25 years is a long time to be in business.
It’s amazing how much we have learned and the mistakes we have made as business owners in the past 25 years.
Nic started Redbox Studio in 1998 – a year after he had started working in an advertising agency. He believed he could do better being on his own instead.
It was not a time to start a business because the Asian financial crisis was happening at that time.
But then again, there’s never a right time to start anything.
You just have to leap and believe that no matter what, you will learn as you go along.
And that’s how Redbox Studio was born.
We started with designing websites for business owners because art and design have always been Nic’s greatest strengths.
Along the way, he realized that he had to add value to clients. If everyone is a designer, no one is a designer.
Our value-add has always evolved with our clients’ needs.
Back then, clients were supposed to give us their content.
But clients are not copywriters.
They know their businesses inside out but they don’t know content the way we know content (because in the end, we had to work with content and design to create websites).
How would clients know what to say on each web page? How could we produce results if the content was badly written?
It was glaringly obvious and ridiculous so we said, let’s create website content for our clients when we design their websites.
Our clients sighed in relief! They were only too happy for us to interview them and write their website content.
After a while, we asked ourselves: what else are we missing? We knew clients experienced visibility and credibility through their websites but we still knew something was missing.
That something was marketing.
And that began our journey of teaching clients how best to use their websites for greater results. Of course, not all clients understood this but we started with educating anyone who wanted to learn.
Our Tech Tuesday sessions were highly popular – they were free sessions every other Tuesday and we taught attendees how to leverage their websites. Tech Tuesday ended its 5-year run because we believed that everything has a beginning and an end.
We also experimented with another event called Level Up where we partnered with someone who wanted to gather business owners for networking but that didn’t do well as partnerships are about working together. Since the partnership didn’t turn out the way we expected, we closed that event. Sometimes it is important to know when to quit.
In its place, we decided that from that moment onwards, we would conserve resources and do it on our own. We challenged ourselves to teach marketing based on what we have learned and what we observed from working with clients. All the mistakes we made and all the mistakes clients made became the basis of our teachings.
Marketing Mojo was the answer – a ticketed, quarterly event at China House Cafe that we organized from 2012 to 2019 for business owners who wanted to learn how to get smarter at marketing.
We taught concepts from our One Mountain One Dragon framework – it was strategy and concepts instead of tactics.
We always believed that tactics can only get you so far. If you understand strategy and concepts, you can apply them easily and don’t have to rely on or remember specific tactics. That has always been our principle.
Since clients were always asking us about websites, Search Engine Optimisation and marketing, we also took all our knowledge and wrote a book. In 2016, we published our book (Web Wisdom) so that we could share what we knew with business owners who needed to know how to create a website that helped them get real results. Many people including web designers have found our book useful for their own work. NOTE: This book is undergoing a reprint as we refresh and update it. It will be reprinted in the first quarter of 2024 and will have a Mandarin version in quarter two of 2024.
But that was not all. In 2012, Nic had an idea of creating a game. He had played Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow board game and was inspired to create a game of cards to help entrepreneurs understand the importance of a crucial currency – time.
We beta-tested the game multiple times through sessions with friends. We received great feedback about the game and finally, Nic unveiled the game for entrepreneurs (Big Timer) in 2014.
The game isn’t just about having fun (although that is also a prerequisite for us); it’s about learning how to act decisively given the time we all have in equal measure and know how to strategically make money from our products.
Although the main audience for our game is still entrepreneurs, we’ve conducted our game in multinational corporations to help employees learn about intrapreneurship. Our game has been played in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore too until the pandemic put a temporary hiatus on our game workshops.
Right now, we’re continuing to conduct Big Timer games and workshops because we have also created modules for training and coaching that happens post-game.
Understandably, we’ve evolved so much from the day we started as a web design company. Today we are more than that – we’re training entrepreneurs because we understand the trials and tribulations of starting and growing a business.
We’ve never considered ourselves web designers very much as we have always believed that we’re marketers first. Clients come to us for strategic consultations and marketing audits when their websites and marketing don’t work.
Websites, however, are still the most effective online real estate you can own as an entrepreneur that is within your control. Unlike social media, no one can take your website away from you or close your website down.
However, an excellent lead-generation website takes time and effort to design, write, plan and develop. We interview every client to develop their marketing story. We work with every client to work their business model into their website. We craft personal and engaging stories so that they are perceived as professionals in their field.
Through this process, we have been able to create high visibility for our clients and as a result, success in terms of credibility and money. Many of them started with zero visibility online where no one knew them and they were not Google-able. Today they are easily found and their websites make them money through the prospects they attract and convert into customers.
While our lead-generation websites have been helping doctors, consultants and SMEs market themselves, the premium web development service will take a backseat in 2024 as we prioritize our Big Timer coaching and training which many people have been requesting. Never fear though. You can still access our knowledge when we open our workshops to teach you how you too can create a lead-generation website. If you’re interested, sign up for our updates.
Additionally, we have more books to write and more collaborations to work on with partners not just in Malaysia but across Asia. Yes, it’s incredibly exciting as the next 25 years will see a refreshed and different Redbox Studio in the making. Phase 2 of our journey is just beginning!
Redbox Studio celebrates its 25th anniversary on 10 October this year but we decided to hold a tea party for clients last week at China House Cafe.
Our business has always been small but mighty because we have created a lot of success for our clients. We have had employees, full-timers and part-timers and interns throughout the years. We have worked with all sizes of businesses from multinational corporations to solopreneurs, SMEs and start-ups.
And we also realized that we have the greatest impact on direct business owners.
So this is where we come full circle. We’re putting our energy into helping direct business owners get smarter with their marketing so that they can grow their businesses and get the results they want through our coaching and training. Far too often, we see the demise of a business not because it offered a poor product but because the business owner didn’t focus on marketing or a sustainable business model!
A few days ago, a friend remarked that she was intrigued that we dared to be entrepreneurs. She had quit her corporate job and only lasted a few weeks as a consultant before she decided to go back into the corporate space where she has been until today.
Her question was: did we ever fear that we wouldn’t make the same amount of money we made when we were employees?
Fears are always present, especially in the early years.
Once we understand value and can create value, the business will make money. But entrepreneurs value something more – they value freedom. Freedom, independence, creativity and control.
Every business struggles in the first two years and 1 out of every 5 businesses will close shop in 2 years.
The top six reasons why businesses fail are, according to Investopedia:
– Not satisfying a need
– Bad business plan
– Lack of financing
– Bad location including poor online presence and poor marketing
– Inflexibility
– Rapid expansion
What about success rates? Did you know that only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more?
But how do you create value and prevent your business from being a sad statistic?
This is why we want to focus on teaching value creation in the marketplace using our entrepreneur game, Big Timer, as the foundation for our coaching and workshops.
Imagine money flowing like a river. Each time you need money, you head out to the “river” and scoop as much money as you like. But with each scoop, you must create value for someone.
If you’re a trainer who would like to license and use our entrepreneur game and training modules in your workshops, contact us.
If you’re a business owner or solopreneur who would like to participate in our workshops and coaching, contact us too.
If you want to be updated on our events in 2024, sign up here.