Took sooo long to update the blog...

Hi girls & boys, Uncle Dan (as I'm fondly called) is back after a year's hiatus from blogging. What happened you may ask? Well.. how should I put it?.... Life happened to me.

The year 2009 wasn't a pretty one financially. It's all because I took it for granted that the business "relationship" I had with a certain low level "no back-bone" executive from a certain company I was "servicing" had my financial interest at heart. Actually how foolish was I ( a matured adult, father of 4 lovely kids) to think that way. Boy, the chap was running all over the place acting more like one of my staff then a client! Little did I know, he had other plans. Heck, he even turned some of my part-time crew behind my back.

But I tell you that GOD is great! He put a challenge in front of me during the economic recession and when the going was kinda bad, I told my wife that all we had to do was to hold on and if we make it through the crisis, we're coming out stronger than ever before... and how right I was!

Something happened by the grace of Allah s.w.t. that completely changed my life. I was blessed with meeting a cameraman from JB while emceeing for Dumex at a local mall there. He was an Polymer Engineer moonlighting as a Cameraman. He made good money from taking up a hobby. He spoke to me on something called the laws of Meta-Physics and the secrets of our Birthdates. He had shown me briefly how it works and I googled it, found some sites, even went to the extend of purchasing a software for it and applied it. And it worked like magic! I applied it in my daily life and in business.

Lo & behold... my fortunes turned. I single handedly (with HIS help of course...) picked up events after events. And we're not talking Karaoke nite type! Crowd capacity was in the thousands... Even I couldn't believe it. I then started to give back a bit by bit. Started with the wife of a friend of my brother in-law. She is an Indonesian, married to a good for nothing chap who hid the fact that he was already married with kids. He used to go missing for days on end saying that he went out looking for work but what he really did was hang around his 1st wife's house. Imagine this, he wasn't even working!! He took "spending" money from his main branch to pass to his 2nd branch... What a bum!

Anyway, the story was she delivered a newborn and the bum could barely afford to take the baby out of the hospital. After that, again he went missing but not before dumping the baby & his wife at my struggling brother in-law's apartment. My wife & I decided to sponsor the lil' baby's Kenduri Selamat at the local surau. Beat this... the minute the prayers were over and I took just one step out of the surau, my handphone rang. Business just like that!

It was calls after calls from then onwards. I pushed aside most of the smaller ones (being a sole proprietor sucks) as I couldn't take on more than I could handle.

Then came the ball cruncher... My best buddy who is also a my business partner in our Marketing business called me & said we needed to talk. It was a really HUGE event. Nothing I ever handled personally... usually it is picked up by a 3rd party events firm with the "connections" but hired people like us to execute. This time we were the main CON-tractors! Woohoo... The profit margin from this has set us up and we're planning our future by investing it and getting other bigger fishes in the corporate events industry.

The moral of the story for today... Believe in God. Believe in yourself. Give 1st, then you shall receive...

Ideal Ideas I'll Do

The past couple of days were spent tweaking the business blog, & my dear friends, I do believe I've finally done it. It's got spunk, a lil' story behind it, my mug up front and personal, a couple of pics thrown in for good measure and ...Walla! A bizznezz blog is born. May not be the ideal site or the hottest (due to the missing "hot-chick" factor) but it will serve the purpose.

It's true that it will take a lot for me to start blogging but seriuosly, it is an ideal idea I'll do.. mmm.. kinda a toungue twister huh? Ok, I'll pickup where I last left off.

It's 1979 - 1988, and it was the best part of my life as everything (almost) was free! Yup, I just woke up & breakfast was served, in school I was given pocket money (back then it started with RM1 then progressed to RM2 due to inflation), got home had tea then later dinner & at the blink of an eye, it started all over again. When I grew bigger than my clothes, I'd get new ones. I was brought up thinking go to school, study hard, get a good job, & everything will fall in place. I failed to mention that I didn't study hard, sometimes used to skip school to go play snooker nearby, and when D-Day came (SPM : Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia) the results were, how should I put it... BAD! The truth is I barely passed with a Grade 3. Friends were jumping and nearly fainting when they saw they had 4-5 A's, I was nearly fainting cause I had passed! Imagine this scenario, my buddies skipped a compulsory paper to go play snooker! Thank god I didn't folllow! :)

