there anything that’s going wrong that they need help with? By just standing up and talking through these things in a short period of time this 15 minute window at the start of every day, what we’re doing is we’re batching things that otherwise would be spread out. Because remember, what we’re trying to combat is that distraction policy where everyone needs help, then they ask someone for the help in the moment, they need the help.

[00:04:09] And instead with this daily standup meeting, what we’re doing is we’re saying, Hey, every day at 10:00 AM we are gonna stand up, we’re gonna talk. And you’re gonna know that you always have a place to share. Now, One of the mistakes that I often see with these daily standup meetings is they can go off track, they can go long, they can go to an hour, right? We really wanna prevent that. The key is to have them literally, everyone standing up and everyone’s talking through these three major things, and we are not getting distracted and going down the track of trying to solve all the problems in the meeting.

[00:04:38] The other mistake I see people make with this is that they think, a daily meeting is too much.

[00:04:43] Let’s do this weekly. The reason this is a mistake is because if you have a weekly standup meeting or a weekly meeting, well now we know that if we have a problem let’s say on a Monday, we know it may be until the following Monday before we can actually talk to someone about it.

[00:04:58] And so as a result, we’re gonna end up sending those Slack messages, those team messages, we’re gonna distract people again. But by always knowing that we have that slot the following day, it means that we know we have someone to talk to in a short period of time.

[00:05:11] Now for the second pillar, we have systems. And we kind of had this assembly line idea in our minds. Let’s have an SOP for everything. Let’s have a process for everything. And while of course, this is good. Our end goal is maybe to create this perfect machine, this perfect process, and I would argue that that can also cause a problem as well.

[00:05:32] The first trap that this causes is that we’re actually building robots.

[00:05:36] Because if we have only SOPs and we basically say, Hey team, this is exactly how we do this every time. The reality is that things are gonna happen where those systems are gonna break. And if everyone knows how to follow the SOP, the question becomes do they know how to follow the process when the SOP breaks, when things go wrong, when we go outside of the lines, what happens? If you have a team of robots and you haven’t programmed everything in, then they’re gonna fall over and they’re not gonna know how to get up. And so that is definitely a trap. We have to be aware of.

[00:06:06] So how do we solve this?

[00:06:08] Well, it doesn’t mean that we don’t need SOPs, that we don’t need documentation. Of course, we want those things. But what we don’t wanna do is create those systems and then hand them off to a team of robots that are just supposed to execute.

[00:06:19] So what, instead we can do one of the fixes is to create a team of owners. And what that means is that everyone is owning a piece of the machine.

[00:06:26] And so we want owners behind everything within our organization rather than just having a process behind everything. We know who the owner is so that they can adapt that process. So they are the ones responsible for tweaking that process. And they feel that ownership, so they know if things go wrong, it’s up to them. And they actually have the ability to make changes rather than going to the owner or the boss every single time.

[00:06:48] The other thing that we need, of course, with this is if everything has an owner and it’s documented everything, everything also needs a backup. So when that person is outta town when they’re sick, who’s the person that’s gonna cover that particular part of the machine? So who’s that backup person or those backup individuals?

[00:07:03] And then the third thing that we probably want is who are the stakeholders? Who are the people that are gonna share ideas about how to improve this system and are gonna have some influence over this?

[00:07:11] Meaning that they can share their thoughts and we can all share our thoughts on things. But we know that the primary owner is the one for making the final decision.

[00:07:17] Now there’s another fix that I have for this, which is again, how we can overcome this, team of robots that, that don’t know what to do when, uh, when things go wrong.

[00:07:26] Having a pre-approved budget. I’m often surprised how by how often there’s not actually a budget. Let’s say a marketing team budget or a support team budget. Who actually owns a budget. To make sure that they’re making the right decisions versus just doing whatever the boss of the owner says.

[00:07:41] And so I think having a budget for different departments is very important. Maybe that’s a budget for when things go wrong, making sure that, uh, if things go wrong, there’s a certain budget that can be pulled from to help fix a problem.

[00:07:52] Maybe, uh, the customer service team made a mistake and they need to send something to fix that mistake off to a client.

[00:07:58] So giving them a budget, making sure there’s no permission needed for that. So if it’s a problem that can be fixed very quickly, let’s not make sure it doesn’t need to be escalated every single time. ’cause every small escalation that comes to an owner or a founder or a leader is something that’s, again, now another distraction.

