Ron Kaufman was previously a specialist in adult education design. In 1990, he relocated to Singapore under the invitation by National Productivity Board and Singapore Airlines to help start a company called the Service Quality Centre. Ron Kaufman officially started his company in 1993 with the main purpose of selling his business engagements. He took his business further by selling his educational books and programs in the later years. Ron Kaufman is married and has a daughter. His family is currently living with him in Singapore.

Company: UP YOUR SERVICE! GLOBAL PTE LTD Address: 50 Bayshore Road, Suite 31-01 Website: http://www.upyourservice.com/ Interview with Mr Ron Kaufman by Ng Shi Quan, Nelson on 22-Mar-2009. Student can be reached at vader_86@hotmail.com   Business Profile: Ron Kaufman Pte Ltd provides clients with upbeat yet practical education through speeches, workshops and retreats. To date, more than three million people have been educated and motivated in his high-energy and high-content presentations. As for Up Your Service! Global Pte Ltd, it was set up as an educational website which focuses on the sales of customer service videos and customer service books. Ron Kaufman has also set up Up! Your Service! College to help organizations build superior service cultures. The College program includes a suite of Video-Driven courseware, customized exercises, certified course leaders, service culture building activities. College clients now include Government agencies and Multi-National Companies in every major industry sector.   Interviewer's Comments: Ron Kaufman comes across as a very humble man who believes that learning is a never-ending journey. Despite of his success, he continues to seek improvement in his business dealings through consultation with his mentors. He acknowledged that his success would not have been possible without encouragement from his family and friends. His nature of business is unique in the sense that not many companies are offering educations that help improve customer service and build a service culture. In addition, his continuous marketing of his products has allowed the company to gain greater prospect of being able to expand worldwide. Throughout the years of the business, particularly the framework of the expansion of the company, he has displayed the qualities of an entrepreneur as such he truly deserves to be awarded the SOE award for the year 2009!   1. What is the nature of your business? The name of our business is Up Your Service! Global Pte Ltd. The nature of the business is to help organizations throughout the world build a Superior Service Culture for Sustainable Competitive Advantage. Up Your Service! Global offers a comprehensive service excellence curriculum called UP Your Service! College, which helps individuals build a Superior Service Mindset for Immediate Career Advantage. The vision of our organization is a world where people are educated and inspired to excel in service for customers and to one another. The vision of our organization is a world where people are educated and inspired to excel in service for customers and to one another.   2. When and why did you decide to become an entrepreneur / take over your family business? NOTE: If it is not a family business, ask: Do your parents have their own businesses too? Have they inspired you in one way or another? (Select appropriate question according to the entrepreneur being interviewed.) My father has always been an entrepreneur. He was an electro-optical engineer and specializes in designing patentable electro-optical technology. So all my life I watched my father have his own consulting business, very much as a one man show but his job was to solve problems encountered by much larger teams. My mother and grandmother were both teacher in the local school systems. So in a sense, I have a father who likes to solve problems and a mother who likes to teach. I am a mixture of the two.   3. What are your reasons for choosing to do business in this particular industry? Before coming to Singapore, I was a specialist in adult educational design. I know how to design courseware for adults to get them involved and engaged in learning. In 1990, the government of Singapore through the National Productivity Board and Singapore Airlines invited me to come to Singapore to help start a company called the Service Quality Centre. That was originally a one week assignment, but I became the project manager for the curriculum development team to design a suite of courseware to raise the level of service throughout Singapore as a nation, from the senior management level, middle management, supervisory and of course the frontline. I then became the master trainer and was responsible for helping 60 Singaporeans to become effective service quality trainers. In year 2000, I wrote the book, Up! Your Service. In 2002 and 2005 I wrote additional books in the Up! Your Service! series. And in 2007, I published 11 new books in the series called Lift Me Up! In 2006, we decided to take all of the training and education and put it into a new business model that could serve the entire world exporting World Class Service Education from Singapore. As an individual author, speaker, trainer, I can do great work and my clients are of course very happy and I get paid a healthy fee but the leverage was not there to serve a wider audience than one person can do. So we looked throughout the soft skills training industry and founded only one other guru who had the methodology to be able to serve the whole planet, different industries, different