My Little Entrepreneurship Journey So Far …

Willingness to learn in order to add new useful knowledge as well as good attitude towards others are really key to secrets of our success…

I walked out of my comfortable corporate world early last year as a Group CEO and CFO with just one purpose – ie to add the experience of being my own boss to my life journey before I pass on, without regret…

I managed to locate 2 other like-minded partners who are equally passionate, with complementary skillset, together we set up our own Corporate Services practice – Corporate BackOffice Pte Ltd – at SUNTEC Tower Three.

We didn’t have any clients at that time, neither did we know how to do marketing. Just 3 accountants coming together trying to provide our only skill to anyone who treasure us – ie doing bookkeeping, payroll, corporate secretarial and taxes.

We just love our only core skills, and believe that if we do our best, we will be okay.

We were too naive…

The real world is not so simple. We didn’t have even a phone Enquiry for our first month in practice. Office rental still needed to be paid, the clock was ticking…

I began to feel that I have let down my partners who trusted me so much that they also walked out of their comfort zones to join me…

I began to start to learn how to do marketing. We met a few very kind prospects who were not even half my age, who spent hours teaching me social media marketing, blog plug-in, use of “key words”, how to use Facebook Account Page, Face Book Fan Page, Face Book groups, Instagram, Linkedin, Wechat, Whatsapp, etc.

I had literally to unlearn all I knew about marketing from schools and re-learnt from these kind souls whose ages are good to be my sons and daughters. I spent hours learning and applying, failed badly at first, and finally my effort reaped a little result.

Long lost friends who were connected to me through Linkedin many years ago, suddenly contacted me to enquire about my services because they saw my sharing posts regularly whenever they woke up and turned on their phones first thing in the morning, and knew that I am on my own now…

My partners and I worked long hours initially on small jobs to ensure we had all corners covered, and we exceeded our clients’ expectations.

Happy and satisfied clients began to mention our company’s name to their friends, and we began to have strangers coming to see us with their business problems.

Major Banks and Service Offices began to know about us, and we gave free sharing talks at their events…

We offered our help and advices initially as part of our business development effort and as a kind of rapport with these strangers, never did we raise the subject of our services nor fee quotes.

We just sincerely wanted to help…

These strangers began to come back with requests for us to take over their back offices ( i.e. payroll and accounting work ), hardly did they even negotiate with us when we actually quoted.

We began our 2nd office to specialize in Corporate Secretarial and Advisory @ Raffles Place Singapore Land Tower in the second half of last year.

We closed our first year end in end Feb this year, achieved results the 3 partners were happy and feeling thankful …

On May 1 this year, we had to add a 3rd office at Paya Lebar Square to specially do our Accounting, Tax and Payroll work. This is because we started to have special clients requesting for special attention services called CFO and CEO services, and we had to convert our SUNTEC office into a CFO Clinic office for one-to-one sessions with business owners with special needs.

We continued our humble ways of sharing and sharing, always adding value to our business owner clients whenever we can, whenever possible, even during a simple lunch appointment with them. We would be inquisitive to ask about their current businesses, and we offered to dissect their problems and offered our 2-cents worth.

We just closed our May accounts, which is 3 months into our 2nd year of practice officially. To our surprise, our 3 months performance exceeded whole of last year’s performance !

If this trend continues, we should be on our way to our first 7 digit revenue this time next year.

Whatever the case, we never forget to learn whenever we are, from whoever smarter than us, and value add at anytime possible.

My journey of entrepreneurship has not been smooth so far, but we have a vision which excites – our vision is —

“Corporate BackOffice helps aspiring entrepreneurs in pre-incorporation business advisory and company incorporations, takes care of the back office mundane matters for these business owners in the areas like accounting, cash management, tax compliances & filings, payroll processing and CPF submissions, HR admin, and corporate secretarial matters, and partnering these business owners in CFO services to guide, value-add, improve and expand their businesses”.

We shall stick closely to our Vision…