Alaric Ong Global revenue, CEO Alaric Ong, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is a lyric on he's got done five different businesses before of which three of them started with zero capital and went on to generate six figures within the few short months one of them went on to generate seven figures within 16 months currently he's the founder of the largest facebook marketing community in singapore with over 1400 paid students he's also been featured in fox market watch and digital journal for interviewing six seven eight and nine figure entrepreneurs like marcos mora who runs a model franchise 120 million dollar a year business grant cardone jt fox and george ross so eric you ready to take us to the top yeah sounds good man all right so it sounds like you're just you're a hustler and you also have a coaching business now today so tell me about the first business you built when did you launch it what year so in 2016 i launched a healthy food delivery business um it basically i served the largest bank in dba the largest bank in singapore called dbs um singapore yeah so this bank has about 10 300 employees and we serve healthy food we serve healthy food in like bento boxes for them yeah okay and how did they like that in 2016 how much money did you make doing that business okay so like when we just still do with dbs um we okay like in my whole business career i've never had a sales and marketing problem it always is an operations problem for me so um the moment i see the deal with them it was a really good deal it's just that my operations um failed within like four days right so what i learned okay so so here's what happened okay so on the first day we had like 70 orders second second we had about 90 orders okay that would have been a run rate of about 30 000 um monthly recurring revenue just from just one uh bank okay and we haven't scaled to like different banks yet so like there's like maybe in singapore hsbc uob et cetera um but the reason why it didn't take off is because on the first day um i caught everyone to come like hey so it's a healthy filipino business they have like 50 floors like this bank had 50 floors so there's no way my operation this will start up there's no way my operations could service all 50 floors so we'll ask everyone to come to our collection point so when i called so i called everyone one by one we had 70 orders so by the time i caught the last the 70th order it was like one and a half hours after the lunchtime so everyone started complaining because like they were receiving their food like one and a half hours later so i wrote a lot of emails apologize to them and say hey sorry uh the second day um i decided sms terms so i sent a text test system so it's faster but on the second day because um our delivery operations we outsource that because we are a startup so we don't have the money to buy a glory like we do have money to buy a truck and everything eric sorry how just just just again because this is a short show so we want to try and get as much as possible so some quick stuff here just to get context how old were you in 2016 i was 90 years old in 2016. okay and how much of your own capital did you put in this business to get it started um my partner put in nine thousand dollars um so we wanted to raise a hundred thousand um but we realized that we didn't need that much money we could okay so so you didn't put it you didn't put in any you you're probably putting 9k how did you guys split equity um it was like uh i owned 30 um my partner owned forty percent his sis you know my partner won forty percent her brother owned thirty percent and we had another forty thirty 30 yeah 40 30 20 yeah yeah that's 100 okay got it so you own 30 of that business uh didn't put any capital and you're 19 years old you drive sales but then you can't keep up operations so what happened when did you shut the business down so after that um the main reason why the business didn't take off is because um the main reason why the business didn't take off was because of the equity speed right yeah so the business didn't work because the equities because one of my partners he had to go for national service and um so he couldn't contribute to the business anymore so when i wanted to buy out but i wanted to like you know respect the equity um he didn't want to give up his equity even though he couldn't contribute to the business anymore so that's why um the business didn't take off so now when did you shut the business down um like six months into starting the business yeah okay guys so shut down in 2016 that same year um talk to me about the next business you worked on uh so after i ran a sales team right so i built a sales team of 140 members i saw all kinds of stuff like tailor-made shirts quality sets personal development courses um health products etc yeah what sales team was this company built for um this company is it's a network marketing company so i joined a network marketing company and then we built the name it's called international entrepreneurs platform yeah it's a singaporean company okay and and did you have equity there or was it just like a job basically um i'm a like it's like a like i didn't have equity in the company but you run it like a business like that yeah so some people run it like a self-employed but if you run it some people run it like a business owner yeah so when you say you have 140 sales people what does that actually mean be specific that means um okay email marketing they call it downlines right so i have i recruited 140 people within 10 months how much did they pay to sign up so they paid from 400 to 13 000 okay 413 000 yeah okay and and how many of them actually ended up building a real business where they drove a sale to a consumer not just downline signups but a real sale to a consumer at least um okay so 140 is like cumulative right so let's say at least 20 of them uh sold yeah at least 20 of them at least 20 to 30 of them yeah so i mean do you feel sort of bad signing up the other 120 making them pay 400 or 13k each and then they didn't end up selling any products themselves at all as a salesperson that's your number one job not really because when they sign up they get value from the products itself so um that's that's how i decide whether a network marketing model is ethical or not is based on whether if they don't recruit other people do they still get value from the product itself if they feel that how do you measure that how do you measure if they get value from the product what if they got a bunch of the product and then it's sitting in their kitchen right now and then a kitchen cabinet that's never been open in the past 10 years so if so let's say they get made to measures right so if let's say they were to buy these meshes even if they didn't have the opportunity to sell it would they buy it or if they if they could if they go for this personal development cost based on the market rate let's say they sign up maybe a thousand four hundred dollars for a certain development course would like would other personal development causes in the market there's about a thousand four hundred dollars and says yes so um as it means as a consumer if they would get value like if it's a fair market value then then um that's how i define whether it's a it's a ethical or unethical marketing yeah the personal development course i mean look if you're trying to get into business and you want to learn entrepreneurship and you sign up to an mlm company to learn your number one thing is can you get customers can you sign people up of which only 20 of them signed up so how can you argue that paying 1400 bucks to get in helps them in personal development when 120 of them never actually signed up their own customer they never actually learned what it took to be an entrepreneur and drive their first sale no but it depends okay good question i i like i like discussing that with you but it depends so um if let's say okay let's say they go and buy a shirt and they get a shirt so so them getting the shirt is the the value that they're getting no it's not it's if they wear the shirt it's if they wear their shirt and it keeps them warm during the day not is the shirt sitting in their cabinet and never gets worn the you and i find it very differently but they wear a shirt you know as like they do wear the shirt so if they're getting the value from the product itself then then that's a ethical networking model okay so what happened in this business this was from what 2017 to what year so um this was from um the mid of 2016 to the mid of 2017. yeah okay so if you sign up 140 people in your downline sounds like it was successful at w and why it only lasts a year so um the last year like i just the branding of the company wasn't very good because of the previous things that they did right and i didn't want to be associated with the branding that's why i left the company okay but you said you did analysis when you joined to make sure it was the best thing possible and it was ethical and everything else and then all of a sudden the branding stopped working no correct so the the business model...