Crisis turns big spender into savvy innovator
Ms. Pat Law borrowed $10,000 from good friend Irene Ang (inset) to start Goodstuph.
Patricia Law had a rude awakening when her father was diagnosed with a brain tumour nearly four years ago. The advertising executive realised her bank account was a big disaster.
“I had been working for more than 10 years but I had nothing, not even $1,000 to my name,” she recalls.
Her mortification was compounded by the fact that she was drawing a more than decent salary of nearly $8,000 a month.
“It would not have been so bad if I actually had a mortgage or a car to show for it, but there was nothing.
Cancer in the family was something I just could not afford,” says the older of two children of hawkers.
Although her father’s tumour turned out to be benign, doctors warned that complications could set in if it grew.
The episode convinced her to overhaul her life. She reckoned that drawing a monthly salary, even a decent one, would make coping difficult should a major medical crisis affect any member of her family.
“I knew what I could do, and that I could do it on my own,” says Ms Law, 33, who was then a promising new media marketing specialist at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.
Two weeks after her father was diagnosed, she handed in her resignation letter to set up Goodstuph as a one-woman show. The agency – which specialises in social media advertising and marketing – now employs seven staff and has annual billings of more than $3 million.
The freewheeling big spender has morphed into a savvy entrepreneur, one whose agency won two prizes – Local Hero of The Year and Social Media Agency of the Year – at Marketing Magazine’s Agency of The Year Awards 2013.
Change is not new to her. “I’m a bit like water.
I fill out different shapes at different times in my life,” she says. Ms Law grew up in a three-room flat in Marine Parade.
Raised to be independent, she was already taking buses daily on her own at six years old to Changi Airport’s Terminal 1 where her parents ran a duck rice stall.
“My mother was very thrifty,” says Ms Law, who attended Ngee Ann Primary School.
“She bought me an extra-large pinafore when I was in Primary 1 so that it would last me a few years.”
Diagnosed with a pronunciation problem, she had to undergo speech therapy at Singapore General Hospital.
“It was a terrible thing for a nine-year-old. You feel very demoralised.
I was quiet because of that. I didn’t want to speak and didn’t want to give others a chance to make fun of me,” she recalls.
Not that she was a wallflower. In fact, she was full of street smarts and was making her own pocket money even at that young age.
“I’d catch grasshoppers, put them in tikam boxes and sell them to classmates as pets for $2 each,” she says.
Academically, however, she was less nimble. Her poor Primary School Leaving Examination scores saw her posted to Pasir Ris Secondary School where she mixed with a motley crowd.
“I was never in a gang but I hung out with folks who were. One student made headlines for punching a teacher,” she recalls with a laugh.
She was no model student herself. As a prefect, she would abuse her position and let students out of school for a buck or two.
That was never found out, but she was stripped of her prefectship for truancy.
In Secondary 3, she decided to pull her socks up and got herself a tutor.
“I looked at my family’s background, saw how hard they were working and I realised that if I didn’t pay more attention to my studies, I would have nothing to fall back on,” she says.
Her O-level results were good enough to get her into a junior college but she decided to study business at Singapore Polytechnic instead.
She says: “I think I’m smart because I know when I’m stupid.
I know exactly what and when it was not my game to play.
” The polytechnic, indeed, was a far better fit, even though she skipped classes a lot, preferring to spend time at billiard centres like Pot Black.
“I was making money from pool games, I was that good. I think I’m a bit of a hustler,” she says with a guffaw.
Indeed, she was also making quite a bit of pocket money from the Internet by then.
She was a self-taught tech whizz and, from the age of 14, had been using her Internet know-how to design online pages for Web users and even start a pen-pal business.
“I knew how to extract e-mail addresses so I put an ad in a teen magazine.
I’d tell people who wanted pen pals to write in, and for a fee, I’d give them an e-mail address. Of course today, that would be illegal,” she says with a laugh.
Despite spending time on her many money-making ventures, her studies did not suffer. In fact, she excelled in subjects like marketing and business law.
“Marketing was my game. I was good in language and packaging, I knew how to sell and I have street smarts so that helped,” she says.
“I partied hard but at the back of my mind I knew I had to do well.
” Although she wanted badly to go on to university after her diploma, she knew that her parents would not be able to afford it.
“I guess they could have taken out bank loans but I didn’t want them to do that, so I decided to start working,” she says.
Her heart was set on advertising. Over the next few years, she learnt the ropes at several agencies, including AKQA, Publicis, TBWA and Leo Burnett.
“In the beginning, I was scolded every day. But I had some of the best training,” she says.
She also worked extremely hard. “A lot of things may not be in my control but I can control how many hours I put into my accounts and how hard I work,” she says. I
n the meantime, she got swept up in the digital wave; she started a blog and soon made an online name for herself writing about marketing and advertising.
Recognising that social media was then the new online frontier, she knocked back an account director position from another agency to join Ogilvy as an account manager in 2007.
“Ogilvy was the only agency with social media as a speciality then,” she says. “It had a lot of clients which wanted to get into the new media space early so it was not hard to sell the idea to them.
” She loved her time at the agency and rose quickly.
“I was liaising with managing directors and leading consultants and had a lot of leeway to use the best that Ogilvy has to offer to produce big campaigns in the social space,” says Ms Law, who worked on the accounts of clients such as Intel and Nike.
One Sunday, her father came home, dropped his mobile phone and told her he could not feel his arm.
She drove him to hospital where a CT scan revealed that he had a tumour near his central nervous system.
The sorry state of her financial affairs sobered her.
After a couple of days of soul-searching, she decided to leverage on her youth and abilities and take a chance to change her life.
She approached her good friend Irene Ang, actress and founder of talent agency Fly Entertainment.
“I asked to borrow $10,000. I dared not ask for more. I’d never borrowed money all my life. I told her my situation, said I didn’t want her sympathy and that I would pay her back.”
She had known Ms Ang from the time she was a young executive.
“A client wanted a celebrity to endorse their products but didn’t have the money. I found out that Irene had a bar in Club Street so I went there, waited for four hours and pounced on her when she came in.
I said, ‘Can I just give you free cat food and if anybody calls and asks what your cat eats, you just tell them the brand?’”
Ms Ang remembers the loan.
“I generally don’t like to lend money because it can spoil relationships.
But I’d known her for several years and I knew she was very talented.
I also believe that young people sometimes need a chance,” she says. Ms Law – who repaid the $10,000 in three months – wanted to run Goodstuph from her home but a friend offered her a space in his office, rent-free. “I wanted to hire staff but I told myself I could not hire until I could go one year without any business,” she says.
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