languages and different organizations. That was Steven Covey, the founder of the 7 Habits program. We contacted them and asked how did that business model work? They shared with us the design and many experiences. We have now adapted that business design using courseware that we have built here in Singapore. Its called Up! Your Service College and is now being used in school systems such as Temasek Polytechnic where 2500 students experienced this course last year before they go went out into the world to get jobs. The College courseware is now used by some of the largest and most successful organizations in the world. Microsoft is our client. Xerox is our client. Nokia is our client. Wipro in India is our client, The largest property developer in Dubai is our client. Capstone Mortgage in the UK and Holland is our client. We have many other clients in the government service and enterprise here in Singapore and we are now expanding further around the world with Singapore as our base.   4. How did you put together all the resources needed to start your business? For example: getting the start-up capital, hiring staff, doing sales and marketing, advertising, etc. The speaking business can be a business with very low overhead. I could run it from an office in my home. Over time, we simply accumulated enough capital to invest in the production of the video-based courseware that UP Your Service Global Pte Ltd now makes available to organizations around the world through the UP Your Service! College brand. We invested a considerable amount to build up the intellectual property, get the trademark registrations done and to do all the other things necessary to build a foundation of quality products and services to provide. Then we started hiring staff and setting up another office which is where the Global Headquarters in Singapore is now based.   5. Why have you chosen Singapore to set-up your business? Have you started out your business when you came here? Actually, Singapore chose me. They brought me here initially to help start the Service Quality Centre. They had done an extensive global search looking for a consultant who could advise on various areas of adult educational design. Singapore Airline knew a lot about service but only in the airline industry. They need someone who could translate this experience into Fundamental Service Principles that could be understood and learnt in any organization throughout the country. Once I got here and started working with Singaporeans, I realized how much I enjoyed being here for several reasons. Firstly, Singaporeans are very ambitious. The country wants to be number one in everything. When you are an educator like I am, and live in a country with a population that is keen to learn, improve and grow, thats a very nice match. The fundamental language of business here is English and because I am a native English speaker, that makes things work smoothly. The racial and ethnic diversity is something that I really enjoy. And I believe the way Singapore nurtures this very successfully is a good model for the rest of the world. So being based in Singapore and going out to the rest of the world allows me to bring the world's focus to this country and also bring the best of this country to the rest of the world. So I first came to Singapore in 1990 as a consultant to the nation. In 1993, I launched my first business here called Ron Kaufman Pte Ltd. This company's purpose is to provide for the publishing of my books, the scheduling of my training, the selling of my speaking engagements, the electronic newsletter that goes to 50,000 people around the world, etc. It was only in the year 2006 when we decided to start UP Service Global Pte Ltd to create and take our full curriculum and courseware and bring it to large organizations and education institutions around the world.   6. Being a motivational speaker, why have you decided to focus on improving service quality and not improving self-confidence etc? When I came in 1990, I was not a service expert. I was an expert in participation and adult educational design. But Singapore was creating a Service Quality Centre to raise national service standards, so over the years I became a service expert. And it turns out to be a very nice match because I strongly believe one of the things we all can and should do on this earth is learn to be of value and to serve other people.   7. When was the moment you realised the business would work and support you? The speaking business grew organically and has been supporting me since I came to Singapore. The team that hired me initially had already worked with many other consultants whom they rejected. They agreed that my style actually worked very well with Singaporeans, so I knew early on that the speaking, consulting and training business would succeed. The UP Your Service! business has now productized all of the intellectual property and makes it available around the world. I knew that business would succeed when we obtained our first major client and especially when we our first clients come in from outside Singapore. First we contracted with large bank based in London, and then with one of the largest IT companies in India, then a telecommunications company in Europe. And when all of these companies reported positive results with the UP Your Service! College program, they started buying more of our services and securing large long term multi-year contracts. That was when I knew that we had something that was going to work.   8. What are some of the challenges you faced when you first went into