Shownotes
BIO: Nattaphol Vimolchalao is the Chief Executive Officer of Siam Rajathanee Public Company Limited, an outsourcing service.
STORY: Nattaphol thought that hiring an executive from a world-class medical device company to run his startup was the way to make it succeed. However, though experienced, the executive had zero experience running a startup. The company went under within no time.
LEARNING: You need more than experience to run a startup. Just because someone has experience managing a multinational company doesn’t mean they’ll be good at running a startup.
“You may be successful in managing one type of business, but that doesn’t mean that you will be successful at managing another.”
Nattaphol Vimolchalao
Guest profile
Nattaphol Vimolchalao is the Chief Executive Officer of Siam Rajathanee Public Company Limited, an outsourcing service. The company started as an agricultural business and later expanded to outsourcing services. Now, it is the leading outsourcing service company in Thailand.
Nattaphol 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.
Worst investment ever
After university, Nattaphol started a medical device trading firm and invested 10 million baht. He didn’t have experience running a business, but he thought he would be able to make it because he went to one of the best schools in the world.
Nattaphol did everything from marketing, sales, and even hiring the first employee who happened to be an executive from a world-class medical device company. The employee had never worked in a small startup, and the way she went about running Nattaphol’s business was wrong. She spent a lot of resources hiring unnecessary employees, not understanding that the startup didn’t have a substantial human resource budget as a big company would.
Cash flow was a problem from the beginning, and because Nattaphol didn’t keep track of the finances, the business was out of money within no time.
Lessons learned
- Managing a startup, a midsized company, a listed company, or a multinational company is different. You may be successful in managing one type of business, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll succeed at managing another.
Andrew’s takeaways
- When setting up a business, be careful about partnering with people who have experience running a big company because they may not be suitable for running a startup.
- It would help if you had more than brains and expertise to succeed in business. It’s a combination of how you work with people, the products you choose, how you build out a sales team, etc.
No.1 goal for the next 12 months
Nattaphol’s goal for the next 12 months is to scale his company’s technology divisions to have a sizable income.
Parting words
“Don’t give up. To be honest, like, my worst failure is the thing that drives me forward now.”
Nattaphol Vimolchalao
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