About twenty years ago, Preecha Prakobkit had 15 minutes to make the decision of a lifetime: whether or not to take the helm at Amway (Thailand).

He remembers being very surprised that the US-based direct-sales company would appoint a Thai executive to the highest position here. He took the job. As managing director he has turned the direct-sales company into a leader in the country.

When he was offered the top post, Amway's annual sales amounted to Bt360 million.

They almost doubled, hitting Bt600 million, a year after he took over. The following year they broke the Bt1-billion mark, and last year they rose to Bt9.71 billion.

For Preecha, however, the day he made his big decision remains seared in his memory.

"A day before, I had to organise a meeting of Amway members in Chiang Mai province and the boss, Jim Pyne, called me for an urgent meeting at headquarters in Bangkok," he recalls.

"So, I had to hurry back. I thought it would be an urgent meeting for a sales and marketing plan, but then the boss told me that he had to move to another country to take a new position and told me to make my decision before leaving the room."

The pressure was unexpected. However, the company was still relatively small, so the prospect of taking the helm did not frighten Preecha. He chose to take the opportunity, and that day is now as unforgettable as a milestone.

Overseeing a company was a prospect far from his mind when, 23 years earlier, he finished a vocational degree in electronics at Don Bosco School in Bangkok and, aged 17, began work as a mechanic for Philips Electronics.

For eight years he repaired television sets and other consumer electronic products, then he achieved a long-held ambition to further his education in the United States, in the marketing field.

He returned to Thailand at the age of 35 and quickly worked his way up to middle management. He spent two-and-a-half years at Berli Jucker before returning to Philips Electronics as a manufacturing manager, then moved to the Ramkhamhaeng branch of The Mall department store. He joined Amway as a sales and marketing manager after the company had been operating in Thailand only a few years.

He recalls that driving Amway's revenue to its current level was not among his initial plans.

"I'm not a person who had a great vision that the company had to achieve Bt1 billion [in sales]," he says. "What motivated me then was that the job allowed me to meet people and offer them the opportunity to have a better life by becoming one of the company's independent sales representatives."

Now, Amway has 440,000 members as consumers and another 300,000 members as independent sales representatives. Preecha believes its asset value is between Bt3 billion and Bt4 billion.

Leading Amway (Thailand) to its current position was not easy.

To start with, it did not have a multilevel-marketing structure that would allow it to emulate the American operation. The young company had a single-level marketing structure, and was competing in direct sales with Avon.

What really challenged Preecha was the collapse of a well-known local pyramid scheme and the perception that Amway was just another pyramid scheme - only one from America.

Worse still, Amway's sales representatives often used aggressive tactics - mainly, says Preecha, because they held very strong beliefs about the company. This left Amway looking like a cult.

In addition, many Amway representatives chose not to directly reveal their purpose to target customers out of fear that they would lose potential business. This created an even more negative picture of Amway's operations.

Preecha admits that these problems pose long-term threats to Amway's image.

To overcome them, the company advises its members to avoid continually boasting about Amway's products and financial benefits and forcing people to become its members.

"Instead, we tell them to set goals in their lives and go for them; that Amway is one of the means by which they can achieve their goals; and they should always remember to speak the truth," Preecha says.

"We try to train our members as much as we can and to ensure that they provide the same proper training to their down-lines. However, it's impossible to keep all members following their training, so we also set regulations."

One of Amway's great motivations is that a large number of people from vastly different cultures can share the same feeling of "owning" Amway, he says.

At 58, Preecha has at least two more years to strengthen Amway. He is not certain that the global parent company will expect him to step down when he turns 60, but the date looms like a deadline.

Having achieved revenue of Bt9.71 billion, the question is whether Preecha can push this up to the Bt10-billion figure.

"It's easy to lift the performance over a few months, but what I'm really focusing on right now is how to make Amway's current strength last for a long time," Preecha says.

Nitida Asawanipont

The Nation