business? When I first made the decision to build a company that would serve the world, I wasn't fully aware of what changes that would involve in my own life. As an individual speaker, trainer and consultant, I still had my own free schedule. I could decide when I was going to work and when I was not. But when you have a company and you have a team of staff, then you become a manager and a leader. That is something we can talk about easily, but actually doing it requires a completely different focus of time and attention, and a very different skill set. It was quite a challenge to get my head around giving up a my personal freedom to focus on working with my team, and to learning more about leading a team and not just doing great work with clients. It took me about a year and a half to fully embrace this change. What got me through it was realizing there are so many new things to learn about building a team, leading the team, managing a team and motivating a team. Now these are some of the things I find most challenging and rewarding.   9. How did you overcome these challenges? Please share some specific examples of the action you took to overcome the challenges. The first step was to realize that I didnt know how to overcome these challenges when I first confronted them. So I enrolled myself in a leadership development training program and found some people who had more experience than me who were willing to serve as coaches and mentors to guide me. I am also very fortunate that my wife works with me in this business, so I have somebody close who is willing to be my sounding board and listen from a different point of view. I am fortunate that she has a real appetite for business and for learning, so we work through a lot of things together.   10. Can you remember your worst day in business or a time when you felt like giving up? What happened that made you feel that way and how did you triumph over it? We recently had to terminate a member of our staff for inappropriate behavior and we struggled with that decision deeply. But once the decision was made and implemented, it freed up a lot of energy and allowed our focus to be back on the business rather than on other unrelated issues. That is something we can look back on and understand, but going through it was actually quite a challenge.   11. Can you share some of the lessons you learnt from overcoming your own business challenges that you think will help other businesses? Success in business requires two different things and both of them have to work. One is to create something that is of value to other people .The second one is to have a leverage mechanism, some way of doing distribution and scaling your operations that allows you to reach the wider market. If you spend all your time developing value but dont nurture the leverage mechanism, you will end up being like a Picasso who can paint one painting at a time. On the other hand if you put all your attention into the leverage and distribution system but you dont build up distinctive value, you are never going to get brand recognition, price premium, enduring market share, etc. So there is a challenge to develop both of these things and then build a good team who can help you with appropriate projects in both these areas.   12. What are some of the proudest business achievements to date? And why are they so important and meaningful to you? Throughout the entire development of UP Your Service! College courseware and the UP Your Service! Global Pte Ltd company, I kept saying "The day we have Microsoft and General Electric as our clients will be the day I know we have succeeded in achieving the level of quality and impact we've been aiming for. Well this year, Microsoft became our client and now they are enjoying the benefits of this courseware which was created in Singapore and is based in Singapore, and is now deployed in one of the largest and most prestigious organizations in the world. This is something that gives us a real sense of accomplishment.   13. What are the operating principles (mission, vision)you have adopted or believe in for this business? Our vision is a world whereby people are educated and inspired to excel in service to customers and to one another.In school, we learn reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry and mathematics but we dont learn how to give good service to someone else. Yet success in the world requires that you provide service to someone else no matter what profession you are in. The mission of UP Your Service! College is to help organizations build superior service culture for sustainable competitive advantage. So if you think of Singapore as an organization, the service culture here is going to have a big impact on this nation competitive advantage and the sustainability of that advantage. In the educational space, our mission is to help individuals build a superior service mindset for an immediate career advantage, which means getting a better job and getting ahead at work by learning how to serve and succeed with others.   