With the advent of technologies, everyone can now become an entrepreneur easily and effortlessly. The only question remains how to Crack the Entrepreneur Code so that you will not just aim at surviving but thriving in your business to help more people who need your expertise.
Jack HM Wong, Founder & Senior Managing Partner of WHM Consulting Pte Ltd, is a serial entrepreneur and a business strategist with more than 23 years of international tax experience. His expertise includes helping other authors, speakers, trainers, and coaches by turning their brilliant ideas in their head into tangible and viable business structures with proper documentation that are transferrable, duplicable, and replicable.
A sales expert with 20 years of under fire experience and a Licensed Trainer in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Jack has also trained over 500 business owners & entrepreneurs worldwide on the secrets, the science and the system on how they can supercharge their sales revenue by up to 300% in 90 seconds or less using a proven system endorsed by San Francisco State University.
Prior to founding his company, Jack spent a total of 17 years in the corporate world, working in one of the world largest international accounting firms and one of the world largest international law firms. At the age of 42, Jack saw his career at a dead end and decided to jump out of the plane to venture out in the world of entrepreneurship. With the help of his business coaches and mentors, Jack managed to hit a six-figure business within the first three years.
In 2015, Jack published his book, Cracking the Entrepreneur Code: 7 Tips to Build the Business You Always Wanted with the aim of helping people who are stuck in the rat race to realize that they can start any businesses using his seven (7) principles as discussed in his book to gain money and time freedom. This book was re-launched in February 2016 and became an Amazon Best Seller.
Jack lives in Singapore and is a father of 3 kids aged 16, 11 and 10. His mission is to improve the quality of lives of over 1 million people worldwide, including both employees and entrepreneurs.
Where did the idea for Cracking the Entrepreneur Code come from?
I spent 17 years of my life working in PricewaterhouseCoopers and Baker McKenzie without even dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur. The traditional education system did a fantastic job to equip me with becoming an excellent employee but never taught me anything on entrepreneurship. When I decided to jump out of the plane and step into the world of entrepreneurship, I basically did not know many things. Apart from figuring out things by myself, I consulted my business coaches and mentors and learned a lot from them.
So, I decided to use the title Cracking the Entrepreneur Code for my book to describe the first three years of my entrepreneurship journey and hopefully, my readers can learn from my experience and the mistakes I made, and realize that they too, can start any businesses they want.
What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?
My typical day includes having a nice breakfast and doing my gratitude exercise. I do this so that I can ground myself before I even start my other tasks. I spend at least 30 minutes a day to read anything on the internet that can inspire me to come up with new ideas to improve my business. I prioritize my tasks using the principle of priorities – attending to something that is important to me and my business as opposed to something that is urgent. I also use my online calendar to plan out my meetings, phone calls, and training sessions. One thing I have trained my clients over the years is not to call me suddenly. It is not because I don’t like to take clients’ call but I want to be prepared in advance. With this move, my discussion with my clients can be more focused and would not be a waste time.
How do you bring ideas to life?
If I have an idea for something that will help me grow my business, I will text my team members and invite them to give me their opinion. I strongly believe that we all have blind spots and thus, brainstorming with my team members is very useful. Eventually, when the team agrees to implement the ideas, we will make sure that we document the process properly so as to create the systems needed and make sure that there is some form of legal protection for the ideas.
What’s one trend that excites you?
One trend that excites me is that clients are willing to pay high dollars when they receive values from our services. We educate our clients of our values and deliverables instead of going for projects based on low pricing. Our company believes in working with a handful of high-quality clients who can afford our services as opposed to serving a large quantity of clients who are considered “problem children”, always asking for discounts or lowering our prices.
What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?
Apart from doing my daily gratitude exercise, my business has put in place something called the “Code of Honour”, a concept which I learn from my coach, Mr. Blair Singer, Rich Dad advisor for Mr. Robert Kiyosaki, in sales and team development. Under our Code, team members agree to do whatever it takes to deliver what we say we will do for our clients provided they are legal, moral, and ethical. We are quite client-focused because this enables us to create a higher lifetime value for each of our high-quality clients.
What advice would you give your younger self?
