IT IS not just the As you get in school that will help you become a successful entrepreneur. You will also need lots of Ps - passion and perseverance.
For those who have to fight for it, as the saying goes, life has a flavour the sheltered never know. Just ask Ms Phyllis Tan, 45, who is no stranger to slugging it out.
That was one of the lessons four home-grown business pioneers - Stansfield group's Mr Kannappan Chettiar, Digital Scanning Corp's Mr Seah Liang Chiang, Portek International's Mr Larry Lam and Osim International's Mr Ron Sim - shared with aspiring entrepreneurs yesterday. They were speaking at a forum organised by the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, the NUS Business School Alumni Association and the South East Community Development Council.
They said that while they were not exactly gung-ho about studying in their youth, they had the drive and desire to do things their way.
Take Portek's Mr Lam, who set up the mainboard-listed crane leasing firm in 1988. He left a secure job as the general manager of a container-crane supplier which paid him $4,500 a month and embarked on a 'one-man show', distributing port equipment from a Swedish manufacturer.
To realise his dream, he had to sacrifice another one - that of owning an East Coast apartment with a sea view. 'I did not want to be financially strapped down so I decided to forgo the $10,000 deposit that I had put down,' said Mr Lam.
And still there were hurdles. For example, to raise the money he needed to embark on his first million-dollar project in 1989, 'I had to take my mother's, brother's and my own savings and even got a friend to arrange a bank loan for me, which was very difficult'.
But his perseverance paid off, and Portek has grown into a leading provider of cranes. Last year, it was listed here, with profits of $6.5 million on a turnover of $43.3 million for the year ended June, 2002.
Mr Lam's leap of faith was echoed in the other entrepreneurs' stories.
Information technology (IT) firm Digital Scanning's managing director, Mr Seah, left a high-paying job in an American IT firm in 1989 to set up his first business. Differences with his partners had led to him resigning from that company, and he went on to start Digital Scanning in 1993. The firm now employs over 25 staff with a turnover of $5 million in 2000.
Stansfield chairman Mr Chettiar started his own business school in 1993 after leaving the Singapore Institute of Commerce, a private law school that he had founded. Stansfield has been profitable from its first year of operation, with profit hitting $1.8 million for the year ended March 31, 2002.
And Osim chairman and chief executive Mr Sim took a gamble on home health-care products in 1989 - nine years after he had started a trading firm. Osim has since become a household name for healthy lifestyle products both here and overseas. --Bryan Lee |
