The Zeal of A True Entrepreneur

Tengku Farith realized his passion for entreneurship, when he

successfully won a project for Road Builder, a construction company

that he worked for. He had a first taste of what is like to build something

from scratch, while doing Business Development for Road Builder.

At that time, they were bidding for Kuantan Ports project, which was

supposed to be privatized together with Kemaman Port. The

government had shortlisted Road Builder and DRB-Hicom as two main

contenders for the project. Instead of risking it all, they proposed to

Economic Planning Unit (EPU) that the privatization be split into two.

They agreed and DRB got Kemaman while Road Builder got Kuantan. It

was a good compromise, he learnt that in pitching for business, it’s

wrong to adopt an all-or-nothing attitude. Sometimes there’s enough to

go around so everybody can get a piece of the pie.

When he recalls of the projects that SKALI failed to win, he always reminds himself of Sun Tzu’s advice in

the Art of War: “Pick the battles and terrains where you are strongest and where your competitors are

the weakest”.

This mantra helped Tengku Farith and his team in bidding big projects like Employees Provident Fund (EPF)

website. SKALI was awarded the contract to build a website for EPF, which was worth RM3 million. In spite

of SKALI being a small local start-up, it had an advantage of being experienced portal building company,

which helped to win the project. EPF called several times seeking clarifications on various aspects of the

proposal before awarding the project. However, building the website proved to be a bigger challenge than

winning the project. Not only the system requirements was challenging but also finance to kick start the

project, was far more difficult. Tengku Farith and team were disheartened when they realize they have a big

project in hand but getting a loan was not possible, however they trudged on because the EPF portal was

too important project to let go.

After various attempts to seek for financing, SKALI managed to get the required financial assistance from

Malaysian Debt Ventures (MDV). Upon completion of the EPF website, SKALI gained more confidence to

bid for other big government projects.

Tengku Farith Rithauddeen, the Group CEO of SKALI struggled with a long journey of

challenges before reaching the position he is today.

Though being a son of former government minister, Tengku Farith and his siblings were

not pampered with an easy life. They were brought up with discipline like any other

children and achieve success through the hard way.

Was sent to Ottawa, Canada at the age of 13 to continue his studies in high school and later in college. He finally graduated from Carleton University with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics in 1992.

He recalls that entrepreneurship being taught to him at very young age by his parents, when he was asked to manage the collection of rental of the family properties in Canada and pay out the utilities, taxes and necessary dues. His mother used to train him and his siblings on financial management, by asking them to produce financial statements of their expenditure.

Tengku Farith’s career began with Commerce International Merchant

Bankers (CIMB) in the corporate finance division. He was a key team

member in the Corporate Finance and Capital Market divisions. He has

in-depth knowledge about corporate restructuring, corporate financing

and financial re-engineering.

Throughout his career at CIMB, Tengku Farith established relationships with various investment

bankers, analysts, researchers, venture capitalists and private investors, and was involved in

corporate advisory services for Penang Port, agencies under the Ministry of Rural Development and

KPJ Healthcare Bhd.

He then moved on to Road Builder (M) Holdings Bhd and was responsible for its business development in property

and infrastructure projects. At Road Builder, he was instrumental in securing numerous privatization projects

relating to property and infrastructure.

During his tenure at Road builder, Tengku Farith led a team to turn around a local manufacturing company involved

in the building materials industry. In his four-year stint as CEO of this company, he earned valuable experience in

managing the day-to-day and hands-on operations of two factories employing 160 employees.

While he was attached to Road Builder, Tengku Farith formed ACIF

Resources, a consultancy firm with Azmi and Aimi (his ex-colleagues from

CIMB). Later, the three of them team up with Maznida Mokhtar, Mohd

Reza Shafiee, Mohd Hisham Mohd Isa and Harjono Zainal Abidin, to do

the Alta Vista’s search engine project.