14. How do you differentiate your business from your competitors? Please provide specific examples. Have you heard of the book "Blue Ocean "?The world of customer service training is a red ocean where anybody can say they are a customer service trainer and so the market of suppliers is very fragmented. There are all kinds of Customer Service Training companies and freelance trainers, so what happens is they fight with each other in a bloody red ocean where price constantly comes down, differentiation disappears and no one has a sustainable competitive advantage. What we have done is that we have taken a different approach. First, we are using a branded position so called UP Your Service! which is now a registered trademark in Singapore, USA, UK, China, India and many other countries around the world. Second, we have a celebrity guru who is behind this particular brand called Ron Kaufman. Third and most important, we have taken all of the Fundamental Service Principles and built them into architecture of service education principles so that they can be taught and cascaded consistently throughout an organization from top to bottom, for both internal and external service provider. If you think about a global phenomenon Six Sigma, there is a language of principles and learning points that everyone learns and that makes sense. If you look at Cycle-Time Reduction, Lean Manufacturing, Balance Scorecard etc, all of these areas have Fundamental Principles and Key Learning Points. But when you talk about customer service, people tend to get very fuzzy. They say silly things like the customer is always right when they are not. They say things like the customer is king when he doesnt behave that way or go the extra mile without explaining clearly what that means. We need to be more precise about Customer Service Education in order to create a sustainable movement, so what we have built is a very solid architecture of service principles and learning points. And then we've coupled these with customized exercises so people can see how each of these points can be applied to their jobs with practical action steps they can take right away to improve. Finally we put all this education on video and created a Course Leader Certification Program with Course Leaders Guides and Service Champions Guides so people inside the worlds largest organizations can easily and effectively bring this to their colleagues. This is an enormous build of intellectual property that few of our competitors will ever match. And finally, customer service education is just one element to build a Superior Service Culture. There are eleven other building Blocks of Service Culture and we help our client organizations to implement best practices in each of these areas, from articulating an engaging service vision, to recruiting the right kind of people and orientating them properly once they arrive, having an effective service communication strategy, motivating rewards and recognition, appropriate measures and metrics, service improvement processes, recovery policies and even service role modeling from the top! This is a huge suite of valuable information and services we provide to our clients. Our competitors aren't doing anything close to that.   15. What do you see for your business in the next 5 years, and does it include any plan for expansion? We do have plans to serve and grow into the future. We have done the initial phase of building up the intellectual property platform. This next year is time for us to build up the information technology platform to serve or clients more effectively and widely. Our overall business strategy is to develop various segments. Enterprise where our existing clients include large multinationals. The government sector is important to us, already including the Singapore Police Force, Central Provident Fund Board, the National Library board, Ministry of Finance and others as well as government agencies in other countries. The education sector includes tertiary students before they head into the workforce. We are now in our third year of a project with Temasek Polytechnic. Think of all the tertiary education institutions in the world graduating people with various degrees. Where to these graduates learn about customers and providing great service? When they go for a job search, if all they have are their diplomas or degrees, they could be with lined up with everyone else who is trying to get a job. But if these students have complete the UP Your Service! College courses and become our Certified Service Ambassadors, you can imagine what that means! Employers will look at them more favourably. We want to help make that happen. There are other business segments we are aiming for, the Consumer and Small Business sectors, for example, which we will move into over time.   16. With the current economic recession, what consequences do you think it has on your company and how are you planning to overcoming it? I think we need to stay very close to our customer base and make sure we are doing an outstanding job of working with and effectively supporting our clients' organizations. NTUC Income, for example, is one of our clients in Singapore and we have very close relationship not only with their Human Resource department and their training people but also with their middle management and also the Chief Executive Officer. Because of that, they are now deploying our courseware for 1500 people inside their organization. That kind of scale and leverage is what we need for our business to succeed.   17. What are the qualities that you believe you possess that have allow you to come this far? I think any entrepreneur needs to be an optimist. If he/she doesn't believe that something is possible and see that all the effort is actually going to pay off in some way then they shouldn't become an entrepreneur. But a healthy dose of realism is equally important so you don't go jumping off the cliff, but rather spread your wings and fly. The other quality is being persistent, as there will always be setbacks, challenges and disappointments. An entrepreneur has to constantly persevere and keep going.   