Ten Things I Got Wrong Setting Up Shop In Singapore

Next month marks the fourth anniversary of an invitation from Singapore’s Media Development Authority to mentor media businesses here. Accepting that invitation changed my life and led me to bring my family to this fascinating island. Three colleagues thinking of setting up businesses in Singapore have all asked me what I have learned from my experience this week, so I made a list of what I’d do differently if I had 20-20 hindsight.

I’m a firm believer that, when things go well in life, you learn little. The tough times have provided most learning for me setting up an independent business in Singapore. So instead of making a list of ten things that have worked out, I’m going to list the things I’d do differently were I arriving again.

What follows is an incomplete work-in-progress by a newcomer to Singapore. I don’t for a minute claim that I can adequately sum up the country that I’ve chosen to make home in a few short sentences. If you’re local, please comment and correct me, accepting that I write in good faith.

1. GET A LOCAL PARTNER
My first mistake was that I didn’t seek out local people for the initial team I put together here. There is so much depth to the culture that local insight is essential on many levels. Singaporeans all know someone who was at school with a friend, or they did National Service with someone, who knows someone that you need to contact. The bonds that NS forges are recognised as one of the strongest arguments put forward to continue it here.

Interconnection is one of Singapore’s social strengths and, lacking those connections, it’s easy to get left out from opportunities, not through active discrimination but simply because it will be assumed that you know what’s going on through one of the informal networks.

It’s natural for westerners to be drawn to other westerners when they first arrive. However, just because someone’s been in Asia for years and perhaps even married someone born here, that doesn’t mean they know how to get anything done. There’s a harsh but true colonial-era expression summed up by the acronym FILTH (Failed in London, try HongKong) which still applies. Westerners come to Asia for many reasons … one of which is that they don’t fit in back home. Beware.

2. COMMIT
When I started out, I imagined that by being here for, say, one week in four, we could keep costs down and still be part of what is going on. That just doesn’t work. People invite you to events with just a few days notice and, unless you turn up and do the networking, you don’t get connected.

It’s not just a matter of logistics and short notice. It’s about showing commitment and giving face to new friends. When you are asked at the start of every initial meeting:

How long have you been in Singapore?

… the question really being asked is:

How long are you staying?

… and it helps to answer that explicitly. It takes energy to build a relationship of trust anywhere. Locals and experienced expats in Singapore will put more energy into something that is likely to last, just like anywhere else.

3. JOIN THE CLUB … NO NOT THAT CLUB
I personally haven’t found it necessary to join one of the expensive clubs, some of which are still quite stuffy. Jackets and ties are rarely worn in Singapore yet the underlying culture of business remains traditional. The sense of being part of things still matters.

As everywhere, people want to know who they are dealing with. This island has a history of people coming and going and trying to make a quick buck since 1819. Carpetbaggers are welcome to spend their money in Singapore, but the community won’t buy from them.

In particular, government agencies are acutely sensitive to the risk of foreigners taking public subsidies and then disappearing off with them. It has happened, so it helps immensely to create confidence with officials if you present your proposals as a genuine collaboration with local people who are physically alongside you at meetings.

I didn’t fully internalise the message that regular face to face meetings really matter when I first arrived. Singaporeans love networking and it is relatively easy to get introduced to whoever you would like to see – at least once. Strangely, the country is such a common stopover destination that it can also actually be easier to meet hard-to-reach westerners here than when they are at home.

On that front, looking back, I could have made contact earlier with UK Trade and Investment, who represent British business here. They often act as a clearing house for all the Brits coming and going and, together with their diplomatic colleagues, can make lateral introductions to whoever you need to meet. Many countries have something similar here, with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise one of the most active.

Were I coming to Singapore again I’d also make much more use of the numeroustrade associations where people in particular sectors congregate to explore common interests, even if they might compete in other areas of their working lives. Become a committee member of one of these organisations and you have a plausible reason to contact anyone you want to reach.

I could attend several work-related events every night if I wanted to. It’s not just because Singaporeans like meeting new friends and contacts. Having business partners who feel like they are a consistent part of the same group is a very traditional way of gaining confidence that someone will be honest with you. It’s a small island and word gets around quickly.

