“There’ll be times you’ll feel like the only one who hasn’t figured it out.” Chua Meng Kiat, Account Director of Akimi Technologies, is familiar with the emotional rollercoaster that is synonymous with entrepreneurship, but he’s riding it with a smile on his face, and showing no signs of giving up.
Chua Meng Kiat knows what it means to be an entrepreneur.
“It’s a marathon and not a 100-metre sprint,” he tells us. “You’ve got to be willing to stay the course. Sustainable companies take time, effort, sweat and years to build.”
Meng Kiat has certainly put in all of that and more. He set up Akimi Technologies five years ago, when he realised, after working closely with the marketing departments of a number of big hotels, that there was a gap in the market when it came to engineering talent for digital projects.
Now, Akimi Technologies serves as a digital partner for companies, specialising in the design and development of custom websites, eCommerce websites and mobile applications for online customer engagement. Their clients include Samsung, Mitsubishi Motors, and The Macallan.
It isn’t always rosy. Running a startup, Meng Kiat says, “is really hard.” It comes with immense pressure and responsibility, and “just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. There will be times you’ll feel like the only one who hasn’t figured it out yet.”
To counter these lows, he chooses to focus on the journey, not the destination; on the interesting projects that he gets to do; and on the great businesses that inspired him to start his own in the first place: “When things got tough, they stayed.”
In the end, satisfaction for Meng Kiat comes from the struggle, and from persevering in the face of it. “If I achieve everything that I dream of, life would be too easy,” he says with a smile.
