The Woke Salaryman Podcast The Woke Salaryman

We talk about the trade-offs for the creative soul who wants to run a creative business.


0:00 Intro
0:50 More about our business and me
1:36 Creative VS Business owner
4:15 Delegate to people who like it more, or are better than you
6:42 Consider input, not just output
10:10 Being creative is good for business
11:36 Take creative risks as a part of business
13:21 Unproductivity is part of productivity
16:25 Mistakes are part of the plan
17:47 Give yourself due credit

Juliana Chan is a scientist and scholar turned business owner. Today, she runs Wildtype Media Group, managing a 20-member team — based in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and India — with 30 to 40 regular freelancers around the world.

In this episode, we talk to her about how she took her company remote, and the impact it has had on morale and productivity.

0:00 Intro: The road to 100% remote
5:00 Productivity will suffer
14:14 The types of employees that are suitable for remote work
18:58 How do you know everyone is working?
27:26 What about hiring locals and protecting local jobs?
31:36 Where in the world are her colleagues working from?
35:55 What's the competitive advantage of someone from Singapore?
41:37 Singapore's a great place to start a business
46:00 How you can keep Gen Zs
51:14 Concluding plugs

Is overtime ever justified? Why do good employees leave? Do you have to worry about your own job being irrelevant? 



This episode, we get the whole TWS team to have an open conversation on these hard topics. We hope you enjoy it. 



Also, this is our first sponsored podcast - a shoutout to Workforce Singapore for sponsoring this conversation. To find out more about what grants and tools are available to kickstart your company’s job redesign initiatives, visit https://go.gov.sg/tws-jobredesign 



Featuring (from left to right):

Wei Choon (Co-founder)

Ruiming (Co-founder)

Vivienne (Account Manager)

Wen Xin (Artist)


0:00 Intro
2:08 Why do good employees leave?
3:51 What is a good employee?
7:45 What is job redesign?
14:18 Have you had a job redesign?
20:58 Do all jobs need to be redesigned for relevance?
29:35 Should all employers job redesign?
38:15 Approaching job redesign with limited resources?
47:41 Who should initiate job redesign?
52:27 Is it fair to have employees OT for job redesign?
59:10 Job redesign VS find new job

This episode, we talk to the founders of The Black Hole Group; a collective of lifestyle and F&B concepts.

They started out in 2012 with a backpacker's hostel, and now they own about 13 F&B and lifestyle concepts and are still going strong.

More importantly, they are friends who started a business together, and we are super excited to talk to them because The Woke Salaryman was also started by two friends who met in school. They met in JC; while we met in Poly, so we have so many things to ask.

We will ask them about what it's like starting a business with a close friend, how to maintain or balance being friends and business partners, and their journey from plucky 26-year-olds running around putting our fires in a backpackers hostel to essentially, F & B moguls.



0:00 Intro

1:16 Why are they called The Black Hole Group

10:05 Starting a hostel in their 20s

15:17 The margins of running a hostel

21:08 Scaling the business

24:02 Do you hang out as friends now?

28:58 Working together as friends/cofounders

37:15 Growing a business = compounding learning

41:00 COVID as a wake-up call

48:20 Co-founders with different lifestyles

54:21 Would you recommend starting a business with a close friend

Jeremy Tan is a professional magician who does a lot of work on cruise ships!

We talk to him about the pros and cons of working in such a unique job, what it takes to succeed as a magician, balancing artistry and corporate crowd pleaser, adapting to COVID, and more.


0:00 Intro
1:23 How he started magicking
7:19 Becoming a cruise ship magician
15:31 Adapting to COVID
22:17 Revealing magic tricks to the public
33:50 Crowd pleasers OR artistry

We respond to some spicy comments on Reddit about the fact that we have sponsors, and talk about how we approach sponsored content, what we say no to, and whether we think we've sold out, and whether we can sleep at night.

The Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/askSingapore/comments/15c2suy/is_the_wokesalaryman_just_sponsored_nonsense/

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Our website: https://thewokesalaryman.com/

Timestamps:
0:48 Is TWS sponsored nonsense?
4:38 When we reject clients
9:52 Do sponsors make content bad?
13:06 Fluffy centrist content VS taking a stand
15:18 Have we run out of topics?
18:14 Choosing tone, raw vs empathic
23:02 We make readers feel unambitious :(
24:17 Limitations of content formats
27:26 TWS is self-righteous
32:00 OP elaborated more
35:03 Bye bye :(