Anyway fastforward to the future sees me entering F.I.T. technical college (don't laugh! At that time they were still honest and running a profitable business). Knowing I didn't have the "smarts" like my fellow future Engineers, I decided to one -up and do part-time studies while working to gain technical experience. I started at Sitt Tatt Industrial Gas as a Production Clerk. Bloody boring job. Skipped to Steel Recon Industries (S.R.I) the guys that put fire extinguishers everywhere. Chances are, there is a S.R.I. Fire Extinguisher at your office now. I was a Production Supervisor at their plant in Puchong. There is where I really learnt some important stuff in life. The lessons learnt are:

1. Hard work pays
2. Fast learners get ahead
3. Experience is invaluable
4. If you are a professional (i.e. Engineer etc), you need paper qualifications.
5. The more paper you have, the more doors open.

After close to a year there while "still" in night school to finish my Mechanical Engineering Diploma course, I was handling the daily operations of the factory producing these extinguishers from the metal press right up to filling the powder type fire retardent till spraying it. Even hiring & firing. This was because my boss, a young Chinese guy decided to skip ship and join another firm. This is when (the 1st step towards events business) I met the most useless chap I have ever known. He was a Degree holder that didn't know much about engineering (I suspect he bought it).

Got fed up and also decided to throw the ball long and see what will it hit. There was an interview for Production Engineer at Kawasaki Sunrock, and when I went there, there wer 4-6 smartly dressed individuals with briefcases, ties, the works. And here I am, with my torn jeans and safety boots, dirty fingernails cause I've just serviced a Forklift! And did I mention that I came by motorbike (a Suzuki 100cc Scrambler). DISASTER!!

Lo & behold, I found that I had the gift of gab, added with a dash of Charisma, I got the job! I later found out from my collegue that we are part of Kawasaki heavy Industries and have a total of 5,000 Engineers worldwide. Yours truly just so happen to be the YOUNGEST! I received my letter of employment before my 21st birthday, while my buddies were still going to college.

Things were great, so comfortable that when I finally finished my course, I didn't even bother going for the Engineering Diploma exam (B-I-G mistake!). That's when life hit me...

Remember what I learnt before? (see item no.4 & 5). Well, our Engineering manager was moving on and it's down to 4 of us to take his place. Guess what happened? Yup, some doofus came in with a Double Degree and sat there! Man, that was enough for me. I decided to go on the road and see where it will lead me. I resigned after one & a half years as an Engineer.

I chanced upon an ad for an Events Executive (thought to myself, yea man, it will be like late nights, party, fast women etc) and decided to have a go. Got the job at my 1st Events company and found out it's the clients that party and us that works! Ciss...

Read about what I have morphed into & the events I have handle before, here.

The Birth Of A Bloggin' Blogger..

Watchout world!

Get ready for a blazin' bloggin' blogger coming your way... Yea yea, been told that you need to be just out of highschool & in your 2nd or 3rd year in college to be "terror" in blogsville, but you know the saying, "better late than never". You will be hearing that saying quite so often here cause I'm one of those late bloomers parents talk about quietly ;)

My name is Daniel, close friends call me Bulldog for my never back down attitude... i hope it's not because of the way I look! I own and manage an Events business under the name of DT-PRO Production (DT - PRO, as in Daniel Tan Professional Production). Yup my full name is Muhammad Daniel Bin Abdullah but I was born as Daniel Eugene Tan Peng Lock... Dont ask me why my name's so long. My Dad thought it would be cool or something! Kids in primary school use to make fun and say Daniel Tan Lock The Door! Ciss...

Of course things changed in secondary school. It's one of those schools that parents wouldn't send their kids to if only they knew that being very near a typical Chinese village would mean that it would be filled to the brim with lil' gangsters (not like lil' bow wow, snoop doggy dogg's nephew) whose main aim in life is dominate the illegal trade of extorting canteen money!

Guess that's where I picked up my Bulldog attitude cause you've got to be strong in the "ghetto". Actually the school is situated in the middle of urban SS2. The Chinese village I spoke about is "Taikong" (that's where all the Taiko's come from) or it's gentle name is Kampung Cempaka.

Commercial break: Visit my company here to see what I do for a living.