By G. Sharmila
After going through a rough patch with their new software company Juris Technologies Sdn Bhd in 2003, things began looking up for the company’s co-founders See Wai Hun and John Lim in 2005. See shares more of their entrepreneurial journey with KINIBIZ.
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In 2003, the year it was founded, Juris Technologies Sdn Bhd went through a rough patch due to its narrow client base, going as far as to experience cash flow problems, leaving its co-founders See Wai Hun and John Lim unable to pay themselves salaries.
“Our cash flow problems only happened over a very short period, and only once or twice, and we questioned ourselves every time. All my family members did too, especially my parents. My father would say, ‘See, I told you to go for the corporate world, where you will be jetsetting, going to New York etc. Now you want to be in Malaysia and drive a Proton!’,” See recalled.
However, they successfully dug themselves out of that pit, which began with research and development (R&D). “In 2005 we decided to do R&D in collection and that’s when we started selling to enterprises and banks. The revenue started increasing because each time we sold to the banks it’s for a few million ringgit. It’s different from smaller sales, and of course after that we decided to again conduct R&D in another area which is origination. It means helping the banks to give out new loans rather than collecting the debt,” See explained to KINIBIZ in a recent interview.
See Wai Hun
They (Juris) ended up with a full range of products they could now offer to customers. “When we grew new sales, some of them came from the whole package: origination, collection and recovery. Around this time we also started on our debt collection agency module. That’s how we grew, by going into product adjacency: the same market and same group of customers but you offer them more things,” See added.
According to her, Juris has been profitable from the very beginning. “The first few years we were already profitable, that’s why all the while we never took loans or financing, we just ran on our own retained earnings,” she said. Last year, the company earned RM13.7 million in revenue and RM3.4 million in profit after tax. Among its customers are Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM), Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB), Bank Rakyat and other local and foreign banks.
The main struggle for See was how to grow the company. “Being a local company, it’s always a challenge on whether people trust you…most of them (banks) were using foreign software companies at the time,” See said.
Mistakes were also made in the early years. “When we first started, there was this company I went to where the manager asked me for a proposal. I gave him a proposal and later he gave me a call asking me to go over to his office. He threw the proposal back at me, he said ‘you look at this, this is your quality, look at the quality of all the other fellas’. He said ‘they understand the business and you just give me a (plain) vanilla version and expect to get the job’,” See recalled.
After that incident, See said she realised that if you want to get business, you’ve got to go all out and you cannot just do a simple job. “That’s why we now have a very strong pre-sales or demo team; every time before we meet our customers we are already prepared. We find out what the customer wants, we change our software and we understand our business, so by the time we go there and we present, they will say this is exactly what I am looking for. This is our differentiating point,” she said.
Being a local software player has its advantages, See said. “If we find anything in our software that we cannot cater to, if you are foreign you will probably say ‘that this is a gap I’m not going to do this, or you will have to pay a lot to change’. For us if we see a gap, if we find something in our software now that we can improve on, we will work on it. And if there is something that we don’t do, we will say let’s do it,” she added.
When asked if Juris is currently seeking investors, See replied that with their main customers being banks and with customers such as TM and TNB, “that’s the reason why some investors are speaking to us even though we are not interested in investment”.
Why aren’t they interested in investors coming into the picture? “Currently it’s because we don’t need investment, but it’s not that we are not thinking about it. If we find the right partner and time, but now we are still on a growth trajectory and we need to handle risk. If someone else comes in who we don’t know and if they are risk averse, it will impact how our business grows,” See shared.
On whether they would list, See replied: “Currently, we don’t have an exit strategy because we are focused on growing the company, we are focused on the fundamentals and how we can build a sustainable business. Because of that we have not thought of an IPO, etc.”
On growing regionally, she said that while they want to focus on Malaysia, “because it still is a very good market”, they do have plans to go regional.
“What we are thinking of is to dominate the Malaysian market first, and then think of expanding. But looking at the current economy, we may have to think of expediting it. I always believe you have to grow your company first before going overseas. ” See said.
See named Vietnam and Indonesia as markets they are looking at. “Indonesia, even though it’s a good market, is going to be a tough market. If we go overseas we have to set up an overseas office, then we have to pay for staff travel etc.” she said.
Why then does she want to expedite regional expansion? Is it because the opportunities are too great to ignore?
“I always believe it will take time to grow anything and if we don’t do it now it might be an opportunity that is lost. Sometimes for emerging economies the time is now and if you are there late, then it becomes a replacement market where you have to replace someone else,” See said.
Yesterday: Being fickle pays
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