However, they could not run the business as successful as they expected due to lack of demand in online advertising

and failure to generate traffic as forecasted. The entire team was on a pressure to meet their agreement with AltaVista

to pay US$360,000 traffic fees, regardless whether they manage to drive actual traffic or not.

Tengku Farith decided to come on board full-time, leaving his steady job at Road Builder. This was exactly when SKALI

was on huge debts, unsettled loans and large amount of pending staff salaries. He felt that move was vital as all his

other business partners were on a battle to manage shareholders, creditors, unhappy employees, while running

business operations as usual.

When the business model was no longer sustainable, Tengku Farith and his

partners decided to diversify to broaden their revenue base, and they

succeeded in doing that too. They built small data centre and with the booming

of dotcom at that point of time, they managed to take advantage of the

demand for hosting services.

Upon coming on board as a full-time president in SKALI, Tengku Farith was

responsible to handle creditors and funding issues. With a huge amount of

debts, Tengku Farith and team began to strategize the settlement of pending

payments through revenues from data centre business and skali.com. They

were also on serious search of potential investors to increase funding of the

company. After a long and continuous search for investors, SKALI managed to

get a few like Transpac, Time DotCom and Malaysia Airports Berhad (MAB).

By end of 1999, SKALI was on pretty good financial footing. The data centre

business was booming well, resulting 88% year-on-year revenue growth. This

progress won the confidence of the investors. The co-founders of SKALI were

leveraging on each other’s strengths and optimize all possible opportunities that

come their way.

During his journey of being an entrepreneur, Tengku Farith was exposed to associations like New Entrepreneur Forum

(NEF) which aimed to promote the development of Bumiputera ICT entrepreneurs and Technopreneurs Association of

Malaysia (TeAM), an association formed by a group of Malaysia Technopreneurs and to assist in the development of

the Digital Economy in Malaysia.

As a result of his active involvement in NEF and TeAM, Tengku Farith was instrumental in the establishment of SKALI

Netpreneurs Acceleraion Program (SNAP). SNAP is an initiative for Asian Netpreneurs to leverage the pool of SKALI's

experience, expertise, resources and business networking. SNAP creates and adds further value for investors,

Netpreneurs and communities in general by sharing an in-depth knowledge base and widening the reach of Internet

opportunities.

Along the journey, SKALI also managed to record a good image with the government. SKALI was one of

the early adopters of Open Source. The idea of using an inexpensive platform to build website, create

and edit content turned out to be a smart choice. SKALI was able to make huge savings and not only

that, SKALI was invited to give some inputs when government decided that Malaysia should evaluate

the readiness to adopt Open Source platforms.

Having gone through a journey of challenges since

its inception in 1996, SKALI stands tall today and

their vision to grower bigger is clearly visible as they

prepare for listing exercise next year. Today SKALI is

one of the notable ICT players who provide

innovative products and services like data centre

services, first cloud provider and recognized web

portal developer. Behind the success of SKALI,

Tengku Farith is one of the great contributor.

Being an entrepreneur, Tengku Farith learnt value of money,

importance of networking with community and proper management of

business models. The essences of entrepreneurship to him simply

means continuous effort of getting up after each fall and try better the

next round.

Not only Tengku Farith has achieved his dreams of forming SKALI to be

one of the leading ICT company in the region, he has also made this

nation proud through the e-government project called Managed Portal

Services, which sees SKALI entrusted to improve and upgrade

Malaysia’s government portals and websites.

“You got to be innovative with your

offerings – be different, identify

uniqueness of your product/services.

Entrepreneurs should posses NEVER give up

attitude in order to be successful.”

https://www.facebook.com/tengku.farith?ref=ts&fref=ts

https://twitter.com/tengkufarith

Tengku Farith Rithauddeen is presently spearheading the overall operational and management

of SKALI Group. For more information on Tengku Farith and SKALI, please visit www.skalilagi.net

and www.skali.net

Thank You