On which subject … trade associations are also often the channels through which government agencies informally explore ideas and canvas informal opinion. They are neutral and talking with them doesn’t run the risk of being accused of giving special access in the way that opening discussion with individual companies might.

4. GOVERNMENT REALLY IS HANDS-ON
It took me a while to realise how profoundly interconnected business and government are here.

Singaporean government agencies are rightly concerned that businesses should be independent and that they do not become semi-detached organs of the public sector living from one subsidised project to another. That is a hard balance to achieve on a small, highly-interconnected island, a strength of which is its ability to direct strong policy from the centre.

The hands-on nature of government makes it easy to inadvertently run across someone’s plan, or to leave out people who could help make your own plan move forward. Were I arriving again, I would create more opportunities to discuss my ideas informally one-on-one with civil servants. I would do more of what we did to launch JFDI.asia, where we published our plans openly and invited comment, making it clear that we did not want to duplicate what was already being done and instead would prefer to partner with organisations that shared our values.

Of course, you can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs and (mixing my metaphors) you are bound to step on a few toes when you start to dance. Here, as everywhere, there are folk who seek to build private empires. They don’t want to build win-win solutions and won’t collaborate. However, a surprising number of people and organisations are very open to collaboration if you listen to their priorities first and only then politely explain how your ideas complement rather than threaten them. The best way of all to strike a deal is for such an organisation to discover what you are already doing and decide it wants to jump on your bandwagon.

5. UNDERSTAND THE AGENDA
Dwarfed by neighbours with much larger populations and access to natural resources that Singapore does not have, folk here still jokingly refer to the island as the Red Dot. It’s a hangover from colonial times when British colonies around the world were often coloured red on maps. Looking at the whole world, Singapore appeared as a tiny red dot on the end of the much larger Malay Peninsula.

Thanks to land reclamation, Singapore is now about 10% bigger than it used to be, with ambitions to add about the same again. But if you drew a map based on finance rather than land, this country would have a much larger footprint.

Singapore is driven by business. It is rightly proud of being one of the safest places to keep your wealth, or strike a contract, across the region. You can expect to get paid here, which is not true everywhere else in South East Asia. That reputation is of paramount importance to the country and the big no-no for anyone associated with Singapore is tarnishing the brand.

In that sense, thinking of Singapore as a company building a brand, rather than the country that it really is, sometimes helps to make sense of it. TheSwitzerland of South East Asia is a phrase that’s often used to describe Singapore but that doesn’t capture everyone’s focus on commerce.

My wife is a professional designer and, when we first arrived, she wanted to join a life-drawing class to keep her drawing skills in practice. Asking around, it seemed that such classes are quite hard to find here. Was that because of concerns about nudity, we wondered? A Singaporean friend joked that if it was sold as life-drawing to improve your foreign-exchange trading skills, there’d be a queue a mile long. But if it was about art, what was the point?

It was only a joke. Singapore does not lack culture if you search for it. A school ethos where only potential lawyers, doctors and engineers had status, and creative kids were labelled as losers, is officially passé. There are excellent museums, a new School of the Arts and world class touring performances live on the Esplanade every night. It’s just that the bottom line here is almost always financial: art for art’s sake is not valued. Art that pays its way (and preferably makes a profit) most definitely is.

6. PRICE AND PRIVILEGE
I hadn’t understood just how sensitive Singaporeans are to price when I first arrived. I could adapt an old British saying to sum up the traditional way of doing business is:

Look after the cents and the dollars will look after themselves.

As a philosophy, it has a lot to commend it. It has served generations of traditional family firms very well on an island of traders who bought low and sold high, got in to deals and then got out of them relatively quickly.

A friend with American roots likes to say that what made his ancestors in the US great at business was a combination of tactical Jewish deal-making skills, coupled with the German gene for strategy and long-term planning. Despite the long term vision of government here, the style of everyday business in Singapore is still very much the former. Singaporeans love to do deals, particularly if there’s a bargain to be had.

