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'Workaholic' succeeds in making a mark in e-commerce

Nov 8, 2009

MR LEONARD Tan, 30, the founder and managing director of PurpleClick Media Pte Ltd, winner of the Top LiveWIRE Award this year, is known for his go-getting attitude and keen vision both as an employee and an entrepreneur.

Mr Tan started working part-time to earn extra income as a student. He managed to make quite a lot of money by selling books online while pursuing his studies in the US. The amount of money was enough to cover for his tuition fees and living expenses. This was a testament of his business acumen. However, his hard-working spirit did not stop there. He also took up a part-time job as a waiter at a restaurant to earn additional income.

He invested $10,000 to start a business shortly after returning to work in Singapore in order to take advantage of the opportunities available. He eventually managed to build a new company with a turnover of around $3 million within a few years and is now hoping to list it on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) mainboard.

Mr Tan revealed recently when talking about his entrepreneurial experience with reporters after accepting the award, that he yearned to acquire some e-commerce knowledge after graduating from the National University of Singapore (NUS). Therefore, he chose to enrol into a university in the US to study this subject.

However, the subject had become 'unpopular' by then, following the burst of the dot-com bubble. He had borrowed money from his father to study overseas and therefore wanted to repay him as soon as possible.

He said: 'I sold books in the morning and attended classes at night. And then I went to the restaurant to work after classes. The restaurant didn't give us any salary so we depended on tips from the customers.'

As for why he only attended classes at night, he said that it was because e-commerce had become an 'unpopular' subject following the burst of the dot-com bubble. Due the low number of new students, the course had to be taught at night in order to have enough students to proceed.

Selling books was more profitable than working in the restaurant and eventually became his most profitable venture. He already had the experience of starting a small business back when he was a student in Singapore.

Selling books in the US was the most profitable

He said: 'Selling books in the US was the most profitable venture. I sold my books on ebay and old books which cost $20 each could sell for as much as $60. I started selling books from my campus to the whole of Chicago and the business eventually expanded to the whole of the US. I sold the books to other poor students like me.'

Mr Tan encountered the Sars epidemic at the time when he returned to Singapore. The situation in the job market was gloomy and he spent close to half a year to find a job. He discovered that not only did his Master's degree fail to help, it had become a burden as no one needed workers with such a high educational qualification.

In order to earn some money for his living expenditures, he once took a job to help Standard Chartered Bank market its credit cards to businesses and worked extremely hard at it. He said: 'When other people signed up 10 companies, I would sign 20. I was focusing all my attention on making money.'

He eventually found a full-time job as Yahoo wanted to hire someone who understood e-commerce. He was motivated to start his own business because many people at work were asking him how to use the internet to market their products, how to get their company names to appear at the top of the search engine results, and how to create Adwords (advertisements on Google) among others.

However, as Yahoo was focused only on major corporations, he felt that there was a gap in meeting the demands of the SME market, which presented a business potential waiting to be tapped. On the other hand, it was inappropriate for him to provide consulting services on Google's search engine to customers while he was still employed at Yahoo. Therefore, he made the decision to start his own business after discussing with his superior.

Starting a business involved 'going in and out of the back-door'

The business did not begin as smoothly as Mr Tan had imagined and in fact it was really tough at the beginning. The company had only two people at first and was located at the back alley of Temple Street. It had no front door and they had to go in and out through the back-door. In addition, it was harder for a small company like that to recruit workers as graduates tend to favour working at big companies.

After the company expanded its workforce to six, it moved to People's Park and the number of its employees doubled each year. It now has a team of 20 people. However, Mr Tan said that as the industry was still very young, the new workers had no prior experience and the company needed to provide a lot of explanations concerning its new services.

Fortunately, many customers were satisfied after trying out the services and decided to continue using them. He also thanked the support of the government, business partners and local media, including IE Singapore, Spring and the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCCI). IE Singapore also helped the company expand its overseas market.

He went on to say: 'I hope the company can be listed on the SGX mainboard to boost its corporate image and credibility. This can help us to expand our overseas markets. Even though the South-east Asian market has yet to reach maturity, we believe that the online sector in South-east Asia will catch up with that of other parts of the world in the next three to five years. Therefore it offers enormous potential.'

Some companies have already expressed confidence in the potential of PurpleClick Media and hope to buy take stakes in the company. However, Mr Tan said that he is not in need of cash and has no plans to cash-out on his investment. He said: 'We are not looking solely for funds. We are looking for strategic partners who can help us to expand our business and develop our operations overseas.'

He currently has a right-hand man - PurpleClick Media general manager Stanley Tan - to help him to handle business in Singapore so that he can spend his time and energy on developing the company's operations in markets overseas.