There is a moment in every skill-based pursuit where you know exactly where you stand. The first time you attempt a muscle up, you hang from the bar and nothing happens. But the progression is visible from the start — negatives, then an ugly kip, then a clean rep. At every stage, you know what comes next. A piano piece has sheet music. You can see every note, measure your progress bar by bar. The feedback is immediate and unambiguous.
Building a business has none of that.
In 2013, my partner and I rented a small industrial unit in Sembawang. We were about 25 years old. We hadn’t even graduated from NTU yet. We had minimal family money, no industry connections, no investors. We had a vague idea that we could build a business trading fitness related products.
That was the plan. The entire plan.
We didn’t sit down with a whiteboard and map out a vertically integrated fitness ecosystem. We found a fairly price warehouse space, brought in some stock, initially via preorders, and tried to sell it. To schools, to home gym buyers, to anyone who would pick up the phone.
The first few years were spent doing things that would never make a case study. QQ to factories. Sifting samples. Receiving containers. Packing orders. Driving deliveries. Quoting customers. Learning which dumbbells hold up and which ones chip after six months. Talking to teachers and discovering sports equipment were not well supplied. Figuring out that wire mesh cages needed to be fabricated locally because the shipping cost from China made them uneconomic.
None of this felt like we have arrived. We had a warehouse, a small team, and enough revenue to justify continuing — but never enough to confirm that we were building something bigger than what we already had.
The hardest part of those early years was not the work. The work was physically demanding but cognitively simple.
The hard part was making decisions when every signal was ambiguous. A good month could mean momentum. Or a one-off. A bad month could mean the model was broken. Or noise. A school reorders — relationship forming, or just convenience? Every data point could be read two ways, and there was no way to know which reading was correct. The information that would resolve it didn’t exist yet. It would only become visible years later.
Meanwhile, my peers from university were getting promoted. They had job titles, performance reviews, salary increments — signals that said: you are on track. Entrepreneurship provides none of those signals. You generate your own sense of direction, or you operate without one.
For seven years, that was the reality. 2013 to 2020. Movement First sold fitness equipment. Javy Sports sold sports equipment to schools. KC Metal fabricated wire mesh cages and custom metalwork. Three small businesses sharing a warehouse, sharing manpower, sharing the same two partners at the top.
If someone had visited our warehouse in 2018 and asked what we were building, the honest answer would have been: I don’t know. I know we’re profitable. I know we’re learning things about this industry that nobody else bothers to learn. I know our suppliers trust us and our schools keep coming back. But I can’t tell you where this goes.
Then COVID happened.
Singapore locked down. Gyms closed. Everyone wanted fitness equipment — dumbbells, benches, pull-up bars, anything they could train with inside their flat. Orders exploded. We had the stock, the warehouse, the supplier relationships, and the fulfilment capability. We raised prices — not opportunistically, but because raw material costs and shipping disruptions had spiked simultaneously. The market accepted the new price point.
That cash funded a pivot we hadn’t planned. With many businesses closed, commercial spaces were becoming available. Rents were softening. And we had seven years of equipment knowledge, supplier relationships, fabrication capability, and new cash reserves.
In 2021, we opened our first gym — a budget concept in an shophouse near Woodleigh. As a new business, it was hard getting landlords to trust us. Build cost around mid-six figures. Equipment sourced from our own trading company. Custom parts fabricated by our own welding shop. The supply chain, from factory floor to gym floor, was already there.
Then we opened a second. Then a third.
Within five years, we went from zero locations to over 25 across multiple concepts and formats. The group has crossed eight-figure annual revenue across all entities.
From the outside, it looked like an overnight explosion. But the seven years made it possible. The supplier relationships that took years to build. The fabrication capability that took years to develop. The equipment knowledge that came from selling thousands of products and learning which ones break. The cash reserves accumulated through years of reinvestment.
The sheet music, it turned out, was being written the whole time. I just couldn’t read it while it was being composed.
Here is the part I think about most.
I shudder to think of how much had to go right.
If HDB hadn’t been renting commercial units to gyms before they banned new gym tenancies, there would be no cost moat. If COVID hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have had the cash to fund the expansion. If it hadn’t also shaken out weaker competitors, there would have been fewer sites at good rents. If Ian had taken a banking job instead, there would be no finance partner.
Any one of those breaks differently, and this essay doesn’t exist in its current form.
I also know, with complete honesty, that I don’t have the confidence or energy to do it again. Even with unlimited capital, I’m not sure I could rebuild what we have. What we built wasn’t primarily a capital problem. It was a time problem — accumulated relationships, accumulated knowledge, accumulated trust that can’t be purchased. Only earned, year by year.
At 25, I had nothing to lose. The downside of failure was a mid-level salary. The risk was asymmetric in my favour, though I didn’t know that at the time — I just felt it. At 38, with a family and a group of companies generating real income, the calculus is fundamentally different. The hunger that comes from having nothing is replaced by the caution that comes from having something worth protecting. That’s not weakness. That’s rationality.
But driven by hunger, curiosity, and youth — it was possible.
People ask me what trait matters most for entrepreneurs. The answer is not what most books suggest. That’s Part 2.
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