Author: pkfavantedge (Page 30 of 37)

MSC status for Rakuten Malaysia

February 25, 2015 / pkfavantedge / 0 Comments

Congratulations, Rakuten Malaysia for attaining your MSC Status!

One of our services is to provide consultancy and program management for MSC application and attainment. It helps that we have gone through the MSC status approval ourselves, but in general, any company intending for MSC needs to be aware that there is some work involved.

In general, you need to understand that you can do this on your own. There is no requirement whereby an independent third party is needed. That being said, in order to smoothen out the process, usually, someone who has gone through the process should be able to assist in a lot of areas. We are pretty flexible in how we work with our clients. For some, our involvement is very heavy, from writing business cases to financial projections etc. For others, we basically advise and manage the communications between MDEC and the company – which is less hectic, but more work for the client. Mostly, our clients come to us because they want MSC due to the tax breaks, and they have better things to do than to go back and forth with MDEC to iron out the business plan and stuff. For us, this IS our ‘better thing to do’, so you get a complete focus and a guarantee success fee attached to our quote.

Once you have decided to go for MSC, we will sit with you to decide on which is the best sector to go in for. Infotech, Creative Multimedia, Global Outsourcing, with each breaking up into subsets of their own. It’s easier said than done actually, because (strangely) sometimes the MSC activities might not be your core focus activities. For instance if you are a reseller, then trading cannot be part of your activities. If you are training, you cannot put that into your activities. However, if you have a branch out R&D or software development, you could technically park those as MSC.

After the decision, we fill in a pre-application form, then follow up with the business analyst. Not all BAs are created equal. We know because we have dealt with a whole train of them. Some are better than others – and we generally jostle to get the better ones for our client.

From there the bulk of the work is in defining the business and financial plan. There is more work than meets the eye here, because there will be a lot of back and forth with the BA before he/she is comfortable to present it. You generally will face some issues – we have faced more than our share – and having a good BA and a good rapport with MDEC is key to get things done here, both of which we will attain.

Once the BA is more or less ready – in general you are fine. However, like in this case, there were still a lot of clarifications to be done. I had to meet with the strategists and head of programs for MDEC in order to push our approval through, in terms of explaining to them our viewpoint. Where MDEC needs to improve is in how they view different business models and revenue models, especially in dynamic environments like cloud applications and such.

Overall, we give up to 75% of our fees as success based (means, no payment until certification). In some special cases, it’s even 100%, means there is no outlay (except for the RM2000 application fee direct to MDEC), until you get your cert.

If you need more information, feel free to contact us at avantedge@pkfmalaysia.com.

Agrobank Launches Agro Visa Debit-i Card

February 24, 2015 / pkfavantedge / 0 Comments

Today, we attended Agrobank’s launch of their Visa Debit-i Card at Wisma Tani, Putrajaya. It was an early event, at around 9 am, but even so, the hall was packed with media, vendors (like ourselves) as well as Agrobank’s personnel. It was a big event.

The fact of the matter was that we’ve been with Agrobank on this journey for more than a year. I recall when we first met and I sat opposite a panel of evaluators and them asking me why our compliance program was the best. I answered frankly, because we are completely devoted to our services to our clients. We might not always make all the right moves all the time, and there might be some hiccups along the way of a very long compliance journey for a bank – but what we can guarantee is a fanatical customer support and customer experience. That’s all we have. We are not a big company with a big name to hide behind.

To me – the satisfaction of being invited to one of their biggest event of the year is a testament to their satisfaction of us.

After the event, our Agrobank account manager heading the card services thanked us personally despite her being pulled by other urgent matters, and media activities.

Sometimes, simple thank yous are good signposts and indications that we are doing something right in our business. Here’s looking to a great 2015.

PCI-DSS Training Available – HRDF

December 30, 2014 / pkfavantedge / 2 Comments

We have recently launched our PCI-DSS Principles v3.0 training that is HRDF refundable!

Details here, please email avantedge@pkfmalaysia.com for more details.

Self Sabotaging 101

November 4, 2014 / pkfavantedge / 0 Comments

As we reach our year end 2014, and looking to break the million ringgit mark on revenue, I look back at the 4 years we have been in existence, since that March day in 2010, when I established this little company with just a vague idea of our strategic direction and services we want to offer.

I have encountered all sorts of characters in both my corporate career, that spanned about 11 years to my business career, from the typical foul mouthed business guy who turns into a great friend after a few encounters, to the typical backstabbers who would say good things about you and then turn around and seek to dump you in the mud. Naivety is the first casualty the moment we become business oriented people. But overall, only two persons in all my years stands out as people who were not only extremely pessimistic, but also extremely discouraging and probably a lesson we can all learn, to not self sabotage yourself or your business. The sad thing was that both of them were business people, and a reminder to me how NOT to be a business person.

1) The proverbial know it all – the first guy I met was very early in my business, when a good friend of mine introduced me to another friend of his. I wasn’t making any money then, and was struggling to get some business in. Instead of giving me some much needed advice, he went on to suddenly lambaste my business model as a failure and that I would not be able to generate any money by going into advisory, compliance and consulting. His business model of getting margins from products and not sharing it with a partnership (mine was a partnership), because he believed all profit should be his, as is all the work. I argued it was a different business model – that it was pros and ons on partnership, and that it allowed us to access more markets. Basically it wasn’t meeting of the minds, but I did not appreciate the way he stereotypically dismissed other business models and only went with what he knew.

Self Sabotaging #1: Going with the same strategy that made you successful and dismissing the rest as bollocks. I wonder where he is now, when the compliance industry is booming and his IT trading/margin business is being sliced down by competitors and direct principals. I still wish him all the best, but it doesn’t mean if one model works for you, it’s the only model for success.

2) The second is a little more clearcut – the proverbial alpha male owner. I met this guy when I was slightly more successful, when the ISMS business we had was picking up and we were getting some clients in. Now, I probably wasn’t that interested in developing internal professionals for this compliance (we were more inclined to invest in PCI-DSS), so we hooked up with an old friend of mine who had recently joined up another company specialising in ISMS and so we set a meeting with the owner. Immediately upon our meeting, he reminded me of people with typical alpha male syndrome. The way he shook hands, the way he aggressively sat, and the way he patronisingly downplayed my business and giving some advice I already knew about and immediately taking credit for the future success he guarantees it would bring. But I already have implemented it and was too lazy to argue with him. Alpha male syndrome generally is demonstrated by people who feels the need to prove themselves as the top of the heap, especially viewing other competitors, like other business owners.

While I wasn’t turned off (I just needed his guy), what completely cut us off was when after a few emails and calls went unreturned, he finally picked up my call, and when introduced again, he completely had no recollection who I was, and dismiss the call by saying, “I am too busy.” From then on, we received close to half a million worth of opportunities for ISMS that we did not channel to him. The best news we had was when my old friend announced that he had left that company recently.

Self Sabotaging #2: Drop the Alpha Male syndrome. It gets old. It works for the past generation maybe, but nobody likes a d**k. Nobody likes to work with a d**k or having to partner with one. Partnership, respect and openness is required. I never pick up a call and snap at anyone, even telemarketers. I actually talk to them and try to sell them my data protection act services, and most of the time, they just hastily hang up. Also, just a final note to Alpha Male wannabes: shake hands normally. I’ve encountered new recruits who shake hands like they want to break my hands like Dolph Lundgren, and flip their palms down as a show of dominance. That works, generally, if we are in the Planet of the Apes. We’re not. Stop it.