Below lifted from the transcript of On My Own Terms Podcast Episode 12

In this solo episode, I will be sharing my career journey thus far - recording this in Jan 2023.

3 reasons why I am doing this:

1. For you to know and understand me a little better. If you’re gonna listen to the podcast host - i.e. me - talk about career switch and career change - then maybe it’s helpful to know what the host has gone through himself - which leads to reason no. 2

2. Knowing my career journey will provide background and context to some of the questions and topics I discuss here with my podcast guests

3. For you to ask me questions directly. I set up this podcast with the purpose to help you on career change and growth through the podcast content. I would also want to be able to help you directly. So feel free to reach out via email - listed on the episode description

I would like to caveat that my opinions expressed here are entirely my own - and they do not express the views of the past, current and future organizations that i am part of.

So what i’m gonna tell you next will be my career journey. This will not be me reading off my CV or my Linkedin profile - you can find out more details on my Linkedin profile.

What I will focus on are the 3 transition chapters in my career:

1. From banking 🏦 to laser tag 🔫

2. From employer to startup employee

3. From untimely departure to ecommerce industry in Covid19

Journey:

• Graduated from Singapore Management University (SMU) in 2009 with a bachelor in Economics and 2nd major in Corporate communications

• For context, 2009 was one of the worst years to graduate from a business school - coming off a global financial crisis triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008.

• Regardless, I joined a local bank in Singapore as a Personal Financial Consultant. It’s basically a retail banking sales role where I was based at a bank branch and sold bank products to individual customers.

• I was there for nearly 1.5 years before I quit and co-founded a laser tag events business full time, a totally different set up from banking

1. From banking 🏦 to laser tag 🔫

• Why the drastic move? There were push and pull reasons:

  • Push reasons - The role, and to a large extent, the industry was heavily incentivized towards selling insurance-linked products; something that I didn’t see a good fit for my long term aspirations and career growth - which leads me to…

  • The work culture also didn’t quite sit right with me i.e. I was punished for doing the right thing - in my opinion. Colleagues and I had to come back to the branch at nights - after banking hours (including friday nights) - for re-training just because we didn’t sell enough certain bank products despite hitting the target for others. I was very fine with earning no commission - as long as I was introducing the right suitable banking product to the customer based on her needs - even if it meant not hitting my sales target of certain favoured bank products. And I just didn’t think it was right to be punished for doing the right thing.

  • I have to also add that my colleagues were great and it was a great first job to hone your sales skills and also to meet interesting people

  • Pull reasons -

    • Timing: I always wanted to try my hands on entrepreneurship and the opportunity came

    • No. of business-specific reasons which I won’t go into; with that I also saw Compatibility of my skill sets which I thought needed to make it work - sales / business development and maybe creativity

    • Nothing to lose: gave myself 2 years and if it doesn’t work out, my degree and the banks will always be there

    • Biggest reason: I did not want to have regrets of not trying

  • How the transition happened:

    • Research: I did not quit and jump into the idea full time right away - I actually spent a few months doing a whole lot of research - studying competitors and the current industry landscape. I even paid for a laser tag session with my future competitor just to suss them out and experience their offering.

    • Due diligence: Only when I was sure there were gaps in the market and that I had ideas to address these gaps, then I could be confident to quit my banking job and jump into the new entrepreneurial gig 100% full time. This is largely to answer to myself (and maybe to others if anyone asked).

    • How it felt: big big leap of faith into the unknown, exciting - big blank canvas

  • What happened:

    • In total, I spent around 6.5 years at this entrepreneurial stint. During this time, a whole lot happened. The team and business grew - from no fixed location to 2. Business also evolved from events to manufacturing laser tag equipment.

    • During this time, I also dabbled with e-commerce businesses and a legal media startup.

Which brings us to Transition Chapter 2:

2. From employer to startup employee

I left the company which I co-founded and built for 6.5 years to join an early-stage tech startup in 2017 as Singapore General Manager.

A side story: It was a little serendipitous how I came across this startup and opportunity. I was representing my previous company at a two-day tech startup event. This was in the days when the company started to manufacture laser tag equipment. So I got to know the tech startup when I heard the CEO, Anthony, pitching his startup on Day 1 - it was a really cool product in my opinion - a smart lock which solves the problem of Airbnb hosts and guests exchanging physical keys.

On Day 2 lunchtime, I was looking for a spot to have my quick lunch and I found an empty spot next to - guess what - Anthony. I asked if it was available and I sat down. We ended up chatting and started to talk about his startup and the smart lock - about target customers, potential product bundling, etc - for the next 1.5 hours! We exchanged contacts and said goodbye.

About 2 months later, when I was looking at opportunities, I saw Anthony’s startup was hiring. I sent my CV, DM-ed him on Linkedin, he invited me for coffee together with one of his cofounders and the rest was history.

Maybe a mini-lesson here is - you never know who you talk to or connect with today - even when you’re not looking out for opportunities - could end up being someone who could give you a referral, give you insider information or even be your future boss tomorrow!

