WHO: Mr Romell Song, 45, chief operating officer of live entertainment company IMC Group Asia, which stages concerts and music events. Headquartered in Singapore, it also manages live venues Capitol Theatre and *Scape The Ground Theatre.
MR ROMELL SONG: What we lost in the last two years was time.
IMC had anchored our business in China since its founding in 2008, but in 2018, the company took a strategic decision to move our headquarters to Singapore to position ourselves as a more Asia-centric company.
Just as we were about to launch our activities from Singapore, including the One Love Asia Festival - what was to be one of Asia's largest music and lifestyle festivals - Covid-19 struck.
The world literally went into lockdown and the live music entertainment industry suffered an unprecedented impact.
Now we are two years behind.
We were committed to keeping everyone on payroll, even though the most commercially sensible thing to do was to cut as much costs as possible and hire everyone back later when things resumed some sense of normalcy.
We continued pushing live concerts where possible with our AL!VE concert series, held at Capitol Theatre, adhering to prevailing safe management measures.
We had staff who, due to border controls, could not reunite with their families in Malaysia and Hong Kong for over two years.
During Chinese New Year this year, we arranged flights and land transit to send them home quickly to spend as much time with their families as possible.
The pandemic has made us rethink what's most important as human beings: To care for and be cared for. People need people. Period.
Our core business is in live entertainment. We truly believe that nothing comes close to being physically present when the artiste is performing, soaking it all in - the sound, the lights and the energy of your fellow audience members. Being there, in the moment, generates a unique emotive experience of oneness. That's hard to replicate, if possible at all.
We remained focused on this, but ventured to do one online concert in 2020 to raise funds for the Darul Ihsan orphanage in MacPherson. We raised close to $30,000 to help fund their dormitory repairs and renewal.
Special mention has to go to one of our senior management staff who is running our China operations, currently our company's biggest revenue source.
The company sent him back the first time at the end of 2020 and then a second time in mid-2021.
In total, he spent close to two months either in centralised quarantine or home quarantine.
We nicknamed him the "China Quarantine King".
For our staff in Singapore, China, Malaysia, Thailand and Japan, it was more the stress of uncertainty. Some had joined the company, like myself, just before the pandemic.
For me, it was not easy, especially with a baby on the way.
My daughter will turn one in May. My wife is a homemaker.
We want to get back on track to our pre-Covid-19 plans of launching the One Love Asia Festival, which is likely to happen in the second half of this year. We also have other self-produced festivals slated from July onwards.
To support all the above endeavours, we will be looking at manpower, which is likely to be challenging. In retrospect, it was undoubtedly a correct move to retain our staff, because we still have a core group of colleagues who are able to keep things going and impart both our industry knowledge and company culture to those who have just joined.
On a personal note, my world view changed quite a bit. There was a paradigm shift in what we took for granted, such as freedom of movement, eating out with friends, attending events. All these seem all the more precious today.
As told to Eddino Abdul Hadi