Yet that doesn’t begin to capture how pricing really works here. I was recently surprised to hear from someone giving me a $10 haircut that her colleague had just bought a $10,000 watch. It is not uncommon for young women living in public housing to spend $3,500 on a designer-brand handbag. The national hobby may be window shopping (aircon in the mall is free) but the prestige stores in malls like Ion Orchard appear to be doing real trade.

The general rule seems to be that people will pay good money for a good product when the benefit is tangible, or linked to privilege and aspiration. However, when they are buying something they can’t see or touch, my impression is that Singaporeans seem to find it harder to assess the quality and value in what they are buying, unless that value is signalled to them by government endorsement or a high-status brand.

That is a particular issue around soft-skill services like consulting. There is a cultural aversion to paying for ideas, expertise and consultants of all kinds. Given Singapore’s desire to build a Knowledge Economy based on Intellectual Property, to complement its pre-eminence in shipping, oil and financial services, that may present an interesting conundrum in the future as local firms need to start selling soft-skill services to the world.

7. NATIONAL SERVICE IS MANDATORY
Fresh off the plane, I mistook polite initial meetings and invitations to participate in industry events for interest in buying when, in fact, they were a way for me to share expertise on an unpaid basis. Expats sometimes grumble about it but it’s really not a cynical ploy aimed at milking foreigners. Local business people too joke about all the unpaid work they do sitting on committees and the like, calling it National Service.

That is exactly what it is and new arrivals are expected to do it too, to show they are part of the national project. Taxes may be low here but there is a higher non-billable-time overhead here than I expected. The good news is that it’s an enjoyable way to get to know people.

8. GIVE GOOD FACE
Soon after I arrived in Singapore, I was asked by someone I had barely met to hear his pitch for a social enterprise. He invited a senior friend from a ministry to the meeting. Having explained that I mentored growing enterprises and invested in them, I listened to his pitch and gave him the positive but direct feedback that I would have done back home.

Big mistake. He hasn’t spoken to me since and the embarrassment I inadvertently caused was apparently discussed at ministerial level.

I now understand that the man in question had assumed that I was an esteemed foreign expert who was going to praise and validate his plan in front of a government official with the power to fund it. In complete contrast, I had assumed he wanted pragmatic feedback on where the weak points lay and how to mitigate them. Instead of giving him face, as he had hoped, I had done the exact opposite and made him lose it in an important meeting. Ouch.

Face is a deeply confusing issue for westerners and I believe the only way to learn to deal with it is to put your foot in it once or twice, hoping you don’t do too much damage along the way. The best explanations I have read link the eastern concept of face to the western concept of dignity. Writers like Sarah Rosenburg suggest that its roots lie in the shame-based culture of the East, as opposed to the guilt-based culture of the West.

In practical terms, a friend who has lived here for 25 years explained it this way to me: if you are alone with a taxi driver, you can be as rude as you like to him. However, if another passenger is with you, you should avoid making the taxi driver lose face in front of your companion, firstly because your companion may assume that you would be willing to make them lose face too, and secondly because you lose face if you lose your cool with someone in public.

First meetings with organisations can often be quite formal, in my experience, with several people present. These are occasions for presenting credentials and establishing common interests. Direct messages and questions are best addressed verbally, one-on-one and face to face in an informal setting.

I have learned to listen and ask privately in advance of meetings involving more than one person what the real agenda is and never to make assumptions. One of the most helpful questions I have been taught is to ask, politely:

What do you want from me?

It can be fascinating to hold a meeting with a Singaporean friend and ask him or her afterwards to give a breakdown on who gained or lost face. There is sometimes a whole level of discussion that a westerner can miss.

As an expert paid to advise, a particularly difficult situation I have met is giving honest feedback when the person sitting opposite you is just plain factually wrong. If I simply come out and contradict someone in front of colleagues, however politely, I make him or her lose face.

There are some key phrases I have learned to listen out for through which Singaporeans sometimes use to get around issues of face, the most frequent of which are:

Ah, actually …

It might be better …

Let’s KIV that(Keep In View – ie put it on the back burner)

If you hear phrases like these in a conversation, tread carefully.

