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14-04-2013, 10:02 AM
An RI boy who made his fortune in logistics/freight forwarding!
The Straits Times
www.straitstimes.com
Published on Apr 14, 2013
Wong Kim Hoh meets... Rajoo Amurdalingam
Life lessons from a hooligan's game
Freight-forwarding towkay picked up his never-say-die attitude playing rugby
Mr Rajoo Amurdalingam first set foot on a rugby pitch as a 14-year-old student at Raffles Institution.
It became his second home, and the sport changed his life. He learnt more than just how to crouch, touch, pause and engage; he learnt how to to give it his all and how to pick himself up after a fall.
Rugby taught him all about camaraderie. It exposed him to highs and lows and tested his limits, both physical and mental. It bruised and humbled him, but also charged him up and made him feel tall.
The discipline and the training on the pitch have served him well in life. He survived some hard tackles, and pushed through a few scrums to found and build The National Forwarder, a freight-forwarding business which employs more than 60 people and has a turnover of $20 million a year.
"One of the things we learnt in rugby is to take defeat graciously, and to win with humility," says Mr Rajoo, now 51.
The amiable entrepreneur is the youngest of five children of a port foreman and his homemaker wife.
His late father, he says, came to Singapore as a 14-year-old, and ended up at the port in Tanjong Pagar, where he worked his way up from coolie to foreman.
"He was illiterate but he picked up English from the ship captains," he says.
The family lived in the quarters for port workers in Tanjong Pagar. "There was no living room, just one bedroom, and one room where we ate, studied and slept," he recalls.
The area was not exactly genteel. It was rife with bad hats and he remembers many a ganja smoker puffing away at the void decks.
"A few sets of parents, including mine, took it upon themselves to make sure that we children did not fall into bad company," he says.
"I actually had a lot of friends who were gangsters but they knew I could study, so they would always tell me not to join them but to go and hit the books," he says, with a laugh.
Although his parents kept their financial struggles to themselves, the children knew life was not easy.
"All of us had just one pair of shoes and one uniform to last us through the year. I was the youngest, so all my schoolbooks were passed down from my siblings," he says, adding that his eldest brother had to stop school after his O levels to help with the family income.
Fortunately, young Rajoo was a self-starter. He was head prefect and consistently topped his class at the now defunct Peck Seah Primary School.
"My teachers were always urging us to study hard so that we could go to Raffles Institution and I was fortunate enough to end up there," he says.
"It was only after I went there that I realised the school had produced all these ministers, scholars and fantastic sportsmen. But the great thing was, my classmates came from all walks of life. I had friends whose fathers were peons and hawkers," he says.
The boys from his year include Education Minister Heng Swee Keat and A*Star chairman Lim Chuan Poh.
He took up rugby when he was in Secondary 2.
While the game gave him a few injuries, it also left the flanker a treasure trove of experiences and memories, one of which was playing in the last Kiwi Cup in 1978. The annual clash - a tradition between RI and St Andrew's School - was discontinued when the two schools could not agree on fielding junior college players. It was revived only in 2008, after an absence of 30 years.
Mr Rajoo's love affair with "the hooligan's game played by gentlemen" continues to this day. He plays touch rugby every Sunday and is the president of the Raffles Rugby Union, set up to continue RI's dominance in the sport.
He left school after completing his A levels.
"If I had studied a bit harder, I would have gone to university. I could also have attempted to resit my exams, but I wanted to start working," he says.
His first job after national service was as a delivery clerk for a local freight-forwarding company in Changi's cargo complex.
Commuting to and from work was a tedious affair, each journey taking two hours and three buses.
"My mother could not understand why I had to struggle to get to work every day instead of getting a job nearer to home," he says.
But Mr Rajoo - who started out doing declaration permits and making deliveries - enjoyed his work.
"What inspired me were my supervisors. I guess they wanted to find out what this boy could do, so every day, they would pick on my mistakes. But it spurred me. I told myself, 'Wah, I got whacked today but tomorrow I will go back and learn some more.'
"The rugby training helped. That's how our coaches trained us - just tekan and tekan," he says, using the Malay word for applying pressure. "But you have to get up and keep going."
His superiors were won over quickly by the young man's fleet-footedness. He got the hang of more complex responsibilities, like costings, very quickly.
"One of the great things about working for a small company is that you get to learn everything."
