The company behind the iconic Red Rhino tells us how it’s keeping its engineering edge after 10 years in the business.
The company behind the iconic Red Rhino tells us how it’s keeping its engineering edge after 10 years in the business.
How did HOPE Technik get started?
The four of us were very good friends before we started the company. After we graduated, we wanted to find interesting engineering jobs, but nothing fit the bill, so we decided to do something together. The company started without pay for any of us, and we worked long hours.
It took one and a half years before there were enough projects and money to pay all four of us. I’d say how the company survived back then is that other people had eight hours, we had sixteen hours. That’s how four people became eight, how five became ten. Now it’s 130-plus people and people are going home at a more reasonable time.
Did you think it’d become this successful?
No, not really. It was tough but it trains you, it puts you in a position you’d never thought you’d be in. There were a lot of highrisk opportunities that we took, projects that other people would have thought were too big for us to handle. And we took them, we survived, and these few big projects were our stepping stones to the next level. One good example is the Red Rhino project, which we called the “Tumbler” internally. It got us noticed.
Why does HOPE Technik not look like a single-product or singlefocus company from the outside?
There’s some legacy there. In the first five years we were very aggressive, we’d take whatever we could get our hands on. Which, in a good way, created a lot of expertise in the company in different fields. And the thing is, if you break down the different types of projects, they actually have similar building blocks.
If you get your fundamentals right, in terms of technology and expertise, you can do a lot of things with the same building blocks. The control system for the Red Rhino is not that different from a flight controller. The composite that we use for the Red Rhino bodywork is the same composite that we use to make our drones.
As the CTO how do you keep tech innovation alive in the company?
Some business units are focused on building sustainable businesses from products. Another part of HOPE Technik is the innovation side, where their job is just to do weird and different things. Because that’s how you increase the amount of building blocks you have within the company. They do projects from different industries, different applications, different technologies.
So they are the group of people that will find the next niche, the next business opportunity, the next technology. The product business units need to be sustainable, to bring in the money consistently. For the innovative part of the company, you can understand that it won’t be doing this.
Sometimes the project is too hard and they lose money. Sometimes it’s easier than you think and they earn a lot of money. You cannot measure the two groups equally. If you go by the dollars and sense with the innovative people, you’re going to chase them away.
So for those people you have to measure them differently from the rest of the company. You cannot bring them down if the project goes sour. It’s a fine balance because you cannot get too disorganised.
Jeff Tang, Chief Technology Officer, HOPE Technik
PHOTOGRAPHY VERNON WONG ART DIRECTION KEN KOH.
