The History of Radical Marketing

Introduction:

Hey guys, Terence here. Today, I wanna share with you a very special video where we’re gonna talk about the history of Radical Marketing.

The Importance of Understanding History:

So why is understanding the history important? Is because by understanding the history of radical marketing, hopefully you will get a better understanding of what we’ve been through, why we’re here today, why we are at this position here today, where we’re going and how we’re gonna get there so that the vision and the mission gets clearer for you. And I think that is so important for you to buy into the vision and the mission of the business to understand Radical Marketing.

My Journey into Marketing:

I think you need to understand a little bit about my history as well my passion for marketing began in my early late teens rather when I started reading books on marketing i don’t know why they were there i think my parents picked up some books on marketing i started reading them and i’m going wow this is quite interesting and that’s as a teenager uh just you know just being curious right And from that, when I went to university, I started to gain a deeper love for marketing and greater curiosity for marketing.

Academic Pursuits:

So in my undergraduate degree, while I was in an economics degree, I also enrolled in a lot of marketing subjects. And as a result from that curiosity, I actually enrolled in a master’s degree in marketing as well. So I did two degrees in marketing after my undergraduate, which is an honours and a master’s degree. So this was all back in Australia.

Venturing into Education:

After that, because I just enjoyed marketing and studying marketing so much, what I did was I basically became a lecturer at university, a lecturer and a tutor and a researcher at university. I was involved in various subjects, predominantly at that time in internet marketing. So because it was such a new field back then, this was back in the late 1990s, I was basically well sought after by various universities. so I lectured at not just my own university I was lecturing at other universities as well like if you know australia i was lecturing in Griffith University that was my main one I lectured in the Master’s Program at QUT and I lectured in the master’s degree program at University of Sydney as well so it was really fun.

Transition to Practicality:

 But one thing I found that doing all this lecturing and all this researching writing books writing research papers and all that stuff one thing was missing for me and that was the practicality of it so even though I had my students doing real-life projects the practicality of it wasn’t enough so I actually ventured out of university and I stopped lecturing and I started the businesses I got into real estate investing while I was still at lecturing at university part-time and I also bought a existing business which was a print shop back then a suburban print shop and shopping mall you know like all those photocopy stuff and you know mugs and t-shirts and all that kind of stuff so that was my early days and you know honestly looking back I didn’t know why I even got into it in the first place but hey I got into it and so I had two businesses running one was the real estate investing business one was the photocopy shop.

Business Ventures and Challenges:

So what happened with the real estate I was quite successful with it kept getting bigger because not because i was smart i believe it was because of good timing and i made lots of lots of money i got into developments and all that kind of stuff and on the other hand, the little print shop just kept on going and it also evolved into a book publishing business and it evolved into like a book services business for people who wanted to self-publish so it all went decently well for the real estate side until 2008 where you had a global financial crisis so 2009 that business went bust and by 2010 i actually had so much debts i had to file for bankruptcy for that business yet at the same time thanks to my book publishing business on that side of things it was going really well even though i was like going broke on the real estate side at least on the book publishing side that was doing pretty well we grew like double and double again until we hit like close to 1 million Australian Dollars turnover back in I think 2011 yeah I think I was going pretty well okay.

Shift to Malaysia and Changes:

So gave up the real estate stuff and focus on the book publishing stuff however when I had my daughter in 2011 we decided to move to Malaysia in 2012 so we moved to Malaysia naively thinking I could continue that book publishing business in Australia with my staff member still working there remotely however that didn’t work out too well and that was one reason and also I think the other reason was that Amazon started launching their own self-publishing business right self-publishing service and it was completely free so you know we used to charge thousands of dollars and now Amazon’s saying they’ll do it for free so basically that business this model was destroyed by Amazon.

So Jeff Bezos I’ll remember you for that anyway back in 2013 I decided to say hey you know what am I really good at what am I really passionate about and it is really marketing so I decided hey look you know let’s start a marketing agency you know let’s do some consult consultation work and all that kind of stuff so I started a Marketing Agency back in 2013 no running ads nothing right just basically didn’t know what I was really doing I was doing some branding stuff for various clients I was doing you know any sort of sort of work right any consultancy work which was not that successful then I started picking up Facebook Ads.

