Executive Interview
Executive Interviews
An Interview with
James Ho
Linpons Company Limited
CEO
Linpons Company Limited is a Hong Kong based business advisory firm with innovative business literacy & linguistic concept. Our specialty is to offer commercial level of human communication expertise to all business that require competent human interactions in daily operation.
What is the concept behind Linpons?
"Lin" represents Linguistics and "pons" means a bridge in Latin and also means the bridge to the brain in human anatomy. We strongly believe an artfully use of language could become a powerful tool of your company to create a bridge to your target segments and clients. Sometimes a few simple magical WORDS could represent and speak for your products and services, it automatically imprints on your clients' mind thru the bridge to the brain. Ultimately those WORDS will connect your business to SUCCESS.
Publish Date:
16 October 2022
Hong Kong
Location:
Tell us about your background, and how you came to found your company?
Both my academic and professional background are mainly in business and finance. I have been working in those areas for more than 20 years by now, and I started to put more focus on business advisory especially in business literacy about ten years ago.
Actually I am not the original founder of my company. I only joined Linpons as a partner last year, but I would call myself a re-founder of the company which I will explain it later on.
Before I joined Linpons, the company has already been offering business linguistic consultation service for a decade. I like to take this chance to emphasize the term business linguistic is often being misread or misunderstood by the public, in fact business linguistic is more than just business translation. We believe in adopting a suitable linguistic tool actually can create soul for each product and service from the business literature’s aspect. Since the original founder of Linpons is a linguistic expert, with her expertise and my advisory & literacy background, I truly believed there was an enormous collaboration space between us, and I also believed we could definitely and significantly enhance our skill set and service standards through our collaboration. That was the major reason why I joined the company. The new partnership indeed allowed me to inject my specialties to the company, and gave us chances to re-define our service scopes and re-plan our business strategies. Since then, Linpons has successfully been transformed into a business advisory firm with innovative business literacy and linguistic concept. So to me I felt like I was the re-founder of the company.
What is most important to you and your organization – mission, vision, or core values? Why?
Well I would say all elements are equally important to us as those elements are highly co-related. As you can see our mission is to enhance business literacy level for our clients especially for SME. According to a recent research, a high level of business literacy could improve the positioning of a corporate’s services and products in the public consciousness, and to build and enhance the relationship with customers and all stakeholders, ultimately increase the business operational efficiency and profitability.
Since we understand a large number of local business, mostly SME are lack of linguistic tools, strategic planning and implementation capabilities due to inadequate resources, for instance, I often come across with local SME business which have been operating for more than 30 years but still not able to express how they are operating or how the revenue structures work to their employees and shareholders. Not to mention the business strategic planning and implementation abilities. How could you expect those business to grow with a foundation like that? Needless to say under the current economic environment, SME really need to act fast and maintain cost effectiveness to survive, but with their resource limitation, they can barely survive. So our vision is to see those business with scarce resources are capable to develop their own business literatures, strategic planning and implementation abilities. Being able to assist those SME is our passion today. I got to say our core values are to serve our clients with our mission and passion.
Can you explain briefly how your service(s)/product(s) works?
Our services are ranged from as simple as training/coaching to as sophisticated as strategic planning of merger and acquisition. In our practice, we normally start with something simple say for example a workshop or a training for a department that probably costs a few thousand as that should not be a big consideration of budget. However that is a good start for us to build up relationship with client and get more understanding of client’s business groundback and its literacy level. During the process, we will initiate conversation with client to explain our insights and suggestions to client's business performance and areas of enhancement. If client is happy with our delivery and agree with our suggestions, and most importantly find us trustworthy, most likely further engagement of more sophisticated jobs will happen.
Our ultimate objective is to be engaged to offer full set of advisory services which are to establish a comprehensive literature system; to design a business strategy and to construct a concrete implementation procedures. Since one of our performance measurement is to produce a promising result, In practice, we will walk through the whole implementation process with my clients as we got to make sure all procedures are correctly executed.
How has the industry been changing in recent years?
I found there are two biggest changes in recent years which are first the client’s expectation. In general practice, many business advisory firms, even big players in the market only manage to present so called a business strategic plan or a business report and then walk away with pile of advisory fees. However, that general practice recently become a controversial topic in business world as clients are not happy with those advisory firms as they never provide a specific implementation solution. It is like a fitness trainer telling a client that he/she needs to lose weight and gain muscle but never advise the client any feasible solutions. So more and more clients nowadays expect their advisors not just to present a plan or a report, they also expect a specific implementation plan and a walk through plan. That means they expect the advisors to provide a concrete solution of how to implement or even expect the advisors to get involved in executing the implementation plan together.
Secondly, business advisors need to keep their minds as open as possible due to the technology impact and the rapid changing business climates. Being a business advisor twenty years ago, you could apply the knowledges you acquired from 30 years ago as the business world tended to be simpler and old fashioned, but being a business advisor today, you have to get yourself ready for new technology and new business model anytime. Those words like NFT, Fintech, Crypto, Co-sharing and Blockchain are something we never heard of 15 years ago but today we often hear new business and technology terms. So it is predicted that more and more new concepts and ideas will be created in the future. Obviously the market development pace will be an exponential growth.
What makes you different from what’s currently available in the market?
As I mentioned before, some business advisors in the market are only capable to fulfil the planning part or only can identify what kind of problems the clients have, they never fulfil the obligation of presenting a concrete implementation plan or a workable solution. However we will not do the same, we prepare to walk through the whole implementation process with my clients if they need us there. I guess that does really differentiate us from the market.
What does the future hold for your company?
Well I like to imagine my company will become a reputable business literature educator and a market influencer one day. What I mean is I really do expect Linpons to take up an important role in raising public awareness of our industry and defining new identity and service standard of business advisor in the future. In fact those are part of our company goals. So you may get a sense of how I wish those goals to happen in the future.
In spite of recent negative reporting and market uncertainty, I still expect a stable growth of demand of our services along with the increment of public awareness and knowledges of our industry. However I do predict the market is expecting a new business standard of our industry or I may say a higher standard. Clients will definitely expect us to be more sophisticated and knowledgeable, most importantly expect us to deliver a promising result. In order to face the challenge, I need to ensure my company to carry the highest service standard and run on the cutting edge of the market all the time.