By the time he left the company three years later, he had mastered the industry's notoriously complex paperwork.
"I understood the chain of action, where something originates and where it finishes. That's what logistics is all about," he says.
Two more stints with different freight-forwarding companies followed before he struck out on his own with two friends from RI. He was then all of 28.
"I had chalked up six years in the industry by then. I told myself that if I could serve customers the way I wanted to, I could be making my own money."
They started the company with $100,000.
"It was big money in those days. You wouldn't believe it, but I actually got the money from a customer I had been serving for several years. He just gave it to me and said, 'You go and start out on your own.'"
He adds: "Even if I hadn't been given that money, I would have gone to my cousins and other family members to borrow it. I was very confident of paying them back, and quickly too."
The trio decided to carve a niche for themselves by specialising in marine logistics, transporting ship spares, oil well spares and cargo for the marine industry.
"I had noticed that demand in the marine industry was immense. People wanted things yesterday but not many freight companies were ready to do round-the-clock work to cater to them. They also didn't have the right staff to do this, staff who were empowered to make their own decisions and who were independent operators."
The company flourished. In five years, annual turnover hit more than $5 million.
He was, he says with a laugh, a young towkay, one who could afford to buy a terrace house in the West Coast and drive a fancy car.
But problems soon cropped up between him and his partners.
"We had differences," he says simply, reluctant to go into details.
The situation became so bad that he decided to walk out after 10 years in 1998, at the height of the Asian financial crisis.
The split, he says, still leaves him a little sad.
"All of us were good friends. One of them was my best man, and I was the best man of the other one," says Mr Rajoo, who got married when he was 26. He and his wife Sharmala - who works with him - have four children aged between 17 and 25.
"If we had all sat down and spoken about it, things could have been salvaged. I'm not saying I'm an angel; I have my flaws as well but..." he says, trailing off with a sigh. "But that's life. Sometimes things don't turn out the way we want them to."
Several of his staff walked out with him, even though they had no idea where he was heading.
"I never felt I was going to collapse. I just told myself I could crawl back up," he says.
And he did, although it was not easy.
With four young children, debts and a mortgage, he had no choice but to sell off his house in the West Coast and his Audi.
He moved his mother and family into a rented apartment and cobbled together $100,000 by borrowing from friends and relatives to start The National Forwarder.
Given an old car by a friend, he remembers once driving up to a petrol kiosk debating whether he should pump in just $20 or $50 worth of petrol.
"It is very easy to get cash-strapped in this business. Every time you move a shipment with an airline, you've got to pay within 30 days. If you don't pay, you don't get the space," he says.
Business was sluggish because of the crisis.
"My staff's salary was my top priority. I could not let them down," says Mr Rajoo, who went without a salary for six months.
His experience and his persistence helped him ride the shaky start.
"We just kept at it, aggressively marketing and taking care of our customers. Then the referrals came," he says, adding that the business turned around in its fifth year.
The company started out with five employees and two lorries from a small unit in Changi's cargo complex. Today, it occupies six units in Changi, has a 20,000 sq ft warehouse in Penjuru, employs 60 workers and owns a fleet of 12 trucks.
Along the way, it chalked up some pretty nifty achievements.
In 2006, it set an industry record by air-freighting quite possibly the world's heaviest item of cargo - a 19.8m-long and 32,000-tonne shaft used for deep sea drilling - from Singapore to Germany on a commercial carrier.
And in 2008, it freighted the longest item, an oil rig slip joint measuring 23.2m to India, also on a commercial carrier.
Asked if he harbours hopes of one day listing his company, Mr Rajoo replies: "No, I can't list because I like to give. I like to do things which give me satisfaction, and when you're listed, you can't do as you please."
Indeed, he has been making regular five-figure donations to various charities since 2004 - from Sinda to the Down Syndrome Association of Singapore and Singapore Children's Society.
He has also been known to hire underprivileged individuals as well as youths with a past.
Mr Danny Lee, 42, has known the entrepreneur for more than 20 years. Now deputy director of student and alumni affairs at Temasek Polytechnic, he used to work as a sales executive for Mr Rajoo.
Mr Lee says: "He's just a really good human being. Sometimes what he does makes no business sense. We've asked him why he keeps giving opportunities to people who do not always appreciate them. But he just does.
