Wong Kim Hoh meets...... (Sunday Times Interview Series)

Somehow I find this column much more interesting than the Young & Savy or the Invest opinion pieces...

Time to revive this thread. This time it's Neo Catering's boss being interviewed. Somehow, from reading the interview, I sense that he's a guy with lots of determination and not afraid of hard work but I'm not if his company will survive when he's gone.

Seems like a fixed mindset kind of person (in Psychologist Carol Dweck's definition)

Wong Kim Hoh meets... Neo Kah Kiat; Lots of grit in caterer's recipe for success
6 October 2013
Straits Times

© 2013 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
Focus on quality also helps make school dropout's towkay dreams come true

The fierce rays from the noon sun bounce off the waters around Lazarus Island, sparkling like white bait in a fishing net.

Seated comfortably in the air-conditioned saloon of his 13m-long yacht, Mr Neo Kah Kiat, 43, is looking at Sally, 40, his wife of nearly 15 years. Her eyes crinkle as he animatedly tells the story of the promise he made her when he was 22 and a penniless caterer.

He is a marvellous storyteller, thanks to his booming voice, emphatic pauses and dramatic hand gestures.

"I told her: 'If I don't success, I won't married you,'" he says in piquant Singlish. "I rather she go and marry someone else if I cannot provide for her because it means I am a useless fellow.'"

Shaking his head and breaking into a sly grin, he continues: "Last time I give myself very pressure but I also don't heck care lah because I must success."

Sally's faith in the Secondary 2 dropout was not misplaced because Mr Neo did succeed, and spectacularly, too.

The struggling caterer is now the founder and chairman of the Neo Group, the Catalist-listed food catering company with an annual turnover of more than $40 million.

Home - one of several properties he owns - is a corner terraced house in upscale Sentosa Cove where he berths his yacht at the back. Four luxury cars including a Bentley and a Mercedes-Benz S series are parked in the driveway.

Candid and congenial, with the expansive personality of a trooper who knows how to take it on the chin, Mr Neo is the second youngest of four children.

His father was a failed businessman; his mother used to juggle two jobs - bakery assistant by day, factory worker by night - to help make ends meet.

"We were the poorest among all our relatives. We rented out one bedroom in our three-room flat in Eunos, so my three brothers and I had to sleep in the living room," he recalls.

Things were so dire that their electricity and water supply was often cut off because the family could not pay the bills.

For as long as he could remember, he had but one dream.

"I wanted to be a businessman although I didn't know what a businessman was. I just wanted to earn a lot of money," he says.

Money, he reckoned then, would help to redress what he thought were injustices.

"I wanted to show our relatives - who looked down on us - and my father - who favoured my brothers more - that I could make it," he says.

The entrepreneurial instincts kicked in early. At nine, he would salvage discarded cable tie from factories and fashion them into interesting shapes. Peddling these to classmates for 10 cents each could earn him $2 or $3 a day.

At 12, he started selling otah - fish cake wrapped in banana leaf - on weekends.

Through a friend, he contacted an otah supplier who told Mr Neo he had to place a minimum order of 1,000 sticks.

"It cost $70 for 1,000 sticks so I borrowed the sum from my godmother," he recalls, adding that he cycled from Eunos to Bedok North to collect his supplies.

The otah was then refrigerated at home. On weekends, he would wake up at 4am to spend four hours grilling it.

He would then take a taxi to distribute the otah to three other friends.

"We took 250 sticks each. If they sold everything, my friends would get $30 each. If not, they would have to absorb what they did not sell. I got $60," he says, adding he hawked his lot by going floor to floor in HDB blocks.

"I also learnt how to make satay, and sold them in the void deck of my HDB block," he adds.

Not surprisingly, his studies suffered and he had to repeat two years in Eunos Primary School.

However, he did well when he went to Bedok Town Secondary School and topped his class in Secondary 1.

"I was champion in mathematics," he says proudly.

But just one week into Secondary 2, he quit school.

"I just didn't like studying. The school teacher came to my home but my mother said she could not do anything because I just didn't want to continue. I only wanted to run a business."

