Here’s the transcript for those who prefer to read.
Gerald: Welcome to another episode of Work It Podcast. I’m Gerald.
Nat: And I’m Nat. We’re your hosts. We’re bringing you fresh perspectives on the world of hustling. And Gerald, speaking of hustling, it’s been a hustling and bustling week for me. I cannot get a grip. I spend time with you here on the Work set. I also produce for the Money Talks podcast. There’s going to be a deep dive podcast recording. We have a CNA correspondent. It feels like I have so many things that need my attention.
Gerald: You need more than 24 hours a day.
Nat: Yeah. And 7 days a week. It’s feeling like that on some weeks, and this week is one of them.
Gerald: Oh man. That’s very relatable. I think even for my own work and many people I speak to, generally Singaporeans when we think about work we always say, “Okay busy lah.” We always feel like our time is out of our control. So this is something that… I don’t know if it’s a good sign or not. We can talk about this with the guest that we have for today’s episode.
Nat: This guy is very interesting. He’s a serial entrepreneur. He runs not one, not two, but four businesses. So I’m wondering how does this guy manage his time?
Gerald: Let’s welcome our guest for today. We have with us serial entrepreneur Jeremy Ko. Jeremy, welcome to the set.
Jeremy: Hello. Welcome.
Business origins + why four businesses
Gerald: I think the question on everyone’s minds is why four businesses. But maybe let’s start with business number one. When did business number one come about?
Jeremy: We can go back all the way in time when I was maybe 13 or 14 years old. My mom asked me, “Do you know how to do website? My boss is looking for one.” And I said, “Let me go and learn.” So I went to the library, I borrowed a book. Within half a day, I understood how websites are done. I told my mom, “Okay, no problem.”
So my mom said, “How much you charge?” And being 13 years old, I asked my mom, “I have no idea. How much do I charge?” So my mom said, “People out there are charging $1,000 for five pages. You just charge $500 and my boss will be happy.” So I said, “Okay, sure.” So I did that.
Once I got his content in, I realized that I could finish five pages in a website within two, three hours… within five hours. So for $500 and you can finish it in five hours, for a 13, 14-year-old that’s $100 per hour. That was the website first. I’ve been designing websites for people since I was 13 years old.
Because I was from Dunman High, it was a Special stream school—everyone goes to JC, everyone aspires to be an engineer, lawyer, doctor. But for me, I told myself that I would probably just be a businessman.
In NS, I met a friend who had a personal trainer. The personal trainer asked me to be his partner after realizing I could do all the back-end stuff. So he focused on the gym aspect of the business, I focused on the marketing, on the management, on the cash flow. After that we realized that a lot of things we wanted to buy in Singapore—things that we take for granted now, you know, Hyrox, you have your sleds, you have your medicine balls—back then we had to buy from Europe or Australia, ship it to Singapore, very expensive.
By 2011 the business wasn’t doing so well so I exited the business. Then in 2012 I went to China for exchange. I started to meet factories there, understand what they were doing, and also understood how to use Taobao for sourcing. By the time I came back to Singapore and I started a gift shop first, I noticed that in that website segment the fitness subcategory was doing very well. So I decided to drill down on that. I started to bring fitness equipment. That was how Movement First started in the 2013, 2012 period.
Nat: Wow. Hustling since 13 years old, all the way until 2013. That was the journey that it took for you to become an entrepreneur. And I guess the question is, why did it not stop there? What happened that after Movement First there was business number two, number three, and then now number four?
Jeremy: In Singapore because of our limited domestic market size, you reach a point where your business will hit a natural plateau. In your first few years you can grow by 30%, 40%, 50%, but you reach a point where every year you’re growing by 5%. So no matter how much work you’re putting in, you will not get the revenue growth that you’re looking for.
But if you start a brand new business, you’ll be able to hit that kind of growth numbers again. For me, what was very applicable was recently I read this book interview by Robert Kuok and he said that he was like a fish always swimming into the deep end of the ocean and before he knew it, he will hit the concrete base, and it was a man-made ocean. So the only way for him to grow further was to expand laterally into other industries. So when I think about that, I’m like that’s exactly what happened to me.
