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Mark Siu: Turning failure into fuel for success

31 Oct 2024

Life is like a contest. Sometimes we win, sometimes we don’t. Losing is inevitable, but sometimes you win even when you lose. We learn more from mistakes and failures than from successes.

Mr Mark Siu, an alumnus of the Department of Computer Science, has emerged as a successful entrepreneur through persevering in the face of both failures and successes. Starting as an employee, Mark made a bold decision to leave a stable job and founded his own security solutions start-up, which has become a leading pioneer in its field.

Innovating for growth

With a view of life as an ongoing contest of wins and losses, Mark took initial failures in stride when first establishing his business. Rather than dwelling on losses, he used them as motivation to improve. Realising the need to innovate ahead of its peers, he soon took his business into retail security and became the first company in Hong Kong to introduce the open-sell retail environment of smartphones, which has since transformed people’s purchasing experience.

Mark believes in celebrating small wins, noting that “10 small achievements are just as vital as a big accomplishment.” By setting periodic goals for himself to realise his long-term business plan, he has cultivated a sense of progress and maintain his motivation. In 2009, his company introduced solutions for open merchandising to Hong Kong and has since assisted more than a thousand retail shops to set up intelligence-based loss prevention systems. More recently, the firm has provided people counting solution that helps various sectors improve operational efficiency.

Learning from the “big data” in life to thrive

While the COVID-19 pandemic has widely impacted businesses around the world over the past few years, Marks' company has shown exceptional resilience in overcoming the obstacles. It utilised the people counting solution to help retailers, schools and organisations to manage occupancy capacity for keeping social distance and thereby protecting public health.

For Mark, the key to success is seizing opportunities, equipping oneself and leveraging one’s strengths. Through failures and successes large and small, he sees each experience enriching his pool of “big data” of the knowledge and wisdom he has accumulated. It is through continually learning from this “big data” that he can find his edge and thrive.

Mark credits his Computer Science education at HKBU with fostering an understanding of the importance of technology in today’s fast-paced world, and he believes people are the greatest asset in making the most out of using digital tools. To nurture future talent, he has supported HKBU students in participating in the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship Bootcamp where they learnt entrepreneurship and innovation skills. In addition, he shared his entrepreneurial journey and experience with HKBU students, inspiring them to dream big and grasp opportunities to fulfil their career aspirations.

Giving young people the room to grow is what makes a society progress. As a football enthusiast, he used his continual recoveries from "repeated failures" to encourage fellow students to get ready to score in life.