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Ron Kaufman plans to go global as first Singapore-based international
management guru
Text and Photos by Oon Yeoh
 Kaufman shows mock-ups of the little ‘quote’ books he’s working on this summer |
It's often said that Singapore has very few regionally or internationally recognized brands. SIA, Tiger Beer…maybe Tiger Balm or Osim to a certain extent. Certainly no personality cult type of brand along the lines of Robert Kiyosaki, of Rich Dad Poor Dad fame, or Anthony Robins, a giant among motivational gurus in the US.
While Ron Kaufman is not exactly of the same stature as either Kiyosaki or Robbins, he is well-known in the Lion City. He has sold about 40,000 copies of his first self-published book Up Your Service!; has over 43,000 subscribers to his monthly e-newsletter and has taught about 400,000 Singaporeans (through seminars, workshops and conferences) during his 12 years here. "That's a lot of people I've touched," he says. And he's right. Although it would be a stretch to say that he brought customer service to Singapore, he's certainly played a key role in upping the customer service level of both the government and private sectors here.
Now he wants to leverage on his reputation by launching himself onto the global market as the first Singapore-based international management guru. He is already consulting a couple of brand specialists and has a slew of new projects up his sleeve. But he's not rushing headlong. It's said one of the biggest mistakes many start-ups made during the dotcom boom a few years ago was trying to go global too fast without the right strategies in place. While Kaufman's business is hardly a dotcom, it's very much a start-up. He operates from home, uses the Internet extensively to enhance his personal productivity and is constantly exploring new ways to leverage on his brand without over-extending it. He's also fully cognizant of the fact that timing and having the right strategy are crucial.
Kaufman's forte
Although he is primarily known as a customer service expert, there are a few other areas that he is good at. Among them: customer loyalty, partnership and team-building. Besides his books, videos and personal website, he also conducts workshops, retreats and customized curricula for corporations and government bodies.
He probably has an innate talent for management skills, but it wasn't what Kaufman was doing before he came to Singapore. He didn't even go to business school. In college he studied international political history, with a special focus on how countries got back together after wars. "This is a fascinating subject," he says, adding that he still keeps tract of it today.
Sports plays a key role in bringing countries together, says Kaufman, who earlier in his career was a Frisbee salesman. He organized many Frisbee festivals and took a small team on a Frisbee Flying tour of China in the mid-1980s to promote "world peace through communication, cooperation, friendship, laughter and play". It is with this spirit that he writes his books and conducts his seminars. "I guess I'd have to say that my competitive advantage is my energy level and also the sense of fun that I convey when I teach," he says.
But Kaufman actually got into customer service by chance. He arrived in Singapore 12 years to help what was then the National Productivity Board (now called SPRING) with a new institution it was setting up called the Service Quality Centre. He was brought here as a curriculum design specialist, not a customer service specialist. However, he made full use of his time on the job to learn about excelling in customer service, mainly through his dealings with various people. "For six to eight years, I honed my skills," he said. "All the content that I have in my books and videos and so on is based on what I learnt."
 Kaufman's last book sold 40,000. He hopes this new one will beat that record. |
Forging ahead
There are several ways to go forward with his plan to extend the brand. Franchising, licensing, developing courses, products (more books and videos) and even going digital (for example, CD-ROMs and Internet-based e-learning). He's considering everything but will take his time to find the right strategy.
Recently, a New York publisher approached him with a six-figure deal for the rights to his first book. Kaufman turned him down, not because the money was not good, but just that he wanted to make sure the book would be released in the US only when he's ready to launch his global strategy. "Stephen Covey said that you know you've got a strategy when you actually say no," Kaufman says, referring to the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
He has, however, just launched his second book in Singapore, entitled Up Your Service! Insights, a revised and updated collection of articles published in his newsletter over the past five years. Kaufman insists that it's not just a re-hash of what's been published before. "I used five different editors from New York, Australia and Singapore," he says. "We improved on them a lot. You can say they've been fiercely edited."
New books in the pipeline include a third title in the series to be called Up Your Service! Spirit, and a fourth book which will be in digital format (possibly a CD-ROM, e-book or even online) called Up Your Service! Toolkit. The former should be ready in two years. About the latter, he's not sure. He's also working on a completely new series of little "quote" books that will contain a collection of sayings by famous people, coupled with his thoughts and questions about those quotes. He plans to work on them over the next 1 1/2 months while he's on vacation in the US. He wants to get a book ready by Christmas.
But what's his motivation for doing all this? Is it to leave a legacy, to get more money or to become famous like Robert Kiyosaki? He says he wants the world to be a better place. It sounds corny but there is something genuine in the way he says it. "I want to teach people about being kind to one another, about being more spirited in giving good service."
He credits the government of Singapore with spearheading the push for better customer service in the early 1990s. Before, it was just efficient. But in the 1990s, it wanted to have a friendly face as well. "They asked themselves: How can we become the best customer service-oriented government in the world?" Kaufman, who calls Singapore home, says he's here because of that initiative.
When he looks back at the way his career has turned out, Kaufman can't help but conclude that he's extremely fortunate. "If I had been brought over here to work on negotiation skills rather than customer service - say they wanted to set up a Negotiation Skills Centre instead - then maybe I'd (have) become a specialist on negotiations," he says. "But I was called to work on customer service, and I can't help but keep thinking: How lucky I am that it was that!"
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