After Movement First, the only way for my staff to get a salary rise, to get more responsibility, is for me to get out of the picture. If I remove myself, I become a shareholder, I become an adviser. I’m no longer drawing active salary from business. I let it run on a passive enough basis. So if I want my staff to grow I have to get out and guide them. That has been the principle that both me and my partners have followed.
Managing four businesses + partners + rest
Gerald: Right now you run four businesses. All of them are in the sports, fitness, equipment, gym, bouldering area. I’m imagining running four businesses—different but related areas. What are some challenges you face managing all of them? How do you balance your day?
Jeremy: With someone with a hyperactive mind and too much energy, which was causing trouble in school, this became the natural outlet for me. One part of the business is purely about sourcing, procurement, solving problems. Another part of the business, the gym business, is mostly about high capex but being able to run smoothly on its own. Beyond opening, it’s mainly making sure the maintenance is okay, making sure that the customers are well taken care of. These are things that you could hire teams to help you manage.
Nat: Because the business demand, the opportunity is always there, right? There’s always something new to break into and develop. How do you personally find a balance?
Jeremy: It’s always too much. We try our best to say no. We know that we are overloaded. We always feel that we should keep ourselves maybe 20% free. But most of the time when crunch time comes, we have no choice. We will be overloaded. We will be tired.
But we feel that for us to serve the community with our special prices, or with our gyms that target a certain group of people, we are doing something that has wider societal benefits, and hence our individual tiredness—purpose will overcome the individual tiredness.
That said, there will be a time where you’ll be at your breaking point, your limits, and that is where the different partners step in. I tell my partner, “I’m really tired for these two, three days, can you step in for me?” The answer will always be yes. Or he’s really tired, he comes and tells me, “I need two days for my kids,” I say, “Sure, no problem,” then I’ll take it over from there.
Nat: There’s this saying, right—if I don’t do this work then who will do the work.
Jeremy: Yeah. Because if you are not doing it when you’re on leave, when you come back from leave or when you come back from your MC, you’re just going to be overburdened by having to catch up, and then having to do the work that you have to do for that week.
Gerald: I had this interesting conversation with my town council cleaner. I asked him, do you have off days? He said he prefers not to have off days. I asked him why. He said because if he has off days then the rubbish will pile up for that day and then the next day he comes back he has double load to clear. He has to work harder. So he’d rather work every day a little bit consistently to clear the load.
Jeremy: Every partner has their own specialty. One partner focuses on finance, on leasing, on looking for landlords and managing them. For me, I specialize in procurement, sourcing, maintenance, equipment. Another partner does the operations, the leading, the strategy, the marketing. Any of us can make a decision and it will be accepted by the rest.
So even if he’s on a break and someone comes to ask me about what he’s deciding, I’ll just say that based on what he told me previously, this is a likely decision that we’ll come to. So let’s just go ahead. I wouldn’t need to call him during his off day just for him to make that decision.
Nat: There’s a give and take when it comes to work. But I guess it’s not the case for you because you have good partners who will cover.
Jeremy: Yeah. Most importantly is what do we do when we go for holiday, right, as a business owner? You still need time to decompress. You still need time to get new perspectives. Or even sourcing trips where you’re away for four, five days—the work still needs to be done. So who takes over those loads?
And I need to say that I’m not the one doing a lot of work. Sometimes it seems like the business owner is the superman, but over time, if you build the resources, you build the team, they are the ones doing most of the work while you are providing guidance and advice, and just being a second pair of eyes to make sure that things go on correctly, or whatever that is supposed to be done is done.
We have to be very clear that when we manage employees, they are not like us. We cannot be overly harsh on them. It’s something I took 10 years to learn. It’s not something that I learned in 2014. When someone makes a mistake, I go full on and I burn that person, and then I realized that it’s not good for him, it’s not good for my anger management. It takes a while to mellow.
Maybe because I became a father in 2018, that was when I started to see my employees as possibly children, and then they have never done it before. You only can guide them and try to walk away five minutes, breathe, then come back again, then figure out how to move on with the problem that has been caused.
Working for others + scaling + tiredness
Gerald: Do you ever look back and think maybe I should have just worked for someone, as opposed to being the someone that people work for?
