Four up-and-coming trends in the restaurant business

Cupcakes from Teacosy are sold alongside angel figurines and furniture.

As technology advances and business concepts evolve, an increasing number of F&B entrepreneurs and service solution providers are thinking out-of-the-box and making life easier for customers.

By innovating, F&B entrepreneurs enjoy reduced overheads, better customer service and additional revenue. Customers feel more satisfied too. In this article, we chart four recent trends in the F&B industry that have dramatically improved how businesses are run.

If you’re a restaurateur or cafe owner, do look at these trends and consider implementing them in your business. Read more

Countries that tax your company to death — and those that don’t

Entrepreneurs residing in Singapore and Hong Kong experience no burdensome taxes, according to a paper published by Grant Thornton.

Titled Grant Thornton International Business Report 2010, the paper sought the perceptions of owners and directors of PHBs (privately held businesses) on the issue of tax in their respective country.

The global study, which covered 36 key economies worldwide, found entrepreneurs residing in Singapore and Hong Kong are among the most satisfied with their country’s tax system. Entrepreneurs interviewed from the remaining economies felt burdened by at least one category of taxation in their country. Read more

Want to sell your business? Attract retailers to your product

A client approached us recently to help sell his business. He designs, manufactures and sells designer greeting cards.

He has run the company for a few years and found it difficult to run multiple companies, so he has decided to sell one and focus on running the other.

He approached us for advice on how to sell his company and value his business. To begin, we collected a few facts so we could get a sense of what kind of business we are selling. Read more

Insights from Crystal Jade’s Chairman and CEO Ip Yiu Tung

In the restaurant-eat-restaurant world of the F&B industry, few local brands have stood out as clearly as Crystal Jade, one of the market leaders in Singapore. Celebrating its 20th anniversary last year with a refreshing of its identity that involves extensive refurbishments at its restaurants, Crystal Jade enjoyed a turnover of S$240M (US$189M) in 2010.

Over the last three years, it has expanded aggressively, investing S$25M (together with partners) to open 39 new outlets across Asia. This year, the F&B group will sink in a further S$17M to open 17 new outlets across eight cities. These efforts helped it to achieve a targeted 10 percent to 15 percent yearly growth in sales.

Beginning from a single outlet in Cairnhill in 1991 — which was closed and reopened with a Kitchen outlet in Shaw Plaza and a Palace outlet in Ngee Ann City – the group now has more than 100 outlets sprawled across 18 cities in nine countries. Half of these are in Singapore while the other 50 are in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and more. Read more

Ten websites to learn Ruby on Rails for free

What do Amazon, IBM, Kickstarter and Twitter have in common, other than being great technology companies?

They all use Ruby on Rails. With so many things going for it, it’s an attractive framework that allows you to deploy web apps quickly and effectively. That’s enough to make you want to pick up Ruby on Rails!

So, I’ve put together ten good sites where you can pick up the framework as a newbie without paying a single cent. These resources will not transform you into a super programmer, but they’re enough for you to create a working application. Read more

Tech Start-ups in Singapore: The Role of Venture Capital and Angel Investors

Professor Dr. Wong Poh Kam here provides an overview of role of Venture Capital and Angel Investors in teh-startups scene in Singapore. It has been republished here with permission. A more detailed version of this will be published in the Annual SVCA Directory 2011/12

High-technology entrepreneurship has been identified as an important driver of Singapore’s knowledge-based economy, and increased policy attention has been given to encouraging the formation and nurturing of high-tech start-ups, especially those with significant intellectual property (IP). To this end, in 2010 the National Research Foundation (NRF) engaged me, as director of the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, to conduct a study of high-tech start-ups in Singapore. While the survey covers many aspects of the high tech start-up dynamics, including characteristics of the founders, their sources of technology and funding, growth strategies, performance and challenges, this blog highlights some salient findings on only one aspect of the survey: the performance of start-ups that have received funding from venture capitalists or angel investors versus those that did not. Read more

Reizo: Undressing the story behind a fashion entrepreneur

This article is syndicated from MoneySmart, an online finance publication for the masses.

Reizo is a custom tailoring house, located at Wilkie Edge. Just a few years old, they already have a faithful following by delivering quality at affordable prices. REIZO’s custom suits suggest a wine-sniffing, caviar-munching elegance, which sets you a head above your less dressed colleagues.

At the helm of Reizo is young entrepreneur Vishnu Vasudeven. Graduating from NUS with a major in finance, he gave up a comfy bank job to create Reizo. In his own words:

“I wanted to do something different. I tried internships (at the bank) and didn’t like it. I wanted to start my own thing.” Read more

Google DevFest Singapore 2011 – Creating a connected future

Google organized their annual DevFest last month, and it was quite an eye opener to see how they’re placing their bets on HTML5, Chrome, Ice-Cream Sandwich (ICS), and Google+.

Having only attended the first part of the event, I got to sit in at the sessions where Google showed off these new technologies.

Here are some takeaways. Read more

How to outsource everything to the cloud (except yourself)

Remember the blurry old days when software was sold in boxes? If you were born in early 80’s, you might even have had the joy of installing software from floppy disks. Gladly, those times are past us.

Setting up a website, building a customer database, sending out newsletters and many other impractical tasks have become affordable for everyone, at a fraction of the costs 20 years ago, thanks to a plethora of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses.

Here you’ll find a brief overview of web-based services that you can start using today to help bootstrap your company. Read more

Starting a new company? Do industry analysis (part two)

If you are looking to sell a business idea to venture capital firms, demonstrating an understanding of your industry is important. This is the second of a two-part series on how industry analysis can take the guess work out of starting a new company and securing venture capital.

Part one defined what kind of questions industry analysis aims to solve. Here we recommend some of the best resources on the Internet to help you carry out industry analysis.

To start, look at the industry as whole, and then begin to make a study of the top three or four players. Cross reference analysis of individual companies with industry analysis to see if you can verify the industry reports and make your own conclusions. Read more