He made S$80 million from S$300k startup
How does it feel like to pocket S$80 million for one deal?
Ask Thai Express founder Ivan Lee.
The 35-year-old recently sold 70 per cent of his business to Thai-listed food and beverage conglomerate Minor International.
Not bad for the millionaire who started honing his entrepreneurial skills at 11, by renting out his Nintendo game console to other kids in his Ang Mo Kio HDB area for S$1 an hour.
By the time he was 26, he had moved on to bigger things. With S$300,000, together with then-fiancee and now wife Grace Goh, he started the now-ubiquitous Thai Express brand with a single restaurant in Holland Village, despite doubts from even his closest family members, to friends and even his landlord.
In eight years, he had grown his company to include several other F&B brands: Xin Wang Hong Kong Cafe, New York New York, and Shokudo Food Bazaar. The deal with Minor valued his company at a hefty S$114 million.
Mr Lee, whose father owned a stevedore business and whose mother is a beautician, stepped down as chief executive of the company, but remains a director on the board, and is still a shareholder.
An entrepreneur at heart, he now has his eyes set on the China market, but in a totally different field.
He now has a Chinese Internet start-up and will launch a new social networking site that will rival established names like Baidu and QQ in the next three to four months.
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Report from The Straits Times dated Wed, Feb 04, 2009
Ivan Lee - Young man in a hurry
By John Lui
The business bug bit Mr Ivan Lee, 33, CEO of the Thai Express group of restaurants, early in life. At 11, to be exact.
That was when the boy, then the owner of the only Nintendo game console in his Ang Mo Kio HDB area, began renting out the unit to other children. He charged $1 an hour.
'People kept coming, so I bought an organiser. After a while, my book was full. Business was good.'
He made about $10 a day, but his profits were literally being eaten away. 'The kids started to ransack my fridge. I was making a loss.'
So the lad sold instant noodles at $1 a bowl. A slice of luncheon meat was 50 cents. It is fitting that the same dish is now raking in the dollars at his Xin Wang Hong Kong Cafes. Now it costs $8.90 (though, to be fair, it includes service charge and a fried egg).
His latest Xin Wang opened in the Northpoint Mall last November. It is a fact that he likes to mention to friends and family who had told him that Singaporeans would never pay cafe prices for instant noodles.
'I love rubbing it in,' he says, with a grin.
The Thai Express group's seven restaurant brands now have 76 outlets around the Asia-Pacific region - including Mongolia, Australia and China - and a sales turnover of $100 million last year. His achievements earned him the fourth spot last year in the annual lifestyle power list compiled by Life!
Dressed in a simple white office shirt and dark slacks, he spoke to Life! at the Thai Express headquarters in the spartan Delta House industrial building in Alexandra Road.
His personal space, like the rest of the premises, is spare with beige walls, simple furniture and computers. It is in line with his keep-it-simple approach. The business, which employs about 1,800 staff in the region, needs loading and warehouse space that is close to the central area, which the building provides.
With outlets opening at the rate of roughly one a month, mostly in Singapore, he and his team are running at a sprint. In the six years since the company's first Thai Express outlet in Holland Village, he has built the largest Thai casual-dining chain the world. With nine branches, Xin Wang is the largest Hong Kong cafe chain in Singapore. Another brand, Shokudo, in Raffles City and in The Heeren, offers two of the island's largest Japanese cuisine dining areas.
The New York New York cafe and deli outlets grew at the rate of nine outlets in just over two years.
And there is the strange patriotic pleasure of seeing a Singapore-based company running a Thai eatery in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia. A New York New York is also planned to open there.
But it is the Xin Wang chain which holds a special place in Mr Lee's heart.
He had a hunch that Singaporeans would pay double or triple hawker centre rates for no-frills fare such as French toast, shaved ice desserts and, yes, instant noodles. The National University of Singapore philosophy honours graduate had seen similar eateries packed to the rafters in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur.
But no one believed it would work. Do not tinker with Thai Express' core identity, he was told. Among the critics was his father-in-law.
Self-made millionaire Tommie Goh, 60, is former executive chairman of electronics firm JIT Holdings and Businessman of the Year 1999, and now chairman of investment company 2G Capital.
He recalls: 'I said, 'Why do people want to eat instant noodles and luncheon meat at a cafe? They can jolly well buy them from the NTUC supermart.''
But Mr Lee bet on his hunch and opened the first Xin Wang in Hougang's Heartland Mall in late 2005.
The outlet was swamped from day one. Its success proved that Mr Lee could trust his instincts, even if no one else did. Taking a risk and proving the naysayers wrong is deeply satisfying to him.
'It means a lot more to me than the money,' he says.
Mr Goh today says he is very happy to have been proven wrong by his son-in- law, whom he describes as 'a strong character'.
'He has a strong belief in himself. He wants to be an entrepreneur. He wants to work for himself,' he says.
Mr Goh first laid eyes on the brash young man when he showed up one day with his daughter, Grace. The couple met while taking the honours philosophy course at NUS.
His daughter was zipping around campus in a Porsche Boxster convertible while Mr Lee was riding a Honda 400 cc racer motorcycle.
Mr Goh's first impression of him was that he was 'a young man in a hurry'. Fearing for his daughter's safety, he offered to subsidise the purchase of a car if Mr Lee would give up the bike. To his dismay, Mr Lee declined the offer.