It is also worth bearing in mind that face applies to institutions and nations as well as individuals. Sometimes it is politic for an official body to issue an announcement of a grand collaboration, for example, when there is remarkably little substance behind it. To western ears it sounds like a commitment to action when in fact the objective is to give face by articulating an aspiration. The intention to follow through into action may not always be so clear.

Finally, face can be the reason you don’t get a reply to messages. Writers such as Malcolm Gladwell have pointed out that westerners see the onus for making sure that a message gets through lies with the sender. If you don’t seem to be being heard, you say it again, only louder. That can sound brash and insensitive to folk from the east, where traditionally the onus is on the receiver of information.

It can be difficult in these days of spam filtering to know whether emails have got through or not, someone is simply to busy to reply or if they are trying to help you save face. For example, a person to whom you have written with a request may well assume that you would prefer them to say nothing rather than to cause a loss of face to you if they say no. Faced with silence or apparent unwillingness to give a straight answer, it can be better to let the matter drop or to address the issue privately in person.

9. MAKE THE CONNECTION
Many westerners’ relationship to Singapore appears to follow a pattern something like this:

1. Attraction to an exciting fusion of exotic cultures, made remarkably accessible through widespread use of English language.
2. Desire to participate, trade and live/work here but also apprehension about costs and so a decision to be here part-time.
3. A realisation that it takes more than a part-time commitment to do business, followed by either exit or full commitment. Cutting the umbilical cord with home is a very significant moment.
4. A honeymoon period exploring Singapore after first arrival, enjoying the safety and convenience of the place and making reassuring discoveries that critical services like education and health are often better than back home when you actually need them.
5. A crunch moment a few months in, when the realisation comes that beneath the urbane surface the culture here is different in some profound ways. This is the time when a trailing spouse may force an early exit, if you have brought one here without thinking through his or her role fully.
6. A decision to either start connecting to local life, or a retreat into a highly expensive expat ghetto lifestyle. The former involves an internal decision that life is just different here, not better or worse than wherever you came from, and the latter quite often involves a lot of whingeing about the things that aren’t exactly like home.

Were I coming to Singapore again I would be more explicitly aware of those phases of cultural adaptation. Being so, I could pace myself more evenly with regards to the emotional energy required and I would have had a better sense of the progress I was making.

Arriving in Singapore as a tourist or as a business traveller hoping to set up shop, it is very easy to see only the squeaky clean surface of this fascinating country. It’s efficient but can also seem rather sterile. Indeed, if you try to do business without taking time to scratch beneath that surface your efforts may well fail to take root. But start digging, connect and our experience is that there is a great depth of warmth and genuine welcome here.

Eighteen months into full-time life in Singapore my family and I are still finding our way. We are eternally grateful to the many local friends who have eased our path and kindly explained the many misunderstandings that have occurred. Of course we have learned most through those misunderstandings and one of the most helpful questions I now ask myself when a situation frustrates me is “What have I done to you to make me so angry with you?” So often the frustration actually stems from assumptions which we have no right to make in someone else’s culture.

10. AND A BUNCH OF OTHER THINGS …
There have been a million other learning points but I can’t recommend Neil Humphreys’ entertaining book Notes from an Even Smaller Island highly enough as a starting point. Neil is a British lad from Watford who came to Singapore to teach English. He writes frankly and with affection about Singapore in a way that makes locals roar with laughter.

If you are curious about the dialect of English spoken by many local people, you might want to read the Coxford Singlish Dictionary. Wikipedia has a more sober explanation of this distinct and recognised creole language.

Workwise, here’s a list of starting points for the Singapore tech scene. ExpatSingapore and Singapore Expats have information about practical issues like finding a place to live.

This article was originally posted on 2010/08/29 on defunct blog hugh-mason.com. The views put forward in it are my own but I would particularly like to thank John Bittleston and Eliza Quek at Terrific Mentors, Marc Nicholson,Jacinta and James Chadwick, Zheng Huifen, Chewlin Kay, Lester Kok, Danesh Daryanani, Meng Wong, Mark Chong, Hidayah Hassan-Le Néel, Lim HongZhuang, Rob Skinner and James Chan for helping me make sense of my time in Singapore.

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