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I learned that if you want something, you have to keep at it until you succeed.
In business, and in life, getting on with people is about making them feel comfortable and finding common ground.
Since then, one of my guiding principles has been that if you see a chance, a flicker of an opportunity, you have to take it. If nothing comes of it you haven’t lost anything; but you might just change your life if you have a go. If I hadn’t stopped Richard that day I’d never have got into the music business, and who knows what path I would have taken.
There was also the inspiring ‘screw it, let’s do it’ approach to innovation. Even today I come across companies that get so bogged down in spreadsheets, projections and forecasts, they sap the life out of new projects or initiatives – I call it ‘analysis paralysis’. But often if it feels right, it is right … no amount of Excel-pounding will get you to a better decision.
and had made it into the music business. Granted, I was in finance rather than A&R; but I’ve always believed that if you want to work in a particular industry you just need to get your foot in the door. It doesn’t matter about the specific job because once you’re on the inside you can figure your way forward from a much stronger position.
I managed to turn their attitudes around when I started working because I was friendly and got on with people on a personal level. I also changed the way we ran things, making everyone more accountable and giving them more autonomy to get on with their jobs.
‘walkaround’ management style and really listened to what people had to say; I made sure that I understood what everyone did and I think I brought a passion and a belief into what we were doing.
A bonus was the way the music crossed racial, religious and cultural boundaries. In Malaysia at the time the Chinese bought Chinese music, Malays bought Malay, and so on. This was the first time that the same music was being listened to by the whole country and it was the first time that you saw Malay, Chinese and Indians at the same concerts. Raihan broke that mould.
Having seen the way the European and US record labels worked, I set about creating superstructures for the industry: charts, an academy and the Recording Industry Association of Malaysia (RIM). I figured that it’s not just about marketing your own products, it’s about creating a market if one doesn’t already exist. Professionalizing the industry as well as your own company always yields dividends – the better the standards in the industry as a whole, the more growth you can generate.
I took his advice. I slashed our lists and made the company refocus on its core artists rather than trying to do too much.
That said, I did technically get my promotion in 1999 but it felt like more of a holding tactic than anything else. Neither Calvin nor Lachie thought I fitted the bill but gave me the job while they decided what to do with me.
Business is about agility and being able to move without being weighed down by processes, committees and working groups.
Sell your tickets over the web; don’t use travel agents; get a single-class operation; put as many seats in the aircraft as you can; use the same type of aircraft; fly the planes morning until night and have the engineers work on them overnight. Be pure low cost.’
It’s a place built to make you feel small.
I started a routine that I still practise today: I worked all the jobs in the airline. You can’t be an effective CEO unless you’re prepared to get your hands dirty.
Learning on the job with the staff means I can listen to problems and make a call with some authority. I can also become part of the staff’s narrative about their jobs.
No reports, spreadsheets or interviews can replace that hands-on knowledge. I encourage all my management or office-based staff to fly as much as possible because you have to keep in touch with the customers and the front-line staff.
The moment you schedule wall-to-wall meetings all day every day is the moment that you start to lose your grasp on what you’re supposed to be doing.
So we also had lots of parties – all of them with no budget! – but it really did help people bond. With no money to take on MAS and Singapore Airlines, I felt the strongest weapons we had were our culture and the fact that we were small and agile.
So the only thing we could do was to be better, which meant be more innovative, provide fantastic value for money and customer service, and react much faster to changing market conditions.
We came into the Malaysian airline market and we didn’t set about stealing routes from the existing players; instead we looked for new routes, we created new areas of the market where we were the first stallholders.
Most financial controllers will cut brand advertising during a crisis, but it’s actually the worst thing to do.
We sold tickets as far in advance as possible; got passengers to pay up front to ensure that our cash flow was as high as possible and made the tickets non-refundable.
I walked into the room and everyone was miserable as hell – I think they were doing it to intimidate me. I just about got through the presentation. After a long pause, Mahathir said, ‘You should be congratulated, it’s amazing what you’ve done.’ The whole mood of the room changed from intimidation to warm embrace.
