Jeremy Han is a business coach to CEOs and their executive teams across the Asia Pacific, with clients in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Nepal, Australia, Indonesia, Myanmar and in more than 20 different industries. He has helped companies achieve exponential growth of between 40-1000% business growth within 5 year time frames.
He is also a speaker who has spoken on various platforms in Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines to business audiences up to 500 people.
Besides being a business coach to others, he is also a ‘practitioner’ of the principles he teaches. He is the director of corporate strategy of a fast scaling education and consulting company in Singapore, and he was in the leadership team that coached the company through a turn-around situation before scaling its profits more than 10X between 2015 to 2019.
Jeremy is a firm believer that business is a force for good, and his role as a business advisor and coach is to help companies to scale their profits and their impact. He is passionate in challenging his clients to achieve exponential business growth, and commit to make exponential impact on transforming the lives of others for the better. He is the founding member of Transformational Business Network Asia (TBNA), an organization dedicated to eradicating poverty through enterprise.
His mission: Help 100 CEOs make an impact for 100M people in 10 years.
Jeremy, so tell us, what is Scaling Up and what is a Scaling Up coach? What do Scaling Up coaches do?
Well, in a nutshell, there are two parts to this question which I will answer. The first is to explain what Scaling Up is. Scaling Up is a business growth methodology based on a book with the same title. It is written by Verne Harnish, an internationally renowned business guru who has helped companies across the world to scale. He is very much a teacher to me, because I get to learn from him how to help companies grow across Asia. So a Scaling Up coach is someone who is certified in this methodology. You can find out more about this methodology here: https://scalingup.com/
As a Scaling Up coach, I work with companies who want to scale but for various reasons may not be able to. I have worked with companies who have grown too fast and gotten stuck, to legacy multi-generation businesses who find they need a new way of thinking and running the business, and also companies who are industry winners and want to keep their edge against rising competition. I help them put in place a new way of thinking of their businesses, and more importantly, a new set of execution habits that help them to translate strategy into results without too much drama and pain.
People who embark on a coaching journey usually have a story to tell. How did you become a Scaling Up business coach? There must have been story behind this journey. Do share it with us!
Well, yes, there is a story. In fact, when I look back, this was not a path I had thought about. It happened because the company I work for was in a crisis. Our company was typical to the situations I now encounter – a fast growing company that got stuck and could no longer grow, thus starting to decline. Competition has increased exponentially and we were hit hard everywhere. What worked well in the past no longer worked. So it was really a turn-around situation that was extremely stressful.
As the person in charge of strategy, I worked with my CEO to find a way, and we tried various methodologies but found them either too complicated, or theoretical to apply. Or more often, these other methodologies did not have an execution format to guide us from strategy to results. Then one day, in a conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, we came across Scaling Up, and I thought this was simple enough, or should I say, practical enough for us to implement.
So I started the process of learning the Scaling Up methodology in 2014, including getting officially certified in the US, with the purpose of coaching our company through this crisis. The whole certification took almost 10 months to complete, including an oral panel of senior coaches who tested our knowledge before conferring the certification. But the rigor was critical for us if we want to solve real problems, as was faced by ours then.
I recall then, as I implemented the methodology in our company, we had to confront many challenges, but the biggest was really how to unlearn the old ways of running the company and teach our people a totally different way to think and act. Using a tools-based approach, we created a new 10-year plan with a very clear purpose that could be translated into a financial goal as well as an impact goal – how we can make a difference in the universe. The goal was to grow our business and our impact 10X – from transforming 100 000 lives annually through our learning resources to changing 1M lives annually by 2023. With an ‘impossible’ goal to challenge the company to greatness, we found our motivation again to change, to grow and to scale.
But the process was still a long one, and I remember every night not sleeping well, wondering what if our turn-around would fail, and I would have taken every one down the drain. It was a frightful thought to wrestle with every night for the almost 12 months or so we were implementing Scaling Up principles into the way we run the company, but thank God the turn-around was not only successful with the entire company, or rather, those who were left (we lost a lot of people because they did not believe we could pull through), it also led to a re-birth of the company into a totally different animal. We became a company that was able to break our own limits, and this led to scaling our profits more than 10X by 2019, and by 2020, achieving our goal of impacting more than 1M people every year with our learning resources.
