Arggh

Looks like I've lost my voice today and could do with nothing better than a hot cup of lemon tea to make the vocal cords function in a more conducive manner. Unfortunately, while I may have the voice of a lung cancer patient that still insist on smoking through a tube, I don't have the luxury of not being able to speak today. Have to visit Pungol CC later this evening for an event where the Foreign Minister will be visiting.

Anyway, Q1 is comming to an end. It's been in many ways quite dissapointing as quarters go. The only main development was the establishment of the hi-fi trading business, which had thus far given me an average of 5% return a month for the last two months on my capital invested.

However, other than the birth of a new venture, it's been a fairly slow process with my bigger clients playing the wait and see game and my smaller clients keeping me busy. It's nice to have the small guys to keep me alive but I do need to be in profit and have cash in the bank and thus...the big boys need to come in.

Still, it was not too bad. Made a break through with GECF yesterday and I think a few interesting points were brought up in interviews yesterday. One point being - IT is only an enabler and the important thing being the soundness of the business model. The other main point being the importance of having cash.

As businesses go, I think most of us forget our basics and it's especially true in good times. Everyone makes money and so we don't see the failures in the system we have. When hard times come, we run towards comforting things like spending money on things like IT in the hope it will work some magic. We forget that we need to have a sound business in the first place.

As for cash......most businesses forget that cash is exceedingly important for their day-to-day opperations. We get so obsessed with how much money we make that we forget that sometimes it's a question of when you you get paid. No point having a million dollars at the end of the decade when you don't have anything in between. I've always admired the Chinese hawkers who managed to not spend their piles of cash because they realise they have to conserve cash to do basic things like pay their suppliers. And speaking as someone with not very much cash....I think of the girls on the streets of Geylang who somehow manage to get paid everynight.

Went out to Lock Stock last night. Great fun, the guys were in good form and the bar had more people than it usually has. Stayed out to 4am - now is that surprising why I can only speak through my fingers?