On 18 February 2017, we went to Style Laser Audio SDN BHD to conduct our interview. The interviewer (owner of the company), his name is Alfred Lee. He was being asked a series of questions regarding how he operate his own business for around 10 of years. Alfred started his business on 1st April 2007. Around that time, his wife, Canny Lim came up an idea of operating their own business instead of working in a corporation. He mentioned, this is to ensure there will be more income coming in instead of being paid the fixed wages. But what’s the most important, is that they could have more flexible time.
After they made up their mind, they decided to rent a shop lot at nearby Taman Connaught, Cheras to operate his business of electrical shop. The electrical shop is just few minutes distance away from his house so that transportation could not be a problem anymore. The idea of operating a electrical shop is he used to work as a contractor. Throughout the year, he needed a lot of raw materials to construct or renovate every single house. Consequently, he spends a great deal of money upon the cost of raw material. By operating an electrical shop on their own, they managed to get the raw material at a lower cost. This big convenience brought them to run their own electrical shop.
The electrical shop, name Style Laser Audio SDN BHD, literally, the form of business is partnership, where Alfred is the main owner of this shop, while his wife works as a limited partner, which is his wife will only invest money in the business but does not have any management responsibility or liability for losses beyond her investment (She has his own company to manage).
According to Alfred Lee, the uniqueness about his business is that it provides several household goods and daily supplies to the customers despite of it just provide electrical appliances to the contractors or workers. We can barely see any electrical shop which have sell goods of housewives, including slice, usual array of pots and etc like Style Laser SDN BHD do.
About the employees on his business, Alfred stated that he has five employees in total, each and every one of them being distributed with different daily tasks, one work as an accountant, one work as a cashier, another three of the workers’ work are to move the electronic appliances to the customers’ lorries or any heavy manual labour. On top of that, we asked him about his preferences of the attitude among the employees, Alfred said that he appreciate so much about his employees’ loyalty, hardworking and the willingness to learn.
However, he mentioned, during the first time most of the workers came to work, they had got no knowledge about that particular field they are currently working on, and how was he going to train the workers was that, everything is about practices. The workers may make a fault on a task for the first time, second time or even the third time. But thanks to Alfred’s patience, he managed to accompany his employees to go through the mistake and got better and better each and every day to the extend that they were so much skilful and dextrous while performing their tasks. This makes Alfred feel proud of each of them.
Most of the time, Alfred mentioned, he undertook the free-rein leadership styles, which is, the boss set objectives and employees are free to do whatever is appropriate to accomplish those objectives. However, on and off he will be undertaking different style as well which depends largely on the situation. Nevertheless, the relationship between the employees and Alfred are good. They get along with each other well.
When we discuss about his daily feeling when he has to get up from bed to get to work, he said he is energetic and passionate every day to work. To be honest, he mentioned, he is such a workaholic ever since he was small. He always being hardworking and not afraid of strike by hardship. What is the hardship Alfred had face throughout the decades? To tell the truth, Alfred confessed, there will be tons of impediment each and every day, but we could take those setbacks we came across as a teacher, to make us realize the weakness of us, to make us strive to become a better person, or better company and services, in this case. Therefore, Alfred will not take those as a setback but a courage instead.
To talk about the future planning of his business, the answers may be differing with any other entrepreneur. He said that in the future, he wishes to work less and instead, he will pass her work to the employees to manage most of the time because she has strong trusts towards his workers. He said that nothing is more important than health. Therefore, he is planning to train his workers more efficiently so that they could cope this big commitment in the future.
Motivation is considered an important element of running a business. Without motivation or a purpose, a business may no longer being exists. What motivates Alfred to continue to operate his business, he said that the achievement of three of his son and daughter in the university motivates him to work harder. What’s more, the support from his beloved wife is the most important motivation for him, being a man, who can manage to run a business on his own for 10 years. The support from closest families are always irreplaceable.
We appreciate that Alfred Lee could tell us that much about how he operates his business and at the end, he advised us that simple adage goes “No pain, no gain”. The interview took about an hour to finish and we took several pictures together as remembrance.
