This article is about some of the toughest obstacles I’ve faced in my life and how I challenged the boundaries of what I could do in order to achieve success. It’s a story of #nolimits, a spirit I share with Audi, a brand that stands for progressiveness, sportiness and sophistication and sponsored this article.

————–

I recently stumbled upon a quote by the author Isabelle Allende.

My life is about ups and downs, great joys and great losses.

I thought it was a great quote. One that made me reflect upon my own life and realize that where we are today in life is a sum of all our experiences; the obstacles and setbacks that test our limits to the point of giving up and the feeling of accomplishment that comes with beating the odds and achieving our dreams.

I think I’ve lived a very blessed life and I have many reasons to be thankful. But as much as the up’s are great I believe that it is the down’s that define us. Surviving these down’s, overcoming what looks like insurmountable challenges is what makes us stronger and possibly better people.

So for today’s article though I want to talk about some of my tougher challenges I’ve had to face and how I overcame them. These were the most difficult times I had in my life:

1) Growing up with eye ptosis

I was born with a conditioned called eye ptosis where the muscle for my eyelid was too weak to open one of my eyes. Doctors told my parents that if I didn’t go for surgery to correct this, I might eventually lose the sight for that particular eye. So to prevent that, I went through surgery at the young age of 3 years old.

I emerged from the surgery without the risk of losing eyesight with either of my eyes but the defect was still obvious. My left eye was still noticeably smaller than my right eye all the time.

I grew up like that and got called all sorts of names in school. Everything from “cock-eye” (even though I wasn’t technically cock-eyed) to the Hunchback of Notre Dame (it didn’t help that the Disney animation that came out around that time depicted the hunchback with eyes just like mine was).

It was a difficult time for me. Throughout my years growing I would blame my parents, wallow in self-pity and even exhibit some self-destructive tendencies

When I hit the age of 15 though, suddenly I had an awakening. I was as if I had spent out my quota of self-pity and blaming other people for my circumstances, so I actually decided to do something about it. An eye doctor told me that I could go for another surgery to correct it…or I could take a more natural but harder route involving the patching up of my strong eye in order to force my weaker eye to strengthen itself through constant usage. I decided to do that and for a year or so I spent half a day using just my weaker eye.

At the age of 17, I went to see that very same doctor that operated on me when I was a 3 year old toddler, and she performed a series of tests on my eyes that concluded that my efforts actually worked and my eyes were perfectly normal now.

2) Starting Nuffnang

I started Nuffnang with my friend Ming when we just fresh graduates, making it my first full-time job. Between the both of us, we didn’t have any business experience, advertising contacts or even a lot of money (RM150,000 startup capital in total… less than what it takes to start a café at that time).

We knew what we wanted though. We wanted to build a company focused on social media with fully staffed offices throughout the Asian region and a diversified, fast growing company with a great culture.

Along the way we made all sorts of mistakes and had our fair share of failures. In the first year, we didn’t learn quickly enough that getting sales doesn’t mean anything, unless you can collect the money. After that, we had failures in some of our other ventures including an expansion to Hong Kong, an ecommerce store called Jipaban and a number of other ventures.

The lucky thing for us was that our wins were bigger than our failures. So today the Netccentric Group (which Nuffnang is under) is a company that has almost 200 employees in 7 different offices around the Asia-Pacific region. With that RM150, 000 and no more outside funding the company has grown far beyond what I expected. It’s a constant reminder to me how sometimes we ourselves don’t know what we’re truly capable of and there is no limit to what we can achieve.

Achieving modest success in business has its own perks too. A few years after starting Nuffnang (and after years of reinvesting into the business), I rewarded myself with my first car. An Audi Q5.

3) Cycling 160KM over 6 hours

About a year ago I turned 30 and realized that I was no longer young. I wanted to do more cardio so I picked up cycling. Then on the 1st of February 2015 I went for my first century ride (160KM) ride. The adventure took me over 6 hours and I will always remember it as one of the most physically demanding things I had ever done.

In spite of all the training and dieting I did before I went for the race there were a few times when I felt like I had reached my limit and almost did feel like giving up. There were busses that went around the race to pick up people that wanted to give up and of the 1,500 participants, over 300 didn’t complete.

Believe it or not the one thing that pushed me so hard to complete it was that I was thinking to myself “I didn’t wake up so early, and travel so far to this race just to NOT FINISH. So I pushed on.

