That was what the more than 100 students who gathered for the first WIT*e – Inspiration & Mentoring held at the Fairmont Singapore last week heard during the “Inspiration for Entrepreneurs” panel.
Said Morris Sim (left), co-founder of Circos Brand Karma, “Follow your heart. At the age you are at, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain – you can always get a job somewhere. If you really have an idea and you can make it happen, go try it – what do you have to lose?”
He said it was much harder to do a start-up later in life when you have a family than when you are young and single.
Martin Symes, CEO of Wego, said that he had always admired people who knew early on what they wanted to do. On his part, he said that his early experience working in corporations gave him good grounding in running his own business.
Working with corporations can give you exposure to different functions and different countries so you can “work out the things you don’t want to do”.
Loh Lik Peng (right), who gave up a legal career to become a hotel owner, said, “Go work for other people first.” 
He said it was rare to find someone with strong management skills and vision when you are young and just starting up with examples like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook the exception rather than the rule.
“My background gave me a lot of skills I needed badly – it gives you credibility with people you work with and you have to manage, to do your numbers, talk with the banks. Learn what you’re good at and bad at, at someone else’s expense.”
On the other hand though, Martin said that once you start climbing the corporate ladder, it can be difficult to give up the comfort and trappings. “So if you’ve an idea, then do it – especially if you have mum and dad who can finance it.”
Ram Badrinathan of PhoCusWright observed that Singapore was the easiest place to be an entrepreneur because of the various government grants and although these grants came with strings attached, of course, they were a good way of helping companies get started.
Both Morris’ Circos Brand Karma and Martin Symes’ Wego are recipients of Singapore government grants.
The three panelists also shared stories of why they started their own business. For Morris, it was the belief that he could make an impact in a faster manner than inside a big company like Micrsoft.
Martin (left), who was involved with ZUJI from the beginning, said it was a lot of fun in the early days. Then it got taken over by a single shareholder and it wasn’t so fun anymore. He considered a couple of consulting jobs and decided to get involved with Wego, nine months after it was founded. “I like doing things that change the world a little bit.”
He admitted he was a little nervous at the beginning. He had just had a child, his wife had stopped working. “But I thought even if it goes horribly wrong, I would have had fun and learnt a lot.”
Lik Peng did not plan to be a hotelier fulltime. He bought the site which would become the Hotel 1929 in 2002 and thought he’d spend time between his legal career and investment. But when the hotel opened, he had so much fun and better things came along.
“Being a lawyer was not so much fun anyway,” he said.
In careers like law and medicine, he said, the amount you earn is restricted by the hours you can work. As an entrepreneur, your earnings are limited by your drive and ability to innovate. “The sky is the limit.”
It’s not all fun though. For Lik Peng, the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur is the loneliness and you have to learn to trust your inner voice. When you start up and have to explain yourself, people will tell you it will never work, he said, especially his lawyer friends who are, by nature, risk-averse.
“You have to switch on that inner voice and let it run your life.”
For Martin, it’s money. As a start-up, the outgoings is always more than the incomings and there are times when you can’t sleep and you ask yourself, how are you going to pay the wages? “It’s not like that anymore, thank God,” he laughed.
Another difficulty is if you’re running a business in which you’re only a shareholder, and not the owner, your title as CEO means very little internally.
If you’re working for a big organization, you have a corner office and nice job title, that carries positional power. It’s easier to get things done than working with the bunch of friends and trying to get things done, especially when these friends are pretty passionate about what they do and also know more than you. “A title means nothing,” said Martin.
For Morris, it’s staying focused. When you start a business, you have a vision that’s different from what’s out there. The road to implementation is also always longer than you think. Customers look at you very funny like you’re speaking a different language. Others will try and re-shape your vision and it’s easy to get pulled one way or another.
“You have to have the conviction that it’s the right thing to do, that it’s a market-changing thing and stick to it.”
Asked where the next big ideas were in travel, Lik Peng said social media and how travel businesses like his could leverage on that. Martin said the basics were in place for the online travel market in Asia – such as OTAs and search – and it was time to exploit “tiny little bits of the supply chain” as entrepreneurs in the US were doing by specializing and building niche products.
Morris cites the ability to personalize the guest experience, not just technically but also in service and the way we interact with customers. Travellers are accessing longtail content and there is a need for that to be addressed, he said.
At the end though, Martin said people invested in people.
And according to the audience at WIT*e that night, qualities need to be an entrepreneur included courage, passion, drive, vision, adventure, stupidity and sense of humour.
Note: Morris, Martin and Lik Peng are among the panel of mentors/advisor for the WITovation Entrepreneur Bootcamp. Send in your entries to take part in our Entrepreneur Competition and Bootcamp.