If you believe in something, you have to go all-in and see it through.
With that signature we became Airbus’s number-one customer, outstripping Lufthansa and Emirates. AirAsia
While a lot of companies focus on external branding, I believe that internal branding – what the staff think of the company, how they respond to the mission and strategy – is more important. If the staff understand, support and enhance your ideals, you’re 50 per cent of the way there. Why try to sell your vision to outsiders if your staff don’t get it? If they do get it, every single member of staff is a walking advertisement and endorsement.
If people are too scared to speak out, they won’t come up with ideas and the company won’t innovate. When a business isn’t innovating, it will die.
You have to innovate and, when you do, you have to move quickly. A lot of companies would have gone through a six-month evaluation process, got their technical teams, HR and representatives from each department to represent their voices, before finally making a decision. That’s way too slow – paralysis by analysis once more.
The point about sponsorship is not the money you spend or the exposure you get from the placement of your logo, it’s about making the association come alive for people – what sponsorship people call ‘activation’.
Once you pay for the sponsorship itself you have to set aside the same amount of money to exploit and squeeze the association you have with Williams or Manchester United. Activation is the key to making any sponsorship deal work.
I always push myself to establish a rapport with as many people as I can – it’s too easy to look inwards and focus exclusively on your own business, but relationships and friendships with people outside your industry will always bring unexpected openings.
It brought home to me strongly how important physical presence and visibility are for a leader. They are important not just to keep the staff focused and to make sure that the culture of openness grows but also so that you can gauge the mood, see the day-to-day interactions and hear the snippets that are telling.
A lot of the problems I faced early on at QPR were because I didn’t question enough and I wasn’t there. I thought that the people in place knew what to do and had good reasons for making the decisions they did.
Focus, being present, watching, listening and talking to people on the ground are vital to understanding what’s happening throughout a business because only that way can you a) motivate and b) catch problems before they become infectious. To be successful you have to focus.
If you set up in a new market, employ people whose approach is to question, disrupt and create – when you hire people from within that industry, often you get people who think within the industry box; you need people who think outside it.
At its most basic, my philosophy is that it’s all about maximizing the top line (revenue), minimizing the cost, maximizing the bottom line and having a healthy balance sheet. And for me a balance sheet is all about cash. Accountants can make the numbers appear however you like, but cash doesn’t lie.
Have a good product – whether you’re selling widgets, drums or clothes, you’ve got to have a product people want. And it also needs to be at a price people actually want to pay,
Having a clear message means you have a clear product which is easy to understand.
Once you’ve got a great product, you’ve got to let people know about it
When AirAsia had no money, I was in the press the whole time, generating headlines, wearing my red baseball cap and making sure that the AirAsia brand was out there.
I have always focused on the price, not on fancy graphics with butterflies which tell you nothing. Why confuse the market with messages other than the one that matters? We do sometimes talk about our food but I’ve created secondary brands for those kinds of things. For example, the food on AirAsia is branded as Santan and we’re even opening a Santan restaurant in Kuala Lumpur soon. The Wi-Fi on the planes is called roKKi and, again, we promote that as a separate brand. The advantage of this is that the AirAsia brand remains ‘low fares with friendly service’
Distribution is the third element of the equation. You have to make it easy for people to buy your product once they know about it.
The last piece of the puzzle is that you have to implement. Ideas are great, talk is cheap, but results are all that matter.
Too many great ideas don’t get out because the implementation isn’t right. You have to move quickly because otherwise the idea dies. Of course, there can also be problems if you move too fast and you make a mistake, so there’s a balance to strike.
Persistence and determination are underestimated virtues these days.
The greatest artists and athletes work the hardest. Short-cuts will lead to failure.
If you don’t succeed, you learn; but the important thing is to have a go.
That means you can’t rely on reputation or past successes to take you forward, you have continually to be better, learn from mistakes and strive to attain your dreams. Underpinning that is the belief that you should never forget where you’ve come from – that is a great reminder of your progress, not what people say about you or what you read in the newspapers.
