Bootstrapped: How OpenMinds built a successful business rooted in a solid startup culture

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OpenMinds has been quietly building a successful business, staying out of the press and VCs. Last year, the Malaysian martech company celebrated its 10th anniversary. The factors that helped the 45-employee group win the market have been aplenty, but one factor stands out: employees.

“We don’t always get it right but we try our best through robust hiring processes to find the brilliant minds to fit into the job role at that season in time. We monitor their growth, performance and culture fit, and if they don’t achieve their goals, we reposition them to different teams or entities to (hopefully) flourish. In our business, people are our greatest asset but our greatest headache too. We must be smart in how and where we invest our time and effort,” says Daryll Tan, Co-Founder and Director at OpenMinds.

In this interview with e27, Tan describes how OpenMinds won the confidence of the market and navigated different weathers to be a force to reckon with.

Edited excerpts:

Can you give us some background on how OpenMinds was founded and how it has evolved over time?

I had my own talent management and video company back in 2011. That was my first foray into entrepreneurship. I decided to pivot the business and find reliable and like-minded business partners.

After several meetings with various people, I finally found the right partner, and we officially formed OpenMinds in 2012. We had five partners then, of whom four remain now. We came together with a common goal to open people’s minds to the possibility of new technology and all digitalisation. We have always positioned ourselves as consultants focused on marketing technology (MarTech) and solving business problems with digital and tech solutions.

Initially, we tackled business hurdles by offering social media management and strategic planning. We then pivoted to analytics and eventually focused on providing enterprise solutions.

OpenMinds is now a group of companies offering various solutions such as digital marketing, strategy, consultation, enterprise tech development, product-market fit, performance marketing, CRM, and automation tools.

We have had more than ten other subsidiaries and ventures along the way but have streamlined to focus on the group right now while maintaining a few strong subsidiaries. One of the subsidiaries is OpenAcademy, an edutech firm focusing on on-the-go, bite-sized learning, corporate, and public training across Southeast Asia.

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OpenMinds has teams and offices in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. China is next in line. We have consulted multinational brands across F&B, finance, FMCG, automotive, e-commerce/retail, electronics, and more.

With a newly minted structure and a dedicated leadership team, we are now evolving to solidify our MarTech offerings across APAC and to enhance our internal culture and people development to ensure better ownership and relevant solutions for growing economies.

One of the unique aspects of OpenMinds is that it has grown without any external capital or VC funding. Can you talk about the decision not to seek external investment and how you have been able to finance your growth without it? Do you ever want to raise funding?

The main reason for bootstrapping from day one is maintaining control over our business. This allows us to make the right decisions at the right time without external influence. Full ownership enables us (partners) to speak freely and create counter-cultural habits and operational processes.

It also allowed us to grow our people the way we want to, invest in experiments as we like, develop solutions that require speed and push for innovative structures within the organisation. This also means allowing our solutions and products to speak for themselves, giving us the runway to prove product market fit and the opportunity to reinvest our profits towards the right channel.

We have since only relied on business revenue, cash flow and smart investment decisions to finance our growth. This has also led us to play in a different financing field where we build our credit line with banks for future funding, as and when needed.

We have since raised a successful round of funding for our subsidiary OpenAcademy. We have no intentions to raise funds from VCs but welcome other forms of funds from financial institutions, government growth grants and client work.

How has OpenMinds been able to compete with other companies in the same space that have received large amounts of funding?

1. We do not consider ourselves as an agency. We steer clear of that. We are consultants first and only execute work in the areas we are confident in, i.e. digital and tech. We always look at the business’s root problem before offering suggestions/proposals — even if it means looking at a broader company scope, addressing a more general need and offering more than the brief.

We have lost pitches because of this. Not that they don’t like us but because our solutions were bigger in scale, addressed business and operational challenges in-depth and required more involvement of other stakeholders. We have since reaped the beauty of approaching business solutions from these angles, and our clients are happy to enjoy the rewards of their investments in us.

2. We invest a lot in our people- from culture to career advancement. For example, we have practised flexible and remote working since 2012. We allowed our team to work out-of-office three days a week; no strict check-in system suffocated them. We are task-oriented and treat everyone as mature adults.

We offer one of the best employee benefits (OM Perks) in the industry, focusing on the team’s needs and having career advancement plans that allow for title promotion and overall upskilling, directorship and company share options. Talents are encouraged to work cross-teams, be responsible for their education (free OpenAcademy access for all employees) and take progressive rest whenever they need to recharge (we have since introduced a very practical 365-day leave).

We have a flat communication culture paired with a structure that allows for vertical growth, advancement, leadership opportunities, and accountability.

3. We have positioned OpenMinds as a multinational company, offering solutions that suit each country’s needs. We have created a network of intelligence and resources pool ready to be shared across our advisory work. While we have a presence in several countries, 99 per cent of our work is done in-house, including our tech development.

What strategies have OpenMinds used to achieve such rapid growth?

1. Pivot, pivot, pivot: We made quick decisions, especially in our early days, to position ourselves as best as possible to serve business demands in the digital and tech scene.

2. Innovate: We are also finding ways to innovate and stitch opportunities—a case in point is the multiple ventures and eventually laser focusing on our current group and subsidiaries.

3. Right people, right position: We don’t always get it right but we try our best through robust hiring processes to find the brilliant minds to fit into the job role at that season in time. We monitor their growth, performance and culture fit, and if they don’t achieve their goals, we reposition them to different teams or entities to (hopefully) flourish. In our business, people are our greatest asset but our greatest headache too. We must be smart in how and where we invest our time and effort.