"But in the larger scheme of things, perhaps someone up there thinks he is doing a good job because his business is flourishing. He is doing well by doing good."
kimhoh@sph.com.sg
The Straits Times
www.straitstimes.com
Published on Apr 14, 2013
Wong Kim Hoh meets... Rajoo Amurdalingam
Life lessons from a hooligan's game
Freight-forwarding towkay picked up his never-say-die attitude playing rugby
Mr Rajoo Amurdalingam first set foot on a rugby pitch as a 14-year-old student at Raffles Institution.
It became his second home, and the sport changed his life. He learnt more than just how to crouch, touch, pause and engage; he learnt how to to give it his all and how to pick himself up after a fall.
Rugby taught him all about camaraderie. It exposed him to highs and lows and tested his limits, both physical and mental. It bruised and humbled him, but also charged him up and made him feel tall.
The discipline and the training on the pitch have served him well in life. He survived some hard tackles, and pushed through a few scrums to found and build The National Forwarder, a freight-forwarding business which employs more than 60 people and has a turnover of $20 million a year.
"One of the things we learnt in rugby is to take defeat graciously, and to win with humility," says Mr Rajoo, now 51.
The amiable entrepreneur is the youngest of five children of a port foreman and his homemaker wife.
His late father, he says, came to Singapore as a 14-year-old, and ended up at the port in Tanjong Pagar, where he worked his way up from coolie to foreman.
"He was illiterate but he picked up English from the ship captains," he says.
The family lived in the quarters for port workers in Tanjong Pagar. "There was no living room, just one bedroom, and one room where we ate, studied and slept," he recalls.
The area was not exactly genteel. It was rife with bad hats and he remembers many a ganja smoker puffing away at the void decks.
"A few sets of parents, including mine, took it upon themselves to make sure that we children did not fall into bad company," he says.
"I actually had a lot of friends who were gangsters but they knew I could study, so they would always tell me not to join them but to go and hit the books," he says, with a laugh.
Although his parents kept their financial struggles to themselves, the children knew life was not easy.
"All of us had just one pair of shoes and one uniform to last us through the year. I was the youngest, so all my schoolbooks were passed down from my siblings," he says, adding that his eldest brother had to stop school after his O levels to help with the family income.
Fortunately, young Rajoo was a self-starter. He was head prefect and consistently topped his class at the now defunct Peck Seah Primary School.
"My teachers were always urging us to study hard so that we could go to Raffles Institution and I was fortunate enough to end up there," he says.
"It was only after I went there that I realised the school had produced all these ministers, scholars and fantastic sportsmen. But the great thing was, my classmates came from all walks of life. I had friends whose fathers were peons and hawkers," he says.
The boys from his year include Education Minister Heng Swee Keat and A*Star chairman Lim Chuan Poh.
He took up rugby when he was in Secondary 2.
While the game gave him a few injuries, it also left the flanker a treasure trove of experiences and memories, one of which was playing in the last Kiwi Cup in 1978. The annual clash - a tradition between RI and St Andrew's School - was discontinued when the two schools could not agree on fielding junior college players. It was revived only in 2008, after an absence of 30 years.
Mr Rajoo's love affair with "the hooligan's game played by gentlemen" continues to this day. He plays touch rugby every Sunday and is the president of the Raffles Rugby Union, set up to continue RI's dominance in the sport.
He left school after completing his A levels.
"If I had studied a bit harder, I would have gone to university. I could also have attempted to resit my exams, but I wanted to start working," he says.
His first job after national service was as a delivery clerk for a local freight-forwarding company in Changi's cargo complex.
Commuting to and from work was a tedious affair, each journey taking two hours and three buses.
"My mother could not understand why I had to struggle to get to work every day instead of getting a job nearer to home," he says.
But Mr Rajoo - who started out doing declaration permits and making deliveries - enjoyed his work.
"What inspired me were my supervisors. I guess they wanted to find out what this boy could do, so every day, they would pick on my mistakes. But it spurred me. I told myself, 'Wah, I got whacked today but tomorrow I will go back and learn some more.'
"The rugby training helped. That's how our coaches trained us - just tekan and tekan," he says, using the Malay word for applying pressure. "But you have to get up and keep going."
His superiors were won over quickly by the young man's fleet-footedness. He got the hang of more complex responsibilities, like costings, very quickly.
"One of the great things about working for a small company is that you get to learn everything."
By the time he left the company three years later, he had mastered the industry's notoriously complex paperwork.
