This year, I have put some thoughts on the way my business is going, and I have learned two important precepts that I plan to implement next year. Business is good, but if we take time to continue to make it healthier , it does allow the business a better way to capitalize on opportunities when they present itself.

These precepts and principles are known to me as it is to most businessmen, but the effectiveness really depends not on our merely knowing it, but on the focus and resources that we put in to insure that it is properly implemented.

As I keep saying, everybody of us knows how to lose weight, but actually being successful in losing weight is another matter. It is a matter of focus and execution.

1. I will insure that all applicants are interviewed by at least four and preferably six people. If you are in the technology industry, and even if not, the most important thing to insure competitive advantage is to be as smart a company as possible. In the words of Lee Hsien Long, prime minister of Singapore, every pair of hands has to be a pair of thinking hands. Noen should be mere hewers of wood or drawers of water.

By making sure that more people put in their opinion, it makes the current workforce feel that they are participating in the growth of the company, and makes the hiring process more fair and hopefully push standards higher.

This will create a lot more work, and will take as longer to add people, but while there are statistics of business losses because of our failure to hire, the more important is the cost of hiring the wrong people.

We want to be efficient in everything, but I feel taking a few extra hours to insure that the people we hire conforms to our company team standards is worth it. I am now painfully aware that we spend hundreds of hours trying to make a wrong hire do ‘right’ which would not have happened if we have taken more care at the start.

2.Another thing I want to emphasize and I want to institutionalize is not only proper processes, but that almost every decision should be based on quantitative analysis.

I’ve found that most wrong decisions we had was not because we were not smart enough, but we did not have enough information.

As entrepreneurs, we tend to have too much high regard for our own gut feel in making decisions. But while I still believe that we have, through the years, learn the ’smarts’ of the business, gut feel alone is not enough. Gut feel, plus the right information, would have a higher batting average in hitting the right decisions.

We should spend more time organizing data, and analyzing it, and coming with the performance metrics to make sure we know as much as possible of what is happening to our business.