Jeremy: I always had this entrepreneur itch. Whether it was doing websites, and even when I learned photography, the next thing natural for me was: let me take photos for Racial Harmony Day, Sports Day in the school. Since I was taking photos for the school, why not take some class photos for everyone? I collected them and I started selling these photos. Maybe the cost of a photo is 50 cents and I sold it for $2.
So in a single day of work after taking photos, one more day of processing, I got the class monitor to collect the order for me. I could be earning $500 in a single day profit. So I’m like, okay, I can earn $500 in a day. How much does a fresh grad in 2003, 2004 earn? It was like $2,000 a month. I’m like, no, I will probably never think about working for people. I have to find a way to run a business or provide a service.
But eventually as I grew on, I stopped doing services-based business because I felt that it couldn’t scale. So if I want to build a business that will keep growing, I need to do things that are scalable, which then will be like trading businesses where you have the same team but you can grow to as big a size as possible.
So that is why I transitioned from doing services-based business like designing websites, doing design work, doing photography, doing personal training, toward selling equipment or doing e-commerce.
Nat: I do wonder though—because you did point out some businesses are hard to scale because there’s a limiting human factor to it. But I would also argue that running a business in general has that limiting human factor—you are human. Do you think you will continue this serial entrepreneurship spree as you get older? Because you’re still quite young.
Jeremy: I’m 37. I feel tired already, honestly speaking. There will be days and mornings where I wake up and I say I want to sleep for three more hours. I don’t want to wake up because the day ahead is going to be very tough.
Will I continue being a serial entrepreneur? The answer is hard to say. Even if you have asked me five, six years back, will I have imagined that I will have four businesses, or ten businesses? The answer is no. But if an opportunity comes about, and maybe we have more than enough cash again, or maybe there’s an overseas expansion opportunity, we will definitely look into it. It would be unfair for us to limit our growth potential just because I’m tired or just because another partner is tired.
Gerald: For listeners curious about starting a business, there are several things he did. He saw opportunities and he had to learn, pick up skills. He didn’t say, “I don’t know how to do it,” and therefore let it go. He went to do research, pick up new skills, try out something.
He talked about per-hour earnings. He started to see that how we use time to earn can be used differently. If today we are salary workers, of course you get the security, but on the other side if you are a businessman then you get to work on solving needs, solving problems, and also increasing your per-hour earnings.
The biggest thing for me is that he has the commitment and courage to start trying. A lot of people say, “If I can turn back time I will do this as a business,” but they never get down to it because an idea doesn’t translate into action.
Nat: Yeah. Execution is a lot more important than words.
For me that’s a key takeaway. Honestly, for me the biggest point I’ve taken away so far—and don’t take this the wrong way—but it’s so comforting that you have days that you also want to sleep for three hours longer. It’s nice to hear that someone as accomplished has the same habits sometimes.
That’s my takeaway. But for listeners watching who are considering pursuing the same career as you—serial entrepreneurship—starting one business, two businesses, up to four or five—do you have any advice on how to get from one to two to three to four?
Jeremy: It is a very natural progression. Basically what you have to see is: how do I scale the business further? And if I reach a point where I cannot scale the business further, then that is the point that you start thinking about a second business.
But if at that point you can still build the business, you are still seeing 20% growth year on year—don’t talk about 40%, 50% when you first start—but you are seeing 20% growth a year, there’s probably no reason for you to think about starting a second business, because you can still grow the first one. You’re comfortable, the risk is lesser.
But reach a point where you only can grow the business 5% a year, or many new competitors are coming into your business—then I have to find a way for me to move again to somewhere else where I can use my same resources but sell to a different group of customers.
And even then, opening the gym business is also a form of doing that, because by opening gyms, my main business will be able to be supported by the gym. The gyms give work to my first business because we are using the same team of workers to set up the gyms.
Everything has to be thought of from a systems mindset—that I’m building something to add to my internal ecological system that supports each other and not detract from each other. So if you’re opening a second business, think about what resources you currently have that can help the second business succeed easier. Find synergies—existing infrastructure, manpower, complementary services. And some lessons from previous businesses that didn’t work out. Make sure you also have the buy-in of the people that are going to be operating these.
Gerald: It’s a very insightful conversation. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Jeremy.
Jeremy: You’re welcome.
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