Afraid of failure

The person featured above is a man who has been through failure but now owns 3 of the best franchises in Malaysia. Many do not even know the franchises are from Malaysia as the name seems to suggest otherwise. George Ang currently owns the company, Revenue Valley Sdn Bhd, which operates Tony Roma's (this is an American brand), Manhattan's Fish Market (built from scratch) and Tokyo G (which was Sushi Groove before). He owns 2 failed franchises called The Fish Market which was closed when its parents company in New Zealand went bankrupt and another one called Hainan Kopitiam which was a concept taken by another franchise which is a runaway success. Nowadays, he did not regret those failures anymore as his stores are all success stories and not just in Malaysia but also in a few other countries.

That was also the gist of his talk when I was at an event featuring him as one of the speaker for the event. I have posted a post on the event entitled 1Malaysia Entrepreneurship Month about how the co-owner of YouthAsia, Khailee who said Youth of Today are Disconnected. George was the other speaker and he was an alumnus of the Sunway University College unlike Khailee and he cited the lecturers who was sitting in the front row as his inspirations and this injected a kind of nostalgic atmosphere a bit.

George showing us his company's major milestone

Although I was invited by my friend, Kid Chan, to see him talk at this event, the real reason I was there was to hear the Managing Director of Revenue Valley to divulge his secret to success. George Ang is very unassuming and the secret that he divulged was no secret at all. It is simply to not be afraid to fail.If you do fail, deal with it and think your way out of it. It will teach you how to be tough or tougher still if you are tough enough already.

I saw what he has achieved by looking at all his food outlets and although the program was for the university students, for someone like me, it was also important to remember that although we never planned for failure, we must always plan for any failure. Other than his story about failures, he also regaled us on how to run a successful restaurant franchise. His life story and how he built the company was interesting. I bet the students learnt a lot from all that.

For me, that advice about accepting failure and dealing with it is one of the highlight of the event...