Ep520: Nattaphol Vimolchalao – Experience in a Multinational Is Not Enough to Run a Startup

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risk but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives to reduce risk in your alliance, go to my worst investment ever.com today and take the risk reduction assessment I've created from a lessons I've learned from all of my guests. It's time to start building wealth the easy way by reducing risk. Fellow risk takers this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, not upon we won't allow not upon. Are you ready to rock?

Nattaphol Vimolchalao 00:49
Yes, yes, I'm ready.

Andrew Stotz 00:50
I'm happy to have you on the mission. Let me introduce you to the audience. Ladies and gentlemen not upon or we're gonna call him by his nickname golf is the CEO of Siam, Raja Tawny public company, limited sourcing business personnel and rental business. The company started as an agricultural business and later expanded to outsourcing services. Now it is the leading outsource servicing service company in Thailand, knots upon his has a bachelor's degree in physics, from the University of Manchester, he finished his master's degree in technology policy, micro and nanotechnology enterprise from the University of Cambridge, golf, take a minute and tell us about the value that you bring to the world.

Nattaphol Vimolchalao 01:37
Oh, that's, that's hard. Like to our company, we just want to use our outsourcing capabilities, so that our customers can focus in a call business, and all support functions, so can help take care to that that's, I'm projecting my values to the world through our company's work.

Andrew Stotz 02:00
What kind of company or let's say individual, you know, what kind of pain are they feeling that they would say they need your services?

Nattaphol Vimolchalao 02:08
Yeah, so something that distract them from their core business, for example, hospital, hospital is set up to, to give the patients the best care, they could, not trying to find valet services, not trying to find, you know, the administrators that sitting on the desk, telling the sick patients where to go and give you more informations, we supply all that, and also payroll. So all those supporting functions that the core business, we try to get out of your way. So you can really spend 100% of your effort on what you actually set up the company to do, right. And just like that, hospitals should be more focused on curing patients not doing other support functions.

Andrew Stotz 02:52
That's, that's so true. I know, a lot of CEOs are so frustrated with having to deal with admin and all that stuff, when they just constantly feel like I just want to get back to what we'd been doing what we started to do. So great, great service. And for those people that are in Thailand, I'll have links in the show notes to the service so that you can check it out. So now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking will be tell us about the circumstances leading up to and then tell us your story.

Nattaphol Vimolchalao 03:24
Alright, so you know, it's actually the experience I had before I joined. So it was polymer component company. We were looking at ways to create more value to our compound because we think compound compounds are becoming a commodity so we one of the things that we look at was medical devices. So when we want to look at micro devices, we want to set up a trading medical device trading firm first, so we can see the market before we actually build a factory to take up pellets for them a compound pellets and created into finished products. Right we invested three around like 10 million baht into this French's I started since day one design the logo, think of the name hide first employee. And I'm also the one that fired all the employee. And, you know, not they didn't do anything wrong, but then the company is not surviving. Cash flow was negative since it was started, never become positive. And to add, I was shutting the company down. So you know, I have no one else to blame. It's just me 100% But um, I was just really fresh out of university. And all my experience was and I was an engineer at Procter and Gamble. It was a fast track before and I thought I would be able to make it because I went to one of the best school in the world, doing what the hardest subject in the world went to the best company in the world. known for doing manufacturing, it was a fast track, I thought I would never fail. But um, but you know, being a CEO and a leader of companies is really different. And you need to keep your eye open. And the scary thing is sometimes you don't know what you don't know. And that's, that's really on your blind spot. And it's really hard to know that so and you know, looking back right is even though I lost 10 million baht right, and it's not even my money, it's that's what make it even worse is from the family office trying to set this up. This was really what making me a better leader through all this failures and and and reinventions and try to rescue it and try to find that this is what I don't know, I don't know. And now it's causing the company to collapse. Right. And I've learned a lot Well, the thing I learned a lot is that, you know, managing a startup, midsize company, a listed company, or multinational companies is really different. And, and, and someone who is successful one doesn't mean that that will be successful at another, because it's literally like a different animal, the way you use your resources, the way you organize your organization is totally different. And that's one of the key learning I do know. And then yeah, so I hide my, my, the person who had bought could lead this from a world class medical device company. And she never worked in a small startup, she always worked at the big multinational medical device companies. And the way she goes about it is totally wrong. From day one, a lot of costs involve a lot of processes that could be done by one people, by one person, but instead of hiring five, because you know, that's how the setup was when when you are really big company, you have one for each role. And one, that's why to do everything, and keep the cost down and try to really understand product market fit. And yeah, so it's and I didn't keep track on the finance, right? It's a failure for a CEO to not know that you're burning, like three 400,000 baht per month. Because your second command that you hired to set up this company is hiring a lot of people, right. So I was busy visiting hospitals, talking to doctors, and telling them about the technical knowledge for the machines. And she was hiring all the back end stuff, which, which I agree to as well, right. But for the first two, three, and I asked that, you know, I took you from a really big company, I should trust you, so whatever you do, I trust just do it. Right. And that's another failure. I did so many things, you know, maybe you're an experienced interviewer, maybe you can automate, and make it more structured. Um, just

Andrew Stotz 08:03
one question is, you know, if someone looks at you right now, as well as looks at your background, your education, it's, you know, the, you're a successful person, you're a smart person. Can you remember the moment that you kind of knew that you had to close this thing and that it wasn't gonna work? Yeah, like a worst moment or a worst day

