In conversation
with Rudy Fang
March 2021, Singapore
Rudy Fang shares about his personal and business life, and 3 personal tips. As CEO of CASEA-BCTM, he invites all CASEA FriendsTM to be CASEA MembersTM. Rudy purposely left us with a big cliffhanger of “CASEA Dream 2051TM” that he will share in the next episode.
In conversation with Rudy Fang
CASEA HostTM : Chrissie Choo (CC)
CASEA LoggerTM : Rudy Fang (RF)
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ENGLISH Transcript
CC:
Hello everybody, I am Chrissie Choo, and this is CASEA DialogueTM! Today we have the very first interview and we have with us here today Rudy Fang, the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of CASEA-BCTM that stands for “Central Asia and South East Asia Business ChamberTM”.
Well, let me tell you a little bit about Rudy today. He pretty much is a serial entrepreneur, and a serial adult learner. He had not only gone through a bachelor’s degree program from University of Indonesia, but also more programs from Henley University in London, and NTU (National Technological University) as well as SMU (Singapore Management University) in Singapore.
His professional life has also been really interesting ranging from being a banker, and IT (Information Technology) professional, and now a serial entrepreneur as he takes on the Central Asia and South East Asia markets.
Rudy, thank you for joining us today. I think our listeners would like to know a little bit about the real Rudy. Could you please tell us a little bit about your background and your dreams and where you want to go from here?
1:09
RF:
Thank you, Christina, for the opportunity today and hi to all our CASEA FriendsTM wherever you are!
A little bit about myself, I come from a very humble family. My grandfather was a laborer in a farm in Indonesia. My father went to only second year of primary school. They worked very hard. Together, my mom and my father, they set up their business and they managed to send all their kids to universities. So that really brought all the kids the education. We really appreciate it and we want to learn a lot more things. That’s why I am kind of university-hopper now, want to learn a lot of things.
I became a banker. And then after that, I got bored with banking and I moved to IT (Information Technology). Then after that, I realized that I wanted to do my own business. I set up some businesses with my couple of friends. I survived until today, and now we are talking about CASEA-BCTM (Central Asia and South East Asia Business ChamberTM).
But let me tell you what I actually want to do. Hopefully, it will happen soon, I want to become a farmer and also a teacher.
2:23
CC:
Wow! Those are a huge range of activities and things that you want to move into. But I can see the real passion you have in education here. It started from all the universities and you want to eventually become a teacher! That is amazing!
Can you tell us a little bit more about your professional life then, moving from banking to IT, and then now being in serial entrepreneur? I am sure that you call a lot of experiences that we can actually learn from.
2:49
RF:
Of course, I learned a lot from being a professional in my corporate life. I learned a lot from Citibank, Standard Chartered Bank where I worked before. I also learned from a lot of multinational IT (Information Technology) companies. But I think I learned a lot too from daily life.
I met a lot of people from many countries. I traveled 75% of my time. I basically came back to Singapore to sleep. I think there is a lot of learning really in life. And this is my point also to our CASEA FriendsTM, we do learn from our lives. I mean do not just learn from universities, right?
That is really what we want to do now with CASEA-BCTM (Central Asia and South East Asia Business ChamberTM). We want to learn together. We want to business together. And we want to grow together.
A lot of people are talking about making money. We have seen a lot of people are trying to make money with different ways. Now people are fighting for vaccine, for example. Lately, there was a 17-year-old boy committed suicide because of the GameStop shares trading. Another 24-year-old in Australia committed crime because of the cryptocurrency business, for millions of dollars. Let us make money together. But let us make good money, not bad money!
4:05
CC:
Yes, I totally agree with you. You know that this pandemic and the slump in the economy globally, worldwide, has put a lot of people on the edge and we are all, lack of a better word, desperate and fearful. We are scared. More often than not, we are all trying to just survive. But I think we are chasing after the wrong goal, just chasing after money.
From your vast experience, can you tell us maybe 3 tips that we can take on from you? How may we actually move away from this purely fear-driven survival mode?
4:45
RF:
As I mentioned earlier CASEA FriendsTM that I learned a lot from a lot of people, learned from life basically. That is my real university, right?
I learned these 3 things in my life. Number one is to be humble, be very humble. There are a lot of people who are smarter than us. They are better than us. They are richer than us. They have more experience, better skills. Let us recognize this and learn from everybody.
Double voice Number two is to be very persistent. Go for It. Go for your dream. Go for what you believe in. Go with your heart. Do not be afraid. Just do it. That is what make things successful.
And the last one is to be agile. As people say, the toughest thing in nature is not stone, but water, right? So, change like water and then change as you go. Then you can see the opportunity and change it as you wish. Be very agile.
5:54
CC:
Well Rudy, you have pretty much quoted my favorite philosopher Bruce Lee then, be like water.
Since we have teed up perfectly for the for the subject, can you tell us a little bit more about CASEA-BCTM (Central Asia and South East Asia Business ChamberTM) and how it might actually help us to break away from the old ways of doing business? I am sure that everybody here is pretty interested to find out how we can scale and move into a new way of doing business.