18. In your opinion, what other qualities does a person need in order to be successful in business? And why? (eg. Educational qualification, work experience, family influence, attitude, etc) I don't think educational qualifications are a requirement to be successful in business. We have far too many examples of very large and successful organizations started by entrepreneurs who didn't have degree. Getting a good education and degrees are helpful, but they don't necessarily teach you how to be a successful entrepreneur. I think every experience needs to be looked at as an opportunity to learn. It could be learning about what works and what doesn't work, learning how to get along with other people, learning how to sell and learning how to manage expenses, etc. Therefore anyone who is interested to become an entrepreneur should be looking at whatever they are doing now and start thinking of what they can learn from it. I do think that family does has an influence as well. Bill Gates was able to do what he did with Microsoft in part because his father was a corporate attorney. So Gates grew up around the dinner table understanding things like licensing, contracts, joint ventures and partnerships. He grew up in a context where he understood that legal issues are big important parts of business. And today Microsoft is primarily a licensing company with thousands of partnerships around the world. So family influence can definitely have an impact. But of all the things I have mentioned here, the most important is an attitude that includes being opened to learn, willing to preserve, and grateful to have the opportunities to be of service to other people.   19. What are some of your business values and what would you like to pass down to others, particularly the younger generation? The number one thing I would like to pass on to everyone is that a good life not about making money. Money is very important because that is how businesses communicate with each other. That's how you can grow, plan, invest and expand. But if the objective is only to make money, then you will never get lasting satisfaction from your the business. If you get into business for the purpose of doing something that will help take care of the needs and concerns of other people, then you will enjoy your success and even the challenges will be worthwhile to face and overcome. But if you see business only as a way of making money, then the money will never be enough to make you feel that you have done something worthwhile and successful.   20. What advice would you give young people who want to start their own business? Go for it! Seek out mentors, make friends with other people who are entrepreneurs and be willing to ask for help and listen to what experienced people have to say. This doesn't mean that everybody will agree to be your mentors but you can certainly ask. The lessons that you learn from them can save you from a lot of grief because you will learn and benefit from the hard experiences other people have gone through before. I still do that today, I seek out mentors all the time, people who have been there and done that or people who haven't been exactly where I am going but they can see where I am going and they might say to me, "Watch out for this" or "Think about this". These different points of views can be very valuable.   21. How much your company grown since it started? In terms of revenue, number of customers, manpower and other areas that are applicable to your business. When we started the UP Your Service! company, it had no revenue at all. As an international group now, we did more than two million dollars in sales last year. Even now in the economic downturn, we are looking to hold at least at that level and see how we can increase profitability. Since we are a small and young company, our objective this year is to invest in a technology platform to lay the foundation for us to grow in the years ahead. In terms of number of staff, I started out with my wife and we have now grown to a total of 10 people. Most of them here are here in Singapore and some of them are in other countries.   22. In your opinion, what does it mean to have the "spirit of enterprise"? Having the Spirit of Enterprise is to have the passion to serve other people and also the desire to have that come into form. It could be in the form of a business, a team, a product, or a form of contracting and licensing, distribution and translation, etc. It is not just having the spirit to serve but the spirit to serve through some mechanisms which become or contribute to a profitable enterprise.   23. How would you define Success? I am what you call a creator, someone who comes up with new ideas. I do that all the time and in fact it's hard for me to not come up with new ideas throughout the day. The privilege of seeing those ideas manifest and successfully reach other people through a business and for them to get value and come back and say "Oh, this was so helpful" or "Hey Ron, I appreciate this and I thank you so much", that gives me a very successful feeling. The other definition of success for me is when other people on our team participate in their jobs and achieve a lot. When our team members feel good about the work they are doing, I also have a warm feeling of success as an entrepreneur.   24. Complete the statement , "Behind every successful man,...." If he is lucky, there is a fabulously supportive woman who helps him and her succeed together. My wife is a rock of support which is so important for an entrepreneur. I am one of those lucky men.