Nattaphol Vimolchalao 08:27
is really shit actually, like this, excuse my language. It was really, really bad. Before this, I was always did really well, you know, to university to my work at professional companies, you know, like so. So I thought I expect success from this, right. And a lot of people expect me to do well, as well, from all the past successes, that's not relevant. And it was actually had to think, right. I can try and waste too much of my years trying to grow this company, right? Or I can go do something else. But I have to admit that I fail a company and I have, I have run company for since its foundation to its closing down on my own and have that as a big boon in my like, so called, like, historical performance, then, you know, after sitting down I realized that I could be doing a lot more impactful things run doing medical device is after learning about the industry is not as great as people from the outside looked. And I don't think any medical device company is a good business to be honest for me, right? It's hard to scale. And another word is about how do you please a cinco doctor that is really demanding so maybe they can be like medical doctors, you're not allowed to make an appointment. So you need to go and wait for him. So sometimes one day you can only meet one Have this and it's a total waste of time. So, with that in mind, I decided that I better shut this down and do something else. But then I also learned that maybe something that looks great from outside, you know, you see that, you know, the cost of the maker device is x, when you sell it for x. You know, that's the reason for this Forex craze, it's the difficulty of dealing with the clients, which is medical doctor.

Andrew Stotz 10:27
Yep, maybe I'll just summarize a couple of things I take away, I mean, the one thing you talked about was coming from big business. And it's almost always a recipe for disaster. Because it big business, you just have so many resources at your hand, you need five new staff that are highly qualified, you just talk to their human resource department, you need to look at the financial statements and breakdowns of your division, you just talk to the finance, guys. But when you're doing business on your own, you're doing everything. So that's kind of a great lesson for the listeners out there to think about, if you're setting up a business, be careful about inviting people who have experienced in big business, because they may be shocked when they find out that there's not a lot of support. The second thing that I took away is that to be successful in business brains are not enough. It's a combination of many things to get it right. The way you work with people, the products that you choose, the way you build out a sales team, you know, so many things come together. And you know, brains and even experience, as we've talked about in big business is not enough. It's all got to come together. And the third thing is you mentioned about finance. And I think one of the things that I've seen is a lot of CEOs and a lot of business people, their finances are a mess. Their accounting and finance is just not delivering the financial statements and think that they need to really understand their business. And in many cases, they may not want it to be clear, because it's scary, what it shows. So those are some of the things I take away anything you would add to that.

Nattaphol Vimolchalao 12:00
I'm not really think it's spot on.

Andrew Stotz 12:04
So let me ask you, what is your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Nattaphol Vimolchalao 12:10
Number one goal? So I want to scale our technology divisions to have a sizable income from our human resources fees. Yeah, so that's my goal. I can tell you a little bit about S O, which is our ticker symbols for Yeah. So we have 10,000 staff, working as an outsourcing employees for our customers in totally different field, right. And, you know, as we start to develop our own technology stack, to put inside that so we can manage our staff more efficiently. And then our customer sees it, and they want to use it too, right? So it gives me a really good idea that so is basically a really big sandbox for technological startup, right? Technological startup, you can really scale it quite a bit. Because you don't need you to have you don't have a lot of CapEx, you can just Yeah, yeah, you don't need human to work on a one to post on a server it can grow. So it's something that I want to start growing. But then when we first build that technology stack for ourselves, right, just for ourselves, the flexibility or not that the load is not there. So we build everything in a mono left layer, rather than micro services. So you have a lot of scale abilities. And when you've a certain module fails, you cannot split it. So you can fix a certain modules. So we do that right now. And it's quite hard just went from a company that's really good with the people really efficient into a tech company. And now the tech talent really rad so that's my goal for next 12 months to really scale our technology divisions. And to make a sizable income, which is sizeable, meaning more than double digit contribution, revenue.

Andrew Stotz 13:59
Fantastic. It's interesting, because you're talking about really developing software that you're using, and then starting to apply it to your customers, that gets you a whole new level of feedback that allows you then to improve that software, and then really, you know, have something that can bring value to companies. So that's exciting.

Nattaphol Vimolchalao 14:21
And we start from and we started, we start from within, you know, to be honest. So we see this pain for us, when we created it, we know the return from us reducing that cost is already worth it in building software. So we never once in our cycle, burn money to create a software and try to create a user base, right? So we already test product market fit with us because we have so many customers from different fields. And once they start using it we see there's a fit that and once you see that as a fit that you can invest a lot in, in actually scaling it right.

Andrew Stotz 14:58
Yeah. Exciting. Well There you have it listeners another story of loss to keep you winning. If you haven't yet taken the risk reduction assessment, I challenge you to go to my worst investment ever.com right now and start building wealth the easy way by reducing risk. As we conclude golf, I want to thank you again for coming on the show and joining our mission. On behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Nattaphol Vimolchalao 15:31
Just don't give up. Yes, that's, that's really important. Because I, to be honest, like, my worst failure, the thing that really drives me forward now. And every single success I have now it's that word fail it actually a big part of it that shaped who I am today. So please just work on and even in how big to fail. It seems to be at that moment. When you look back in five or 10 years time, it's really little. It's reflecting back.

Andrew Stotz 16:05
Great words of advice. And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our wealth. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, this podcast is about one guest one story, one mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. Fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you. Thank you, Andrew. Yep,

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