6:24
RF:
Certainly. CASEA-BCTM (Central Asia and South East Asia Business ChamberTM) is a platform. It is also a community and I would say that it is also an ecosystem. This is the place where we want all of us, Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) from 16 countries to go together, learn from each other, learn from our successes, learn from our failures, grow, and thrive together. The differences that we have compared with other business chambers or chambers of commerce have is that we do not do normal business matching. What we want to do is that we want to create projects together with you. We want to bring your projects to 16 countries. We want to get our hands dirty in the project together. By doing these projects I believe, and all of us in CASEA-BCTM (Central Asia and South East Asia Business ChamberTM) believe, that we can learn from each other, and to thrive together.
As I mentioned earlier, we want to make good money, right? Do you want your business to be sustainable? Today, what is sustainability? We want to comply with, we want to adopt the United Nation’s SDG (Sustainable Development Goals). We want to also have investors with us. We want to apply the investors’ ESG (Environment, Social, and Corporate Governance) concept in our businesses. That is what we are going to do together, and we will support each other for this.
7:43
CC:
Wow! That really feels like it is moving forward in a very progressive way, not just building businesses together with our CASEA-BCTM (Central Asia and South East Asia Business ChamberTM) Members but also bringing them across into 16 countries, in just the right business models with the SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) and the ESG (Environment, Social, and Corporate Governance) goals in mind. This feels like a really huge plan. Do you think that it is going to succeed?
8:18
RF:
Yes, definitely. As people say, if you do not dream it, you will not get it, right? So, you dream it, you plan it, you measure it, you get it. We learn from life; we learn from experience. That is what we have. So, yes, if you ask me. Yes, we have a big dream. We call it “CASEA Dream 2051TM”. In fact, we will talk about that later. We have methodology. We have experience. We have planned what to do, we will meet what we want to achieve, and we will be successful!
8:56
CC:
Wow! Rudy, I really like that cliff-hanger you left for us there. But before we end this interview off, why don’t you let us know where are these 16 countries that you are talking about? Because I am sure that if we want to plan about scaling our businesses, it would be a good idea to actually be able to visualize where we are actually scaling them and bringing them to.
9:17
RF:
Yes, in fact, that is very good question! CASEA FriendsTM, the 16 countries are 10 countries in South East Asia – Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Brunei, you know all the 10 countries, and the 6 countries of Central Asia are Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Mongolia. It is not easy to spell all these “stan” countries, but I am sure once you join us in CASEA-BCTM (Central Asia and South East Asia Business ChamberTM) you will be familiar with these countries and we all want to do business together.
9:58
CC:
I cannot wait, especially with your Cliff-hanger! We are going to find out a little bit more about that in our next show. That is all the time that we have. I want to really respect your time and the time of our listeners. Do you have any last words, pieces of advice, that you can give to us?
10:14
RF:
Yes. We want to invite all our CASEA FriendsTM to join our events, listen to our podcasts and shows.
If you are Students and want to learn about business, please come and join us. We will give you a lot of training, a lot of opportunity to learn, and we will try also to create internships for students.
If you are Start-ups, please come and join us. We will connect you with a lot of established businesses who have been doing business for years, and to do business together with them.
If you are Small and Medium Enterprises, or you are Entrepreneurs, you want to join us because we want to work together, and we want to go to 16 countries together with you.
And finally, if you are Universities or Higher Learning Institutions, we really need your support. We want to get your contents and teaching, we want to help you to bring all the contents to 16 countries, to our Students, to our Start-ups, to our SMEs. And research; your research is very important including thesis and dissertations of your Master’s degree students or PhD students. We want also to do research together with you in 16 countries. And of course, your Students will have opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship from 16 countries, and probably also internships.
We want to welcome all of you CASEA FriendsTM to join us in CASEA-BCTM (Central Asia and South East Asia Business ChamberTM).
11:47
CC:
Wow! Rudy, I have to say after the whole interview, I am getting a much better picture that this is not just for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) and businesses that are already formed but it is also for Students and Budding Entrepreneurs and Start-ups, that we are able to groom through education and take them on into building a scalable business model that is going to be positioned specifically for Central Asia and South East Asia. I think this is an opportunity not to be missed!
We can stop right there so that we can give CASEA-BCTM (Central Asia and South East Asia Business ChamberTM) Members, as well as CASEA FriendsTM something to think about, as we will also be interviewing all the Founding Members of CASEA-BCTM (Central Asia and South East Asia Business ChamberTM) so that we can have clearer insights on all the different areas that will be able to help you with and also how we are going to be able to build businesses together.
With that, thank you guys for tuning in, keep a lookout for us. And thank you, Rudy, for taking the time out to come to speak to us here.
RF:
Thank you, Christina, for the opportunity and thank you, CASEA FriendsTM, from wherever you are! Goodbye!
CC:
See you soon, Goodbye!