I would have told my younger self that he has many choices in life. Everything is possible and it’s only a question of strategies. He has a choice of becoming an employee to work for other people or becoming an entrepreneur. I so wish some wise people could have given me this awareness a few decades ago.
Tell us something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on?
It is this statement: “Entrepreneurship is about taking a risk.” Perhaps under the traditional education system, I was conditioned not to make any mistakes because mistakes meant punishment. Robert Kiyosaki has summed up this point well because an entrepreneur will make mistakes, in fact lots of mistakes. However, each mistake can be seen as a valuable lesson. So, entrepreneurs have to take some form of risk. Notice that there is a difference between taking a risk and becoming “risky”. Being risky could suggest that we are “off the board” (i.e. out of business). Therefore, a good entrepreneur is a good risk assessor actually.
As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?
I would say “never quit” because when we quit, that’s the end of our entrepreneurship journey. It is important for us to believe that when we are making the right moves in our business, there will be a huge pay off one day. Of course, we don’t know what it is and when it happens. However, one thing that is certain is that the payoff will never come when we decide to throw the white tower.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?
I would say it’s coaching. Many people see coaching cost them money but what I learn from my coach is that coaching actually helps me make money. Why is that so? It’s because I don’t know what I don’t know. I can spend time trying to figure out things by myself but what if I seek my coach’s input and I can get the answer almost immediately that allows me to move forward. Coaching actually has shortened my learning curve tremendously in my entrepreneurship journey.
What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?
Based on my corporate world experience, it is difficult for me to say “no” to my clients. Somehow, I have been conditioned with this habit of not saying “no” to my clients when I started my entrepreneurship journey. During the initial phase of my business, it was all right because every “yes” was translated into a piece of work or project. However, in my third year, I noticed that I was not able to deliver quality work to my clients because I had so much work to do. It is at that point I learned that it is all right to say “no” to some clients so long as they understand my intention. Good clients would understand my intention.
What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
One thing we’ve come across many times when we are working with our clients is the difficulty of building a champion team. The question is how to do it. The idea of building a champion team is very straightforward and involves the following steps:
a. List down your own personal values
b. For each personal value, state the applicable rule. You can ask yourself this question “For what must happen for this value to be elicited?”
From my experience, you will start attracting people like you whose values are similar to yours as soon as you complete the above process. It’s pretty amazing!
What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?
I deploy accelerated learning methods when I give training to my clients and this requires the use of flip chart paper and jumbo markers instead of power point slides. So, I would not hesitate to invest in good quality jumbo markers (Artline 100 and Pilot SCX-6600A) because every flip chart I draw is a valuable lesson to my clients. So, getting right tools for me is an important step.
What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
I deploy several services from Fiverr.com, including creating and distributing press releases relevant to my business, creating logos for my new services, and also modifying my websites. I have learned that these tasks do not actually make me any money in my business and therefore, they should be outsourced to other people and thus, free up my time to come up with new ideas to improve my business instead.
What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?
As a student of Mr. Blair Singer, I would always recommend his book Little Voice Mastery – Learn How to Win the War Between Your Ears in 30 Seconds or Less and Have an Extraordinary Life. The reality is that we all have little voices going between our ears. If we accept these little voices’ suggestion, we will likely stay put and nothing will happen. So Blair in this book has offered 21 proven techniques which he spent over US$500,000 to learn from other people and shared with us how we can mitigate our little voices easily. It is an absolutely essential reading for all entrepreneurs from my experience.
What is your favorite quote?
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader” ~ John Quincy Adams
Key Learnings:
• Start your day by grounding yourself first.
• Apply the principle of priority and deal with matters that are important instead of urgent.
• It is all right to say “no” to your clients when you have to, rather than saying “yes” to them but you cannot deliver high quality of services to them.
• When you are aware of your personal value, you will be able to build your championship team.
• Read Little Voice Mastery by Blair Singer to master your own little voices to enable you to move forward in your business.
Connect:
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Carlyn runs the day-to-day publishing operation here at ideamensch and interacts with our awesome customers and entrepreneurs. She is likely editing this with a cat on her lap.