For Norman Yeo of Tangy Lab Group, running his own business gives him the flexibility to live his life the way he wants.
What’s your story?
Influenced by my parent’s business journey, I have always wanted to start a business and thus at 19 years of age, while studying, I started my first business – writing a book featuring established business owners in Singapore. Since then I have participated in a number of startups and helped young businesses by being involved in their strategic planning and building the system within the business.
In 2015, at the age of 28, I finally embarked on my own to run a digital marketing agency (Tangy Lab) with the intention to help businesses grow through social media marketing and lead generation. Within 3 months we were net positive and by the second year we had grown the business to a high 6-digit business with an initial capital injection of less than SGD5,000.
What excites you most about your industry?
2 words – results and growth. The thing about marketing is that it is an economic driver. Marketing allows businesses to grow, expand and hire more people. That in turn allows them to feed their families.
Being able to see the businesses we have helped generate results, grow and start hiring more people is what fuels me. It is what allows me to know that we are doing the right thing.
What’s your connection to Asia?
Singapore being my homeland is the starting point of my business. At the moment, we are in the midst of exploring neighboring countries for market expansion opportunities.
Favorite city in Asia for business and why?
Singapore. While the limitation of Singapore is its small geography and population, Singapore is still, in my opinion, the best place to start a business because of transparency and government support. The eco-system for business here is so strong and it is something our country should be really proud of.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
The best advice I ever got was from another business owner who told me that staying small is a “sin” in business. Because, if you choose to stagnate your business, you have let yourself down, your family and your staff.
Those who follow you will have very limited means for progression, making it difficult to attract and retain talented staff. And those who continue staying, will have let down their own families, because they will give their families a limited future.
As an entrepreneur, we have limitless potential to achieve and not allowing that potential to come through is not being fair to oneself.
Who inspires you?
My parents are the one who inspired me on the entrepreneurship journey.
Being from a family that runs a business, I was able to understand from young age that running a business is the best way of being compensated based on your effort and the decisions you make. If you want to be able to control your own future and lifestyle, running a business allows you that dream.
What have you just learnt recently that blew you away?
One of the new things that I have learnt and developed in the last few months is to build a marketing funnel within messenger bots. This is relatively new in Singapore and an area which I really believe has tremendous potential. Basically, it allows marketers to sell and engage all within messenger bots itself. When I first found out about its capabilities, it totally blew me away and we knew we had to take action quickly.
If you had your time again, what would you do differently?
If I can turn the clock back, I would have done 2 things differently. Firstly, I would have placed a lot more emphasis on specialised education at a young age. Secondly, I would have experimented much more at a young age with a variety of things. As we grow older and many commitments start to kick in, we naturally have to move from more testing to greater stability as more is at stake. I would have loved to experiment and make more mistakes in my younger days.
How do you unwind?
Comedy. I love witty humor with creative catchphrases. It just gets me going.
For example, I thoroughly enjoy comedies like How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory. I also enjoy some really old comedies by Rowan Atkinson like Blackadder.
Favourite Asian destination for relaxation? Why?
Well, I have been to many countries in Asia, but ironically, the one that is at the top is still Malaysia. It’s easy to drive into, has great food and a huge variety of different experiences from food hunting, thrill seeking adventures and plenty of nice places to have my “zen” moments.
Everyone in business should read this book:
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. The term outlier, commonly used in statistics, refers to a data point that does not behave within a predictable range or an abnormality.
In this book, it covers the story of how successful outliers achieve their success and what makes them different. It also shares an idea that for someone to achieve mastery in a craft, the time required is 10,000 hours.
It’s a book filled with great ideas shared in an interesting way that I believe is an awesome read for anyone pursuing success.
Shameless plug for your business:
Tangy Lab Group Pte Ltd is Digital Marketing with the key agenda to grow business in 3 different ways. We help them establish their brand through content marketing, develop a direct response strategy to get them leads or sales and we teach businesses how they can build their own businesses through a 3-day lead generation course.
Find out more at www.tangylab.com to see how we can help you grow your business.
Or if you wish how you can generate massive amount of qualified leads for your own business, www.tangylab.com/fbleadintensive
How can people connect with you?
You can connect with me at LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/normanyeo
Twitter handle?
@Normanyeo87
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This interview was part of the Callum Connect’s column found on The Asian Entrepreneur:
Callum Laing invests and buys small businesses in a range of industries around Asia. He has previously started, built and sold half a dozen businesses and is the founder & owner of Fitness-Buffet a company delivering employee wellness solutions in 12 countries. He is a Director of, amongst others, Key Person of Influence. A 40 week training program for business owners and executives.
Take the ‘Key Person of Influence’ scorecard <http://www.keypersonofinfluence.com/scorecard/>
Connect with Callum here:
twitter.com/laingcallum
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