4. Leadership team: This has gone through multiple iterations throughout the years we’ve been operating. The leadership team is different from mid-management. They don’t only perform their role as team leads but act as a “sub-committee” specially appointed to handle the group’s overall business continuity, decision-making, and succession planning.

This helps us with operations, people advancement, and business growth and for the founders to focus on steering the bigger vision.

Are you breakeven or profitable now?

We have been profitable since the first year of our operations.

Can you talk about some of your biggest challenges and how you overcame them without external funding?

1. Cash flow: This topic sounds too simple and has been reiterated a thousand times. But cash flow becomes very real in the business world. We had multiple times when we were rather tight on cash due to the payment terms of some of our invoices, overdue payments, and lack of proper financial planning. Most of the time, we overcame this with quick execution of payment recovery from clients, loans, and a whole load of faith. We have never shortchanged anyone, even at our tightest; we paid salaries on time and have seen the rewards of pure integrity, morale and trust.

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2. Salary during the pandemic: We did not retrench anyone but had to defer some portion of the salary. I believe we aced this process by having the leadership and in-house finance teams ready. We put together a solid pay deferment plan, communicating this to all employees via a town hall, followed by group check-ins and open door policy where we addressed every concern in a 1 to 1 setting. We then made sure communication was written in black and white and communicated along the way. We eventually paid back all the deferred salary within a short few months, with interest! This helped us gain the confidence of the team.

3. The leisure of hiring very senior talents: As a people-driven organisation, the ideal situation is to have very senior and competent people from the get-go. But with limited funds, we needed to be wise in who we hired. We overcame this by breaking down the roles, ensuring a very tight and unique interview process and having milestones to gauge the talents’ performance and fit.

We also invested a lot of time in training internally and allowed the team to flourish by themselves, guiding them as we went along. We also promoted internal teammates so that our hiring cost remains low. Train them and allow them to take on bigger roles.

How has the company culture contributed to its success, and how do you maintain that culture as the company continues to grow?

We are big on culture. I always say this: Values create character, character creates habit, and habit creates culture”. From an operational or structural perspective, culture has allowed us to work in a unified mindset, sharing the same values and vision. Our culture has pushed us to be more gracious, understanding yet firm, and accommodating yet decisive in our wants and needs. It has given birth to a great employee benefit, working style and tenacity that echoes across the board. This big area has kept four of us founders going strong too.

Culture is easy to develop, but it takes one person to knock it all down. We try our best to maintain our culture through proper onboarding, accountability and leading by example. We maintain consistency in our speech and conduct.

Expanding to different countries doesn’t mean that every country must follow the same culture as Malaysia. This does not work as every country has its own social establishments. We only provide the framework, and they grow the culture that best suits them with the essence of our value. It’s like taking DNA and adding your own flavour to make it relevant.

What is the long-term vision for the firm, and how do you plan to achieve that vision without external investment?

The vision has always been to create an ecosystem of complementing, self-sustaining ventures where bright minds can do the things they love, benefit and thrive in. From a solutions point of view, we want to be a multinational company that offers relevant and results-driven MarTech solutions for any industry willing to expand and grow its tech and digital ecosystem.

As said above, we will continue strengthening our leadership team, maintaining our culture, investing in the right people, remaining innovative, solving business problems and setting proper structures for greater ownership. This will eventually lead to great work, monetary rewards, and growth opportunities.

Can you share any success stories or milestones you are particularly proud of?

1. I first dived into entrepreneurship without a bachelor’s degree (I stepped out of university and pursued entrepreneurship at age 21). I am proud because I took the time to understand myself, how I learn, and the best way to advance in life. I learn quicker and better by doing, taking risks and curating life lessons in every changing season. Taking that big leap is a success by itself as I did not stop at mere chatter but putting things into action (I can share a whole story on this).

2. Finding and assimilating the right business partners. There is no such thing as a lone wolf in business. I’ve tried that, and I’ve seen failures. We need fellow founders to battle through the business field because it can get messy, lonely and wild out there. Just by being able to maintain and grow stronger as partners despite all the disagreements, ups and downs, and roller coaster rides, the success is not only in the partnership but the journey we have gone through together to this day.

3. The next generation of leaders. Succession planning is unavoidable. Many know the importance but rarely succeed in implementation. This particular story is a success in the making. With our current (and future) leaders in place, we can successfully hand over a huge portion of the business to younger leaders to expand while we look for new pastures to advance.

4. The entrepreneurial journey is about more than just business. It’s about our lives as a whole. I am blessed to have built the business to where it is now and established a healthy family, circle of friends and purpose in life. It is well-integrated and harmonious. This is also through God’s blessing, and I can confidently say that no success is without the hand of God in our lives. An invisible power has led us and given us wisdom in our decision-making.

What is your ultimate goal? Do you have plans to launch an IPO or get any other forms of exit shortly?

We have no solid plans to exit at the moment. But several conversations and offers have taken place in the past. With the right structure and ventures in place, we may IPO. For now, we are open to funding for our other ventures or even business partnerships that can create a win-win collaboration. We also focus on investing in other firms/startups and place our funds in business expansion in other countries.

What is your advice for aspiring entrepreneurs who think it is almost impossible to scale the business without raising external financing?

My spiritual mentor always reminds me, “Don’t go where your talent can bring you but your character cannot sustain you.”. As entrepreneurs, you can be extremely talented and grow to great heights. But all those don’t matter if you have bad character. Eventually, that will be your downfall.

Also, always remain agile. Don’t stop at being an “A4 paper”. Allow your learnings to mould you into something greater, like a “paper plane”. Go further, soar higher and live purposefully.

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