Today, Ms Grace Goh, 31, laughs at the memory. She says that she would never have dared to ride a bike, not even one handled by her then boyfriend.
Mr Lee used his own family's car instead when they went out for dates. He later bought a car with his own money.
The couple now have two girls, aged 14 months and three years. They live in a rented apartment near Great World City in River Valley Road while their bungalow in the Tanglin area is being built.
When the couple first met as first- year students, the sparks that flew were far from romantic.
'I thought he was this loud, arrogant fella in colourful, tight T-shirts and he thought I was this snobbish rich girl,' she says, laughing. He had an 'annoying' habit of getting on the dean's list without studying. He seemed to prefer hanging out with a group of male friends and was not shy about teasing girls, she says.
It was only three years later when they were in the same small honours class that they had their first proper conversation. That led to their first date.
Ms Goh knew how hard it must have been for a boy from Ang Mo Kio estate to date a girl with her own sports car, especially for someone as driven to succeed as her husband.
He says he feels 'uncomfortable' with taking anything that he feels is not rightfully earned as it becomes a debt he feels obliged to repay.
He paid for their dates which were simple affairs. For example, he says with a laugh that for their first date, they ate at the Wee Nam Kee chicken rice eatery near Novena MRT station.
Mr Lee's own parents were also entrepreneurs, though not on the same scale as his father-in-law. His mother, Madam Lenice Cheng, 60, is a retired beautician who ran her own parlours and his father, Mr Lee Hock Seng, 57, runs a stevedore firm. When he was in Primary 6, his parents divorced.
Madam Cheng hired a maid to help her look after Mr Lee and his younger brother and sister.
He says he was a tearaway during those years, hanging out in void decks and getting into scrapes with a group of teenagers. From them, he learnt 'smoking, shoplifting and fighting'.
His father asked for custody. He knew by then it was too late to play the strict parent, so he just offered a lot of support and broad guidelines.
'It was his way of showing his love,' Mr Lee says. ?The motorcycle, for example, was his father's idea, to give the boy space to explore and learn real-world lessons. His father did, however, keep a closer watch over his sister.
Mr Lee did well enough to go from Anderson Secondary School to Anderson Junior College and then to NUS, where he took up economics and philosophy. On the side, he set up a mortgage broking and insurance sales business with a friend, which gave him some pocket money.
His wife, Grace, says his ability to juggle many things has to do with his analytical mind.
She knows better than to argue with him, she says with a laugh. His fierce urge to win and his intellect, when fired up, make for one-sided contests.
'We don't argue because it's tiring. His logic and reasoning are powerful, he can just think something through and get to the point of it,' she says.
And his mind is never more thoroughly engaged than when he is thinking of his next move for his business.?He and his team of managers pore over every detail, to either cut costs or improve quality.
His team obsesses about efficiency and waste. For example, kitchens do not generate revenue. Seating does. So with each new restaurant, his team finds new ways to squeeze seating space from the kitchen, by refining how chefs work.
His chefs experiment with ways to simplify food preparation. About 20 spices are required in traditional home-made tom yum soup. After testing, omitting 15 spices still made for a tasty dish, he says.
Taking care of his people is a key priority in an industry that relies on human interaction yet is known for its high employee turnover. He fights to keep good employees on board, he says.
These are lessons he has learnt the hard way.
He and Grace came out of university with plans to marry but also to test a somewhat offbeat cafe-cum-nail bar concept with his mother.
The three pooled their money and the Onyx Cafe in Siglap opened in 2000. The eatery limped along but created the cash flow to help fund their second venture in 2002, the first Thai Express in Holland Village. This was an instant hit and Onyx was turned into the second Thai Express outlet, which is still open today.
'We were just surviving. With a few small changes, we could turn Onyx into a Thai Express,' he says.
In typical fashion, he wanted to do it as much on his own as possible.
'If I was to do it, it would be on my own terms, so I could take the credit for the success and blame for the failure.'
The idea for Thai Express came to him when he saw that while there were Japanese casual dining chains such as Sakae Sushi and Western chains such as Swenson's, there was no such outlets for Thai food despite its popularity here.
The profits from the first few restaurants were put back into expansion. So he and his wife had to watch their spending in the early years.
The independent man also refused the offer of a penthouse from his father-in- law because he wanted to be able to buy a home for his family. He chose a rented condominium in the Newton area. By 2005, he had enough to buy a semidetached house in Grange Road.
By then, his wife had had enough of running a business and went back to NUS to study law. She graduated in 2006 and is a housewife. His mother went back to running her own beauty salon.
But Mr Lee had by then learnt the tricks of the restaurant trade. That, married to his strong drive for running his own business, sealed it for him.
'I had this strong, overwhelming sense that I could turn things around,' he says, following the dismal performance of Onyx.
At the current rate of expansion, he has more than turned things around, but he says he is far from done. Just as 30 years ago, there was an explosion in customer numbers for fast-food restaurants in Asia, the same thing is now happening in casual dining, he says.
'Who knows how long this trend is going to last? I want to capture it and milk it as much as I can.'
At 33, Ivan Lee is still a young man in a hurry, though one who has travelled very far in a very short time.
Great job Mr Ivan. It is really inspiring to read about your determination and focus that brought you to where and what you are today.
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