SYNOPSIS :
At the age of 13, I learnt what fortitude meant.
My name is Tengku Farith Rithauddeen. I am the CEO of SKALI. If you’re familiar with the IT industry, you would probably have heard about and witnessed SKALI’s various incarnations: from a humble content provider and small time player in a game surrounded by big boys like Yahoo! for example, to what we are now. An e-business specialist. We are your business partners in every way.
Today SKALI can boast that it is a survivor, and a business entity to contend with. If you had thought SKALI was once just a plaything of ambitious Malay scions, it is now an organisation that the country can be proud of, for we fought tooth and nail to be where we are now.
Contacts and good networks can only bring you so far. If we did not have the drive, the ambition and the intellect, SKALI would not be here today. SKALI is that spirited child who has grown up to be a leading force in the industry.
But first things first. To understand SKALI would be to understand who the individuals behind the company are. I’ll begin with myself.
My parents, Tengku Ahmad Rithauddeen and Tengku Nor Aini have always been firm but loving to us. There are six of us – Tini Supardi, Tengku Farahlucia, Tengku Feizaluddin, Tengku Putri Falida, myself and Tengku Fadli. We’re pretty close, and at the same time, we lead our own lives, like all families. To say that we were handed a casket of gold would not be correct, for we too have had our share of failures and successes. I for one can attest to that!
My father was a government minister, and he was always busy. It didn’t mean that he was a distant father, but his duties as a high profile government servant meant many long periods away from home. So it was left to my mother to care for and discipline us, and she could be formidable when she had to be.
I would say that my mother was the true entrepreneur in the family. You know what they say about Kelantanese women – they have business smarts to die for. My mother loved a good business deal, and she had an eye for properties. To say that she was a leading feminist cum business figure would be misleading for Kelantanese women are very entrepreneurial and driven. They are not the downtrodden Muslim women the media makes them out to be.
My parents felt that international exposure would stead us children well. My friends have always wondered why I went to high school in Ottawa, Canada at the age of 13. My parents figured that since Ottawa was one of the coldest places on earth, I’d focus on my studies instead of playing the fool, if I were sent elsewhere. My cousins were all abroad – in the UK and US at the same time, so my parents had strong reasons to send me to Canada.
Their strategy worked and I got through high school and college quite smoothly, finally graduating from Carleton University with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics in 1992.
Was entrepreneurship in my blood? Well, my grandfather was an entrepreneur. He was probably the first large-scale Malay rubber plantation owner. I remembered him as a very powerful man: strong, stoutly built and determined. He was always in the rubber estates, making sure everything was working and in order.
My mom had pretty progressive ideas when it came to business. When my siblings and I were still schooling, she used to buy property in places where we studied. This made sense because then we’d save money on lodging, staying in those houses and taking good care of them. To build up the value of the houses, my mom would renovate them with craftsmen flown in from Kelantan, who had the virtue of being both affordable and talented. Imagine if she had hired Canadian craftsmen to renovate the houses – she would be paying through her nose for their services!
After we graduated, she sold the houses. A lot of people questioned the move – when you think of it, it takes a lot of capital to send workers overseas to renovate the houses! Yet it paid off: the real estate value of the properties shot up, people enjoyed living in them and that taught me one thing: your house must be in order in order to create harmony.
It also trained us, her children, in financial management because many of the rooms would be rented out to other students. I would collect the monthly rental from the students and pay the necessary dues like taxes, utilities and so forth. I would also regularly send financial statements to my mother and she would give me instructions on what kind of things to buy for the house.