Ok back to my career transition chapter 2 - and now let me zoom in on some consideration factors and lessons during this transition period.

• Tech: I knew I needed my next step of my career had to involve tech somehow. The advancement of technology was rapid, tremendous and was covering more and more parts of our lives.

• Numbers on CV: I knew first-hand the importance of putting quantitative numbers on my CV in my applications.

• More than 1 offer - i needed to make sure joining another company was a well-considered decision which was thought through and had merit on its own

• Learning opportunity - both tech software and hardware

• Due diligence - did my research, even tested the product in retail store, saw the potential - I chose the tech startup despite 50% more basic salary in the other offer provided

• How it felt: I was 34 years old then - I was a little scared about joining a company after being an employer - more variable factors - i.e company culture, sense of control, oversaw wider aspects of company vs just sales

• But also excited to be part of something larger - venture capital backed startup, with a much larger audience globally

• What happened:

  • Steep learning curve - every industry comes with its list of regulations, practices, ecosystem of players

  • From SG General Manager to Business development director for SEA

  • Travelled and represented the startup at tech conferences and events across the region - MY, Indonesia, PH, HK, Germany, Las Vegas (in pre-covid times of course)

  • I was in the midst of the startup’s rapid growth in terms of team size, product development and market expansion

  • I truly learnt a lot and had a really awesome 2 years

  • But like most good things, they all come to an end.

Which brings us to Transition Chapter 3:

3. From untimely departure to ecommerce industry in Covid19

Unlike my transition chapters 1 & 2, this transition was not quite on my own terms.

The CEO of the tech startup and also my boss, Anthony, and I have had different thoughts on how the company processes should be and we had an amicable parting in early Oct 2019. The timing was also not the best for a career transition - at this time, I was a month away from my wedding and my then-fiancé was 5 months into her pregnancy. My income was the only source of income for us as my then-fiancé had already quit her flight attendant job due to the pregnancy.

I negotiated for two months notice period to give myself more time to land my next job. So, you can probably imagine the stress I was in.

What came next was one of my lowest periods in life. I was frantically looking to land on something - I brushed up my CV and linkedin profile, signed up for numerous different job portals, typed in key words and signed up for job alerts, modifying my cover letters to attach for different job applications. I remember applying for roles in the government and I had to fill up insanely long application forms and even submitting my Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) scores. There I was, applying for a job at 36 years old and needed to submit my score for an exam I took when I was 12 years old.

I remember it got a little depressing at one point. But I kept myself busy to keep my chin up and kept going.

And so in late Nov 2019, I took a leap of faith and did a career switch to the ecommerce industry to join a SEA ecommerce marketplace company.

Leap of faith because - remember the context here - this was 2019 - before covid19 happened. Before all offline world was brought to a halt.

• Part of a toolbox: In all honesty, I was not the most excited about the ecommerce industry, but when I was managing sales at the tech startup, a significant portion of sales came from ecommerce. I thought if I were to sharpen my tools in business development and sales, I needed to figure out ecommerce.

• Scale up: I also told myself, at least this was also a scale up in terms of company size, maturity and capital funding.

• Resources: I also wanted to learn how bigger companies organize resources and execute strategies. At startups, esp early stage ones, your strategies and execution constantly depend on how much money is left in the bank, which can be super short term and limiting

Two quick points about my transition:

• Experience brings pressure: Being a relatively senior hire in a generally young working environment, I felt some pressure of proving myself quickly while also picking things up in a new industry

• Big, cold and corporate: at this point of my career, this ecommerce company was the biggest company I was working in, with the exception of the bank. Inevitably it felt very corporate-like, which made me assume that I should be a little cautious about stepping on other people’s toes. On hindsight, this was an unnecessary and silly baseless assumption. And also, I was paid to be effective at work, not to be Mr Popular.

And then in March-April of 2020, Covid19 brought Singapore and the world to its knees.

• Except for medical services, food delivery, ecommerce and a few other select industries, most other industries were facing pay cut or loss of jobs

• And yet I had a little pay bump and a tiny bonus at the end of the financial year

• I realised: I was at the right place at the right time

• Then my Linkedin kinda exploded - the demand for folks in ecommerce shot up due to the pandemic

• Again, right place right time

It turns out:

• The untimely departure from the tech startup which led to my initial leap of faith into ecommerce turned out to be a huge huge blessing in disguise

• I’d be first to acknowledge the huge role luck and timing played in all of these

• Having said that and looking back now, would I still have wanted to leave the tech startup on my own terms and avoided all the stress of landing something else in the time frame - YES ABSOLUTELY. What I had gone through was super terrible and no one should ever go through what I went through - I absolutely hate the fact that I had no control and felt utterly helpless.

• It was also these feelings that formed my motivation to start this podcast to help others in similar shoes; and also to open up and share all these about my career transitions with you.

Summary: the 3 transition chapters in my career:

1. From banking 🏦 to laser tag 🔫

2. From employer to startup employee

3. From untimely departure to ecommerce industry in Covid19

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