The successful implementation of the Scaling Up methodology gave me the confidence to help other companies who are facing growth issues because I understand not just the method, but also the emotional struggle and psychology of the leadership team who will be involved in this transformation. I can empathize with them, and could totally identify with the questions they have in their minds. Also very importantly, I could instill confidence in them by using our own company as an example; business leaders are savvy people who have little time to waste, they want to work with someone who has been there in the pits and pulled themselves out. Scaling up a business is not just about coming up with a strategic plan, a roadmap or a framework, it involves people, and that means helping them to also grow and transform.
Now tells us about the work you do in the Asia-Pacific region. What are some of the highlights you have encountered as a business coach?
My primary responsibility as a business coach is of course, to help a business to scale their revenue and profits. However, one enduring question I face is this:
“How can I do good and make money at the same time?”
A lot of companies actually want to find meaning by doing good, by knowing that their business benefitted someone, but they do not know how to do that and make great profits at the same time. Thus they find themselves stuck with annual CSR initiatives that do not actually excite them.
So what really excites me is to help a company unlock its potential to do good for its customers, employees, community, country and of course the world and in the process be highly profitable; like we did for our own company at the start of our Scaling Up journey, I help them define a goal that would challenge them to greatness – and this goal must take into account both their revenue and profit growth, and also the impact they will make in improving the lives of others.
I do this by adapting a framework taught by Jim Collins called the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) to help businesses see where is the intersection of three critical aspects of their business, and how that can help them to see where their biggest impact is. The framework looks like this:
The intersection of these three circles is really how one can do good, create value and make money. Of course, the key lies in defining a purpose that changes the world for the better, and building the skills we need to create extraordinary value and the right strategy to run your economic engine. All these 3 components must be right before a company could really do good and make great profits. Let me tell you a story how we can put this together. Once, a CEO of a beauty accessories company and his leadership team came to a class I conducted, and they told me their 10 year goal is to become a $1 Billion company. However the problem is this - no one was really motivated to work towards that goal because it does not touch the heart. So I asked them what is the meaning of becoming a $1 billion company? No one could answer that question.
So when we spent a couple of days answering the 3 questions in the diagram 1. What is your purpose 2. What do you do best 3. What is your economic engine and how do these three intersect, and they realized something that had the entire team in tears. They told me that as a beauty accessories company, they specialize in making artificial eyelashes, and their purpose is to help every women in the world become beautiful.
Yet as they make money selling eyelashes to beautify the eyes of their customers, there would always be a segment of society, the blind, who would never see how beautiful they truly are. They told me that in their country, thousands of women are blind because of cataract but could not afford the relatively cheap surgery to restore their eyes, and thus would never be able to see how beautiful they are. And so they have found the meaning of what it means to be a $1 Billion company in 10 years – and that is to help 10 000 blind women pay for the surgery to regain their eyesight, so that they can also admire their own beauty.
This is one of my favorite stories. By helping companies tie their purpose and profits together and turning it into a goal that the whole organization can believe and strive towards, I create alignment and momentum for growth. There are other companies that I have helped grow 5X to 10X, and scaled their impact as well. Helping these companies give me tremendous satisfaction.
Now we come to the question I am sure a lot of businesses have in mind – With Covid 19 devastating the world economy, can businesses still scale?
Thanks for asking this. Indeed many companies are struggling with the lockdowns across the world. And the only way they can still grow and scale is to change – yet the million dollar question is how to change right?
Everybody knows that change is necessary but they do not know how, so my role of a coach is to help them through this process. There are 4 areas to a pivot or business transformation. The first is to understand how the disruption has created new problems for your customers. The second is to see if the disruption has created new opportunities for your customers.
Thirdly, whether the disruption itself has led to any unmet needs being highlighted, and lastly, and very importantly, whether your core competencies can enable you to pivot into these areas. So let me share a story to illustrate how a client in the food and beverage pivoted and scaled in 2020 during the pandemic.
This is a high-end, fine-dining restaurant with very beautiful surroundings, creating a really nice ambience for diners, who are mainly upper class folks. So when the pandemic hit, understandably the restaurant could not open, and its unique value proposition, its lovely meals amidst beautiful gardens, could no longer attract diners. When the owner called me in April 2020, he was frantic because he thought he needed to retrench his staff. However, I took him through those points to help him see the possibilities to pivot, and left him with one final thought – let the restaurant team whose jobs were on the line, come out with the solution to pivot. He need not carry the burden himself, but let the collective wisdom of the team derive a solution.