Cobbling together his savings and a small loan from his godmother, the then 17-year-old took over an economy rice stall at a small factory canteen in Geylang Bahru.

"I employed a chef. I remember he came to work with his own set of knives and other equipment," he says. "I served and washed the dishes."

It was a tough slog.

"I didn't make any money, I just broke even," says Mr Neo who closed the shop not long after. He began his national service after applying for early enlistment.

Upon completing his NS, he partnered an aunt to start a business repairing second-hand electrical appliances.

"I rented a small space in a shop in Ang Mo Kio and went around collecting old TV sets, refrigerators and air-conditioners. I would get someone to repair them and after that, export them to countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia," says Mr Neo, who often rolled up his sleeves to do simple repairwork himself.

The business lasted about one year.

"It was not easy. You had to deal with many parties and the profit margins were not good," he says.

Unimpressed with the food catered at the parties some of his friends threw, he decided he should get into catering next.

In 1992, he borrowed $15,000 from family members, relatives and friends, hired a skeletal crew and leased a small kitchen - shared with another caterer - in Joo Chiat to start Neo Garden.

"I would use the kitchen from 6am to 6pm and he would use it after that," he says.

Those were tough times, he recalls.

"On weekdays, we'd get one or two orders; on weekends, four or five. We would be working two months, but just earning one week's worth of money," he says with a sigh.

With great humour, he tells of the battered lorry he used for deliveries.

"I could not afford to pay the instalments. Every couple of months, I would get a call from the finance company: 'Mr Neo, you must come down and pay a bit.'"

"I also didn't have money to repair the faulty radiator. Every trip I made, I would have to stop at least three times to top up the radiator with water. One day, the whole thing just broke down."

For eight years, he lets on with a wry laugh, he had to borrow money from loan sharks - whom he euphemistically refers to as "friends" - so that he could give his staff a Chinese New Year bonus.

"You have to take care of your staff. Even though I had no money, I would look for money to pay them," says Mr Neo who would settle the loans - together with the hefty interest - a few days after Chinese New Year when there were usually more catering orders.

The thought of giving up, however, never once entered his head.

"I just believe one thing: I must, must continue. It was very, very tough but my ego is very, very big. I cannot fail," he says, loudly emphasising the last word.

It helps that he has never been intimidated by hard work. In fact, he thrives on it.

He would turn up at his kitchen at 4am and hit the wet markets four times a week to order fish and other ingredients.

"I spent 12 years in the kitchen helping to cook and fry. I know everything there is to know about the business."

His friend, Ms Aileen Low, 48, says his capacity for hard work is probably his greatest strength.

"He is very cheong," the director of Defu Foodstuff says, using the Hokkien word for "tenacious".

"He can wu zhong sheng you," she adds, using the Chinese proverb which means "to create something out of nothing".

To stay afloat, he started a tingkat lunch service. He also advertised in newspapers and hired someone to trawl the Yellow Pages, looking for numbers of companies to fax menus to.

Through it all, he knew one thing was paramount.

"I was very insistent on quality. In the food industry, without quality, you won't survive."

Business picked up slowly.

"I only stopped worrying about money eight years after I started the business," he says.

In 1999, when things settled down, he married Sally, who was his secondary school sweetheart. They have two sons, aged three and five.

Not content to rest on his laurels, he started to expand the business. In 2004, he started a halal catering arm, Deli Hub Catering. Four years later, he opened his first Umisushi kiosk in Eunos MRT station, selling sushi, sashimi and other Japanese food items. Today, there are 19 Umisushi outlets all over the island

In 2008, Orange Clove Catering - aimed at the upper end of the market - was launched.

"We can do everything - from a sit-down dinner for 10 people to an event for 10,000 people," he says proudly.

By 2011, the company was ranked by Euromonitor International as the No. 1 events caterer in Singapore.

Mr Neo then decided the time was ripe for the Neo Group to get listed.

"It was time to be recognised. I want to make my staff proud, I wanted them to work in a place where there was corporate governance. I didn't do much planning, I just do," says Mr Neo, whose company achieved its Catalist listing last year.