"I understood the chain of action, where something originates and where it finishes. That's what logistics is all about," he says.
Two more stints with different freight-forwarding companies followed before he struck out on his own with two friends from RI. He was then all of 28.
"I had chalked up six years in the industry by then. I told myself that if I could serve customers the way I wanted to, I could be making my own money."
They started the company with $100,000.
"It was big money in those days. You wouldn't believe it, but I actually got the money from a customer I had been serving for several years. He just gave it to me and said, 'You go and start out on your own.'"
He adds: "Even if I hadn't been given that money, I would have gone to my cousins and other family members to borrow it. I was very confident of paying them back, and quickly too."
The trio decided to carve a niche for themselves by specialising in marine logistics, transporting ship spares, oil well spares and cargo for the marine industry.
"I had noticed that demand in the marine industry was immense. People wanted things yesterday but not many freight companies were ready to do round-the-clock work to cater to them. They also didn't have the right staff to do this, staff who were empowered to make their own decisions and who were independent operators."
The company flourished. In five years, annual turnover hit more than $5 million.
He was, he says with a laugh, a young towkay, one who could afford to buy a terrace house in the West Coast and drive a fancy car.
But problems soon cropped up between him and his partners.
"We had differences," he says simply, reluctant to go into details.
The situation became so bad that he decided to walk out after 10 years in 1998, at the height of the Asian financial crisis.
The split, he says, still leaves him a little sad.
"All of us were good friends. One of them was my best man, and I was the best man of the other one," says Mr Rajoo, who got married when he was 26. He and his wife Sharmala - who works with him - have four children aged between 17 and 25.
"If we had all sat down and spoken about it, things could have been salvaged. I'm not saying I'm an angel; I have my flaws as well but..." he says, trailing off with a sigh. "But that's life. Sometimes things don't turn out the way we want them to."
Several of his staff walked out with him, even though they had no idea where he was heading.
"I never felt I was going to collapse. I just told myself I could crawl back up," he says.
And he did, although it was not easy.
With four young children, debts and a mortgage, he had no choice but to sell off his house in the West Coast and his Audi.
He moved his mother and family into a rented apartment and cobbled together $100,000 by borrowing from friends and relatives to start The National Forwarder.
Given an old car by a friend, he remembers once driving up to a petrol kiosk debating whether he should pump in just $20 or $50 worth of petrol.
"It is very easy to get cash-strapped in this business. Every time you move a shipment with an airline, you've got to pay within 30 days. If you don't pay, you don't get the space," he says.
Business was sluggish because of the crisis.
"My staff's salary was my top priority. I could not let them down," says Mr Rajoo, who went without a salary for six months.
His experience and his persistence helped him ride the shaky start.
"We just kept at it, aggressively marketing and taking care of our customers. Then the referrals came," he says, adding that the business turned around in its fifth year.
The company started out with five employees and two lorries from a small unit in Changi's cargo complex. Today, it occupies six units in Changi, has a 20,000 sq ft warehouse in Penjuru, employs 60 workers and owns a fleet of 12 trucks.
Along the way, it chalked up some pretty nifty achievements.
In 2006, it set an industry record by air-freighting quite possibly the world's heaviest item of cargo - a 19.8m-long and 32,000-tonne shaft used for deep sea drilling - from Singapore to Germany on a commercial carrier.
And in 2008, it freighted the longest item, an oil rig slip joint measuring 23.2m to India, also on a commercial carrier.
Asked if he harbours hopes of one day listing his company, Mr Rajoo replies: "No, I can't list because I like to give. I like to do things which give me satisfaction, and when you're listed, you can't do as you please."
Indeed, he has been making regular five-figure donations to various charities since 2004 - from Sinda to the Down Syndrome Association of Singapore and Singapore Children's Society.
He has also been known to hire underprivileged individuals as well as youths with a past.
Mr Danny Lee, 42, has known the entrepreneur for more than 20 years. Now deputy director of student and alumni affairs at Temasek Polytechnic, he used to work as a sales executive for Mr Rajoo.
Mr Lee says: "He's just a really good human being. Sometimes what he does makes no business sense. We've asked him why he keeps giving opportunities to people who do not always appreciate them. But he just does.
"But in the larger scheme of things, perhaps someone up there thinks he is doing a good job because his business is flourishing. He is doing well by doing good."
kimhoh@sph.com.sg
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