I finished it in the end with a timing of 6 hours 20 minutes or so. It was a great ride. I’ll definitely do it again. I just don’t know when 🙂

The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche once said “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger”. These past experiences have made me a believer of that quote. While going through these difficult times were painful and stressful, each time I passed it I felt stronger to face a bigger challenge in future. I suppose that’s what life is about: A constant test of our limits.

Moving on

While the past tells us how we became the person we are today, the future is going to tell us where we are going to be. I plan to live the rest of my life with zest and adventure, creating new experiences and storing new memories every day. In business, I hope to grow Netccentric to an even bigger company that creates more jobs. On a personal level,I hope to be involved in more sports. But more importantly on a family level, I hope to be a great husband and father to my little family that so depend on me.

I can imagine more challenges in my life ahead. I only pray and hope that I will have the strength, the heart, the resources and the people around me to help me through these difficult times. You can never choose the situation, but you can always choose how we respond. This is #nolimits

To discover more Audi #nolimits stories click here.

Starting a franchise is a good gateway into starting a business of your own. I have many friends from Entrepreneur’s Organization who have found great success in their business careers just for picking the right franchises and growing with the brands

I often ask why they choose to go down the franchise route instead of creating their own brand and their own business but they often say that the benefits outweigh the cons.  Among the benefits are the ability to leverage an existing brand that is well-known to even using the opportunity to learn more about a business and industry.

There are cons too of course, and in talking to my friends, I’ve taken away some learnings from their experiences in being a franchisee that I thought I’d share here.

Here’s what to look out for before you buy a franchise.

1) The Brand

How big is the brand of the franchise you want to bring in? A big part of what you’re buying is the brand and that’s what you’re hoping to leverage on.

A big enough brand would be able to drive sales for you without a significant investment in marketing.

Some companies now start franchising their outlets from their really early days before their brand is well-known in order to expand quickly.

The downside of going for franchises like that is that you really then have to rely on a strong product to sell because the brand won’t be able to give you much help.

2) The Management

When you buy a franchise you aren’t buying a company. You’re buying the license to sell a company’s products the way they do it. You have no control of the direction of the company or which products they choose to sell or discontinue. All these things are made at the franchisor’s level and then just passed down to you. So to buy a franchise is to invest not only in yourself but to invest in the management behind the franchise.

Check the track record of the management and decide if you believe in them.

3) Location

Many franchisors already have set locations in malls where they know they want to open. This is helpful because it gives you a bit of a head start but don’t take it at face value. Visit the area, do your own research and find out if the product you’re going to be selling will sell well in the location you plan to sell it at. Look around to see if there are competitors too.

If you’re taking on a good brand with a decent product, the thing that normally makes or breaks your business is the location. So put a lot of thought into this because once you’re committed to one location, you can’t move without losing your sunk cost.

4) How much it costs?

Just like all businesses ventures, before we invest into them we have to look at the return on capital. Sure a bigger and more established brand will likely cost you more but if you do your math and the cost is way more than the potential return on investment you could get then perhaps it’s worth a pass.

It’s important to look beyond the costs and into any potential hidden costs. Anything from deposits to the landlord which can be substantial if you’re in a mall, employee insurance plans, or even interest cost of loans (if you have to borrow money).

It’s also important to look at the long term costs. Some principles require that you constantly open X number of stores every year. So a good portion of whatever you earn ends up being reinvested back into the business which is great because if you’re successful you’ll end up with a hundred stores in time… but it could be bad if you have more short-medium term financial goals.

5) Support from the franchisor

This is one of the most important things that my friends constantly reminded me of. Some have been in businesses where they feel the franchisor didn’t give them the support or the training they needed to excel and grow the business to the next level. Coupled with the fact that as a franchisee there are limitations on what you could do, they eventually get stuck. It’s a frustrating experience to be stuck in a business and helpless in being able to do anything to solve it.

Sponsored: Since we’re talking about franchising, here’s an interesting franchise opportunity that’s available now.

Senheng (Yes the electrical shop that has been around for decades) is now providing franchise opportunities to wannabe entrepreneurs. I thought Senheng’s approach was interesting because they have the Senheng Franchise Academy that focuses on first training you from a Sales Associate to a Store Manager and beyond.

On top of that they provide financing opportunities so you could start your own franchise business with them with no up front cost. You can find out more here.