Neo Group now has more than 500 staff on its payroll, four central kitchens to prepare food, and more than 100 vehicles to make deliveries. Revenue for the financial year ended Jan 31 was $41.7 million.

Running a listed company does not faze the stocky entrepreneur.

He may not have a Harvard MBA but he can articulate, in his own inimitable way, what he considers sound management principles.

And that includes early succession planning, paying and treating staff well, and hiring the right people.

"My people are my biggest assets, so I have to pay them well. People say there are four pillars in every organisation. I say I have 500 pillars, big and small."

To instil camaraderie and loyalty, his kitchen staff wear a different coloured polo shirt every day of the week, recite a company pledge and sing Emil Chau's famous song Friends when they knock off work each day.

He has no issues hiring people smarter than him. In fact, he is very chuffed that a secondary school dropout like him is employing graduates and challenging them every day.

"I like them to be better and smarter than me because if they are not, I will have a big problem. I will not be able to take this company to the next level."

One other thing, he says, has taken him to where he is.

"I learnt how to give. Once you know how to give, your life totally changes. Your business will continue to grow and big problems will become small," says Mr Neo who regularly donates to charities including the Singapore Children's Society.

He adds: "I always tell my staff they have to give, even if it's just 10 cents. I say it's good for them. If they ask me when this can be proven, I will say I do not know. But I tell them to believe me and to believe that it's something they need to do."

The towkay is happy that he has done well enough to help out his family and prove his father wrong. He employs two of his brothers, bought his mother a new Mercedes-Benz C-class last year, and gives his father a generous allowance every month.

"My father told my mother: 'Forget what I said in the past.'"

Meanwhile, Mr Neo has another dream.

"I want to have at least 5,000 people on my payroll and bring my revenue to $1 billion."

It is not a pipe dream, he says.

"When I started this company in 1992, I had nothing. In 2003, we achieved $3 million revenue. But last year, we did more than $40 million."

He says earnestly: "There are a lot of learning curves in this business. But when you have conquered the curves, you will fly."

kimhoh@sph.com.sg

Singapore Press Holdings Limited

sounds like my cheonging sergeant in the army.
the best I learnt is he was thick skinned to borrow 15k from friends/relatives

When no money no paper, must chiong. If not, then hiong.

Too bad neo group is so richly valued at the moment. I shall wait patiently for it to one day be a value buy!

(08-10-2013, 11:30 PM)opmi Wrote: When no money no paper, must chiong. If not, then hiong.

Nicer term is leverage from relatives usually interest free.

Take from relatives and friends, more emotional
baggage. Lose money no face during CNY.

Interesting read as always. I guess my biggest takeaway from this article was how he tried to balance work and time for his family but I don't think that I would ever turn to running a full-time business if that was what I'm looking for. IMO, it's draining running a business full time especially for businesses in their infancy.

Tan Meng Wei; When his first venture bled, he expanded
13 October 2013
Straits Times
© 2013 Singapore Press Holdings Limited

Today, ex-banking executive runs 11 childcare centres all over the island

Eight years ago, Tan Meng Wei and a couple of partners shelled out $80,000 to buy a childcare centre.

Brave man, foolish decision, thought many of his relatives and friends. Why was he taking the plunge again when the first centre he bought two years earlier had saddled him with a host of problems and nearly bled him dry?

The former banking executive says he has his optimistic nature to thank.

"I try not to worry too much. I believed we could not stop at one. We needed volume. Two was infinitely better than one, but obviously, two was not the way to go either," he says.

His tenacity served him well.

Today, the Star Learners Group has 11 childcare centres all over the island, and an annual revenue of about $10 million.

But the chain's effervescent managing director is not done yet. "We are looking to triple our size," he says.

The 41-year-old will probably achieve that by going about things his own way, with a dash of derring-do and a heap of faith.

Garrulous and energetic, the younger of two children reckons he inherited his appetite for risk and his penchant for the unconventional from his mother.

His mother was the eldest of eight children and never had the chance to further her studies beyond the O levels. She worked as a clerk with the then Registry of Vehicles and helped to put her siblings through school. Her brothers and sisters did a lot better; one became a doctor, another an architect, and yet another, a senior executive with an oil giant.