 I thought hey you know Facebook Ads this looks like good opportunity back in 2013-2014 and I’m like going okay really really research into it and you know found out a lot about Facebook Ads didn’t have client yet until one day I was introduced to this guy called Aaron Sim so Aaron basically is from Wealth Mentors and he has like a various speakers coming in like success resources right so he promotes those speakers in Singapore Malaysia and basically he was looking for a way to get you know bums on seats.

 so I said hey have you tried Facebook Ads right and they’re like oh no we haven’t tried that yet does it work I said let’s give it a go we’ll see you have no hassle let’s give it a test for one month and see if you like the results right so basically we did that and like we crushed it compared to their traditional forms of marketing like newspaper ads and all that kind of stuff we were getting leads for like super duper cheap back then as you can imagine back in 2013- 2014 I think there was hardly anyone we could have been one of the first that was doing like hey seminar marketing stuff back then in Malaysia and Singapore right maybe not Singapore but at least for Malaysia right so yeah uh from there we kind of picked up another client or in the coaching seminar kind of space.

Office Space and Team Growth:

And I remember back then I was working out of my friend’s office. She didn’t really use it. And she said, hey, you know, why don’t you use my office because I hardly use it, right? Then basically, I used it until she said, oh, we’re selling the office, right? And say, okay, right. So I just moved downstairs to another guy’s office, got a new from downstairs, the neighbor, and they say, hey, we got one office space for rent, like one little room for rent. Okay, sure, let’s do it.

Lifestyle Business Beginnings:

Then all the while, I had a mindset that was, hey, you know, if I can just get a few clients myself uh you know run this business make 10 20 grand a month yeah i’m pretty happy right so i wasn’t really thinking big or anything I was just like thinking this can be a pretty good lifestyle business kind of thing right.

Business Growth and Hiring: 

So then I started growing a little bit then I realized hey it would be cool to find someone who can actually help me out because you know i’m doing all this work i’m not really that good at graphic design so I should get some a graphic designer to help me out.

Relocation to KK and Team Expansion: 

At that point in time also I decided hey you know my family we wanted a better lifestyle better health reasons for health reasons because my daughter was coughing a lot due to the haze in KL every year so we decided hey let’s move to KK and that’s where my wife’s family is from and my parents also wanted to move to KK because of the better lifestyle there from KL so we all moved to KK and we hired our first team member actually I hired someone else previously but she didn’t work out so I hired this new team member and Angel if you’re still here when you’re watching this video which I hope you still are she was not my first team team member and thankfully I selected a really good one at the start which helped me to you know free up more time to help me you know grow the business more.

Focusing on Coaching Space: 

Throughout all this subsequent years so this is since 2017 thereabouts we’ve just been basically focusing on growing our clientele in the coaching space and yeah for a few years there to be honest you know it’s kind of one step forward one step back because for various reasons I think you know picking up wrong clients pandemic didn’t help as well we had to pivot from seminars to webinars which kind of long term it helped a lot but in the short term it kind of disrupted our business a bit and hiring poor people as well also didn’t help but you know overall now the business has come to a point where really focus on growing it big.

Vision for the Future: 

That’s why we have this big vision of going like 50x pretty much in the next by 2033 so that’s in summary where we came from and where we’re at and obviously for me to me this is like just kind of like the beginning of the journey i think there’s much more exciting days in the future.

Mindset Transformation:

One of the biggest things that was shackling me and the business was that my mindset right as I mentioned I started as a lifestyle kind of business and I didn’t want to really grow that big but now you know for various reasons maybe limiting beliefs and you know misconceptions and all that kind of stuff but now that is kind of like lifted and as i grow i believe the business will continue to grow and my mindset is now really expanded and I’m just so excited that you if you’re watching this video right now that means you’re on board with us.

Team Collaboration and Future Outlook: 

I just look forward to just like having just this awesome team of navy seals just working together and kicking some ass together and making a dent in the universe right so thank you so much for watching I really hope you enjoyed watching this video and that sums up the history of Radical Marketing.