Networked

Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary

Networked is about interacting with people and engaging them for mutual benefit. A successful entrepreneur should be outgoing, sincere, friendly, supportive, a good listener or someone who follows up and stays in touch. The ability to network is one of the most crucial skills any entrepreneur must have. It can help entrepreneurs to establish a new business or grow an existing one. They can use networking as a tool for finding investors, customers, staff, suppliers and business partners with minimal cost to their business. They can also network face-to-face at social events, conferences and through industry associations (Entrepreneur, n.d.).

A large collection of business cards and a huge contact list doesn’t make you an expert at networking. Building value-based relationships that are truly meaningful is what networking is all about. These are the relationships that lead to business opportunities and long-term relationships that are mutually beneficial.

In almost every case, entrepreneurs never get to success alone. The best understand it takes a network of contacts, business partners, financial partners, peers and resources to succeed. Effective people nurture these relationships and surround themselves with people who can help make them more effective. Any good leader is only as good as those who support him.

This trait can be related to Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary who is one of the most successful Malaysian entrepreneurs that involved in various fields of business. His name also had been listed in top 10 Malaysian Richest Man with a net worth estimated to be US $ 2.9 billion according to Forbes making him the 8th richest Malaysian. (Forbes, 2015). Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary was born in Alor Setar, Kedah on 1951 and he is the third child of seven siblings. His family is a mid-low class family of Hadhrami Arab ancestry that traveled until central Asia for trade and choose to stay at Kedah during the 1940s.Due to his family background, he started working early in young age while pursuing his primary and secondary studies (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2015).

He experienced many thing through years but in 1975, he starting to do rice trading business and get a license from Bernas. Through this business, he expands his business into the diversification of other business industry using networked. He gets into other business through the contact that his making for an example his commodity business with China is a success when he doing barter system changing cocoa that his company produce with tea from China. He also managed to set up a water privatization project in cooperation between his company, Kembangan Dinamik and One Company from France. Tan Sri Mokhtar also connected with the community through the establishment of Al - Bukhary Foundation that making charity to helps the poor, support the development of Islamic art and culture (Mahmood, et al., 2010).