"But when my mother was in her mid-40s, she decided on a drastic career change. She got her driving licence and her remisier's licence and is still working as a stockbroker today," says Mr Tan, whose father is a retired teacher.

The family lived in a four-room Housing Board flat in Holland Village and he and his older sister were taught to be independent from a very young age.

With a big grin, he says: "Both our parents had to work and we were what you would call latchkey kids but in those days, it was not a bad word," says the former Anglo-Chinese School student.

One of the school's top chess players, he gave his folks no grief over his studies and excelled in sports, representing ACS in water polo.

After the O levels, he went to National Junior College. As he was not sure what he wanted to be, he decided to cover all bases, doing physics, mathematics, literature and economics.

"The teacher gave me the master timetable and said, 'You do it if you can fit it all in'."

He did.

"Technically, that combination could qualify me for any university course except medicine," he says.

Sheepishly, he lets on that he spent more time on the sports field and squash courts than on his schoolwork.

"I skipped half my classes but because NJC students were so well-behaved, the teachers didn't really come after you. Then again, because everybody was studying, you also had to make sure you could keep up."

He failed to get into the law faculty at the National University of Singapore, and settled for accountancy at Nanyang Technological University instead.

"I actually wanted to be a writer but everybody told me I wouldn't make any money," he says with a sigh.

At NTU, he was a live-in student whose love for sports and hostel activities got in the way of his studies; he failed several subjects including consolidated accounting and business law. He decided to move back home in his third year to avoid being distracted by hostel activities.

He had hoped to join Citibank's much coveted management programme after graduation. It attracted 1,500 applications, from whom 160 were shortlisted and 20 finally accepted.

"I made the shortlist, attended three interviews but didn't hear from them after that."

He landed an auditing job with Coopers & Lybrand instead but on a hunch, decided to call up Citibank to ask why he had not heard from them.

He was told he did not make the cut, but was asked if he would be keen on a position handling a regional financial product.

Three more interviews ensued, the last with Mr Piyush Gupta, now chief executive of DBS Group.

"I was offered the job but I told them I would only accept it if I could be part of the management programme. They agreed," says Mr Tan.

He quit his auditing job after just three weeks and moved to Citi, where he spent four years handling transactional and other complicated financial products before he accepted an offer from another bank - which came with a twofold pay increase.

He was serving his notice at Citi when a friend told him that the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) was looking for management consultants.

"I went for an interview. BCG interviews are very different, they get you to solve a case study and I really loved the whole exercise because it was very stimulating."

Two more interviews followed. By the time BCG offered him the job, he was six days into his new job at the new bank.

"Some people had to jump through hoops to give me the package I wanted at the new bank, but I couldn't pass up the BCG offer," he says.

He spent a tough but stimulating four years at the management consultancy.

"It's a tough job and the stress levels are high and involve late nights and long hours. One guy who joined the same time as I did left after just three weeks," he says. "They also have an up or out policy - if you're not promoted, you will be told to go."

He thrived on the adrenaline buzz he got from working on different cases, and liaising with chief executives and heads of strategy in different industries in the region.

But the work and routine - which involved flying out of Singapore on Monday mornings and catching the last flight home on Friday evenings - took their toll.

By then, he had married his university sweetheart, and their son was three years old.

"One day when I was home, my wife asked him to tell me that dinner is ready. He picked up the phone. His idea of talking to me was always on the phone. That's when I knew I had to leave BCG," he says.

His next stop was Standard Chartered Bank (StanChart) where he first joined its central consulting team and later became its head of strategy for private banking.

He acquitted himself very well in the job but was grappling with some major headaches privately.

While at BCG, he had plonked $100,000 of his savings - which he had set aside for his MBA - to buy the Star Learners childcare centre in Eunos.

"The whole point of getting an MBA was to either join management consulting or investment banking. I was already a management consultant so I didn't see the point," he says.

Moreover, he felt that the opportunity cost of taking at least a year off and uprooting his family to the United States was high.

He was 30 when the offer to buy the childcare centre came in 2002. He roped in a partner and decided to go for it.