[00:08:13] And it’s also creating the skin in the game. Because remember, ownership is gonna breed that judgment and judgment is what we really want out of our team members and teammates here. If we actually wanna make sure we’re building this lower maintenance machine we’re talking about.

[00:08:25] All right.

[00:08:26] The third pillar is innovation.

[00:08:27] And we always want these fresh ideas in our companies. We wanna make sure that, uh, the best idea is winning.

[00:08:32] But here’s what actually happens. More often than not, what I see is we want our teammates and our team members to speak up, but we really need to ask who actually has the true authority. Because if we’re getting everyone to speak up and we’re getting everyone to share in a meeting, but then when a decision is made, we actually are the ones with the veto power.

[00:08:52] As soon as we’re doing that and we’re showing and demonstrating that we have the veto power behind everything. All we’ve done is we’ve trained our team that they shouldn’t speak up.

[00:09:01] After all. If they speak up and they’re knocked down or their ideas knocked down, or if they speak up and share a problem and they’re, you know, basically told they did a bad job for something publicly, especially in Thailand is a bad idea, right? Then they’re just gonna go back into their shell. And so what we have to make sure of is that when there is a decision you, we don’t take final decision on, on everything. ’cause if we do, then the result is gonna be no one’s gonna speak up any longer. And it’s like we’re coaxing this turtle out of its shell and then we’re snapping our fingers, our veto power, and they’re gonna go right back into their shell.

[00:09:33] Another fix behind this is to think of the decisions that are being made into these two distinct categories. We have these one-way door and two-way door decisions. Now this was popularized by Jeff Bezos, but the idea here is that we need to think. Are the decisions that are being made or being proposed, are they ones that we can’t come back from?

[00:09:54] If it’s like a big acquisition, if it’s some huge decision that, uh, some huge expense That’s one that we wanna have that veto power. And we wanna make sure that we’re all meeting together to make a final decision together.

[00:10:06] That’s the one way door. But the opposite of that is the two way door decisions. And these are ones that we can come back from. these are the ones that we wanna make sure that we’re giving some decision making power and authority to the people that work in our companies and on our teams.

[00:10:20] Because if these smaller decisions, let’s say it’s a small marketing campaign that we wanna test out. Sometimes we would usually veto that, but if we just say, Hey, you know what? The team’s gonna try it. Let’s see if it works or not. If it doesn’t work, we can pivot, we can go back, right?

[00:10:34] of course that person’s gonna learn a lot more through that that learning experience when they see their own idea, fa fail. Right? And that’s what we want to do.

[00:10:42] So in summary, what are we really trying to do? We need to turn the noise into a rhythm, right?

[00:10:46] Number two was systems. So we’re gonna turn our tasks into outcomes. We’re gonna make sure there’s ownership where we know who the true owner is and they’re owning the outcome versus just some SOP that they’re told to follow and they don’t feel any ownership over.

[00:10:57] And number three is our innovation. We’re gonna get our innovation by not having a sole authority that’s making all the decisions to have all the veto power. Instead, we’re gonna have some distributed authority, so smaller decisions can be made without always escalating them.

[00:11:12] And what we’re really trying to avoid here is we don’t wanna be the tanker.

[00:11:14] We don’t wanna be the big company that’s very slow moving. But we also don’t wanna be, what I would say, a lot of small and mid-sized businesses end up being where they have that owner that they’re all relying on is that’s more like a jet ski. And that means that there’s one driver that’s adding the gas or hitting the brake and swerving left and right. We’re nimble. But because of these constant shifts and changes, you’re gonna cause employee churn.

[00:11:37] You’re gonna cause a lot of confusion in the organization. ’cause we’re kind of so nimble that again, we’re dizzying our team and we’re not all working together. It’s kind of one person driving the jet ski.

[00:11:47] So how do we actually unshackle ourselves? Well, we create a fleet, and that means that we might still be the head of that fleet.

[00:11:54] We might be the one pointing things in the direction we want to go, but we have different boats, different ships. They’re all headed in the same direction along with us with their own decision making power.

[00:12:05] And that is really the summary of it all. Now, I help small businesses go through these transitions.

[00:12:10] I help international businesses that are expanding into Thailand,

[00:12:13] So you can certainly contact me if you have any questions about any of this. But hopefully this provided some value to you and gave you some ideas on how you can actually build this machine that doesn’t rely on you, and you can actually take some of that weight off your own shoulders.