So the team came out with 2 ideas – First, these well-to-do diners are not likely to be people who cook, and since they were all locked-down at home, it would be very difficult for them to get their regular restaurant cooked meals. So they created weekly menu packages for order, delivered frozen with instructions for each day. For example, Monday’s meal is this, re-heat this pack, Tuesday’s is this, reheat this pack etc etc. They made it easy for customers to have the gourmet meals they were used to even amidst the pandemic.
The second idea they came up with was to connect the farms with the consumers. The chef reasoned that since they knew the supply chain for high quality produce well, and their customers trusted them as a high end restaurant supplying good food, they could connect the two. So within a week, they started a organic food supplier platform, where consumers could order from the farms and they would deliver it.
The result? The owner told me that the teams running the food delivery businesses doubled the business within months and it is now a serious revenue contributor. What is even more exciting is to hear that he allowed the team who came out with this business to have shares in it. Just a few months before, he almost retrenched them, now they are partners with him in the new thriving venture.
I interviewed him and you can watch it here, if you would like to know how the story went: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lUR_gwoaEo&t=121s
This example illustrates the key points of pivoting and scaling – first identify new problems or new needs created as a result of the disruption, then see if these can become opportunities to serve your customers in new areas then match them to your core competencies and pivot from there.
With a framework for pivoting, I believe companies don’t have to struggle in the dark with Covid 19. There is a way out.
Last question, could you share with us what are some things you are working on now, to give our readers a glimpse on how you are continuing to help companies scale their value?
The area that really fascinates me, especially in scaling and multiplying business value, is digital transformation. I think digital transformation means many different things to different people, but fundamentally, I think we have to understand the word transformation.
Transformation means that at the end of the process, your business model must become different. It cannot be the same, just 20% more efficient. This fundamental misunderstanding is causing a lot of businesses money on the table.
A company that was delisted recently due to poor performance and declining revenue started their digital transformation journey to great fanfare a few years ago, only to declare it a failure after spending more than $100M on it. Why? It is due to this fundamental problem of not understanding what transformation means, and therefore not being able to set the right questions to find the right answers. The CEO of that company once described that digital transformation to him, was like putting rockets on a tortoise to make it go faster. But a tortoise with rockets is still a tortoise! There was no transformation at all. The business model which was failing remained the same. He just wanted a faster version of a failing model.
When a business leader starts off digital transformation with a wrong premise, they will go down the rabbit hole no matter how much money they throw at it. And this problem is perpetuated by technology vendors because if you ask them what is digital transformation, they will tell you that digital transformation is whatever they are selling. Don’t believe this? Go and do a Google search “definition of digital transformation” and you will find the different versions of what it means depending on what they are selling. For example, the data analytics folks will tell you that digital transformation is all about using data analytics, while the Cloud folks will tell you it’s all about being on Cloud etc etc. None of them will tell you it’s really about your strategy to scale. So what is your strategy to scale? It is about how you uncover and overcome constraints. How to scale is a topic I would like to talk about more so watch out for my other contributions on Brainz Magazine.
I recall we learnt this lesson hard when we started our own digital transformation journey in 2016 – we started out with 2 fundamental questions that went to the heart of why transformation? Our traditional business model was failing, so I set a goal for our company to transform from a traditional model to a digital one, with a clear KPI of at least 300% revenue growth and a multiplier effect on our valuation. Back then, the consultants we met in Singapore, where are based did not understand our question at all – all they wanted to do was to sell us an ERP system. However, we found the right consultants in the US who helped us discover our digital transformation journey’s starting point, which was the customer.
Starting out from the right premise was critical, and since then, I had created a program to help companies embark on their digital transformation journeys. The journey is a long one because I repeat, it is a journey, not a project, and it requires changes to both the business model and the way people think and work. The transformation must be dual in nature. Just changing it on one level will not work.
Helping companies to scale is my passion, and I believe that’s how I can create the most value for others. Like my earlier point, what really drives me is to make impact. Digital transformation, like everything else, I put that into the context of scaling value. When a company scales value, they become a tremendous force for good if their heart is in the right place. That is what I hope to achieve, and that is why I love being a business coach.
To learn a proven methodology, scan here to sign up for our free online course ‘How to Scale Your Business’.
You can watch some of the video testimonials from clients at his Youtube Channel