"I adore kids. And I thought to myself, 'This is going to be simple, it is self-running, the money will just roll in and I just need to pay the teachers.' I treated it like a financial investment," he says ruefully.

It turned out to be a deal from hell.

Only after he had bought it did he discover that income taxes and staff's Central Provident Fund contributions had not been paid. The centre's supervisor also decided to quit, taking along a third of the pupils with her. To make things worse, Sars happened in 2003.

Mr Tan sighs when asked why a trained management consultant like him did not unearth the management issues while doing his due diligence.

"It was not so simple. I also tend to take people at face value. You can never tell unless you're in it. For instance, I never thought Sars would happen and that it would make enrolment drop so much. I also never thought about what to do if enrolment dropped," he says.

The centre started haemorrhaging.

"At its worst, we were losing $12,000 a month," recalls Mr Tan, who often used his pay cheque to pay the centre's eight staff and operation expenses.

He counts himself fortunate to have been able to dig into his savings, thanks to astute property investments he had made earlier. His wife had by then given up teaching to become a housewife.

"My colleagues said I'd been gung-ho going into properties but I think I took careful risks. I bought what could be rented out and in areas where tenant flow was consistent. I had very good yields, and in a couple of cases, was offered significant amounts when the property market went hot," says Mr Tan, who bought apartments in areas like River Valley and Havelock.

It took a good two years before a supervisor he hired helped to turn the childcare centre around.

But even before it was in the black, he bought his second outlet in Simei.

He was emboldened not just by the shrinking losses of the first centre, but by the hard lessons he had learnt.

"The biggest takeaway was to not buy over a company but buy over a business. If you buy a company, whatever problems come with it become your problems too," he says.

"When you buy over the business, you just need to change the brand. With the second centre, we started making a little money from day one."

Over the next five years, he held his job at StanChart and acquired two more childcare centres.

In 2010, he decided to quit his bank job.

"There were no push factors. People told me I was crazy to give up a good salary but I was spending 10 hours in the office. I wanted to spend those 10 hours with my kids instead, send them to and fetch them from school, be there for them," says the father of four children aged between four and 12.

He remembers the day he made up his mind.

"It was a Saturday night, just before a Liverpool and Manchester City match. I had texted my resignation to my boss, saved it to draft on my phone. But as the match was about to begin, I said: 'What the heck, might as well send lah'," says the Liverpool fan, adding that his team won the match 3-0.

A colleague decided to quit and join him in building Star Learners. They streamlined operations and appointed staff to take care of human resources, marketing and finance.

"My main takeaway from my corporate days is that you have to understand your strengths and use them well. And where you have weaknesses, you get other people to fill the gap.

"We don't have a target as to how many centres we want by when. But if and when we can gather the resources, we will consider it."

Over the last three years, the Star Learners Group - which now has six shareholders - bought seven more centres. It now employs 180 staff and has a total enrolment of 1,000 pre-schoolers.

The group's motto is to build "confident, creative children with character" just like his own two sons and two daughters. The three older ones are either chess champions and/or soccer players.

Mr Tan plays an active role in mapping out programmes for the group. A firm believer that sports - with its emphasis on training, teamwork and discipline - plays a big part in shaping character, he imported a multiple sports programme from Australia.

"The programme exposes children to a different sport every two weeks," he says.

Inspired by the song in the musical Les Miserable, he also started a Castle On A Cloud programme which offers all single mothers a monthly $200 rebate off their child's fees. In the Cameron Mackintosh musical, the song is sung by Cossette, an orphan girl.

Businessman Willy Chua, 40, describes his friend of 20 years as a sure-footed man.

"He knows what he wants and what he has to do to achieve it. When something doesn't work out, he may backtrack to correct his mistakes, but he will not abandon it."

kimhoh@sph.com.sg

the biggest take-away from this article for me is - just be yourself
I dun think warren buffett could succeed what he achieved.

share investor seems a different animal from an management consultant/entrepreneur

one thing I dun quite understand - he said ""The biggest takeaway was to not buy over a company but buy over a business.".. how to interpret this?

In the end, it was superhero property investor that saved the day... makes me wonder how much of such businesses is being supported/made possible by money made from property mkt.