Cover Kong Wan Sing, co-founder of JustCo (Photo: JustCo)
Kong Wan Sing, co-founder of JustCo (Photo: JustCo)
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Fifteen years, 54 locations and one guiding rule: JustCo’s Kong Wan Sing shares why the discipline to hold back—not just push forward—is what separates companies that endure from those that just expand
When JustCo opened The Collective Labrador Tower in February 2026, it was not simply adding another address to its portfolio. The company’s first luxury co-working space in Singapore marked the moment Kong Wan Sing had spent 15 years building toward—deliberately, and on his own terms.
As the executive chairman and CEO of the flexible workspace operator, Kong now oversees 54 locations in eight markets, spanning three distinct brands: its flagship JustCo, luxury concept The Collective, and the more accessible The Boring Office.
Getting here, he says, required as many strategic pauses as bold moves.
The Collective Labrador Tower, JustCo‘s first luxury co-working concept in Singapore and its fifth in Asia (Photo: JustCo)
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No ego expansion
Kong’s guiding principle for expansion is straightforward. “Don’t expand for the sake of expanding,” he says. “Don’t do it because you want to plant a flag and tell people: ‘Oh, I’m in Japan, I’m in Korea, I’m in India.’ It looks good on the map, but actually, it doesn’t work.” He calls it “no ego expansion”—the operating philosophy that has governed every decision JustCo has made since Kong started the company in 2011, and guided it to its listing on the Singapore Exchange 15 years later on May 22, 2026.
The process behind any new location is rigorous. Today, it takes roughly six months from initial assessment to commitment, down from the 12 or more required when JustCo was young and without a track record.
The team identifies the right building, negotiates hard on rental, models occupancy scenarios and stress-tests the numbers against two non-negotiable metrics: payback period and internal rate of return. “If we don’t meet a payback, we don’t do the deal,” Kong says. Only when every condition is met does the project proceed.
Around 60 per cent of JustCo’s customers are multinational corporations—a fact that shapes both the rigour of the underwriting and the profile of buildings the company will consider.
Enterprise Singapore provided early support when JustCo entered China, connecting the team with local contacts and market intelligence at a time when Kong had fewer than ten locations and a revenue base he describes as “so small”. That government backing gave JustCo a head start in a market notorious for its entry barriers.
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Don’t expand for the sake of expanding. Don’t do it because ... it looks good on the map, but actually, it doesn’t work.
The expensive lessons
Even so, not every assessment has been accurate. In 2022, JustCo exited China and Indonesia. The financial contribution from those markets was small, and stakeholders urged the company to stay, which Kong says would have cost relatively little anyway. But his reasoning for leaving was not financial. “It’s about management bandwidth,” he explains. “To operate in one country, you still need the same amount of management bandwidth. We moved out so we could use that energy to focus on better-performing markets.”
One of the costliest individual lessons from those years was neither the exit decision nor the market timing. It was hiring. “This is a localised business,” Kong says, “so the general manager has to be local. You can’t parachute someone from Singapore into Shanghai, Japan or anywhere else and presume that they understand how to operate there.”
In Japan, for instance, members prefer in-person service interactions even where digital systems are available—a cultural preference that only an embedded local team would know to accommodate. Getting that hire wrong, Kong says, is the single most expensive mistake a regional operator can make.
Joint-venture partnerships carry their own risks. In one market where JustCo was performing well, a conservative partner resisted further growth at precisely the moment Kong wanted to accelerate. “That’s a big difference, a misalignment [of goals]—and it can kill your business,” he says. “If you don’t grow fast when you’ve proven yourself, you might not be able to hold off competition, because you’re not building your network.”
His advice to other founders here is to be specific about what a partner provides that your business cannot supply itself, and to verify that growth ambitions are genuinely aligned before any agreement is signed.
JustCo at Hong Leong Building in Singapore (Photo: JustCo)
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Luxury by design
The Collective was initially not a planned brand extension. It was, Kong says, triggered by a specific customer who informed JustCo that they needed something more refined and attentive in its hospitality. If JustCo could not provide it, they would have to leave. “We'd been hearing that kind of feedback for a few years by then,” Kong says. “But that was the final point. We bit the bullet and decided to build this brand.”
Japan was chosen as The Collective’s debut market in 2024 because a specific location cleared all five of the brand’s criteria simultaneously: the right address, floor, views, connectivity and overall quality of the space.
Singapore did not present an equivalent opportunity at the time. The Collective’s first centre in Singapore—and its fifth to open in Asia—now extends daily breakfast, evening aperitifs, personalised concierge services and wellness programmes to its members—all offered not as a workplace amenity, but as a standard of service members expect as a baseline.
The Collective is designed to remain at ten to 15 per cent of JustCo’s total portfolio, with the flagship JustCo brand accounting for 50 to 60 per cent. Each tier is deliberate, and Kong has no interest in blurring the lines between them.
JustCo plans to double its APAC footprint by 2029, with 28 new centres opening in 2026, including in India, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines, and entries into Dubai and Saudi Arabia targeted by 2027. From its recent IPO, the company raised about S$100 million to fund its expansion plans.
In a press statement announcing the expansion, Kong explains that the addressable flexible workspace market has grown about 50 per cent since 2022, but penetration across the region remains at just 5 per cent.
For him, that gap is not a caution, but an opportunity. And Kong intends to close it the same way he has approached every decision so far: only when the conditions are exactly right.
Chong Seow Wei is a regional senior editor covering business, innovation, impact and people. Based in Singapore, she oversees content for Gen.T, Tatler’s platform for promising entrepreneurs and new-generation leaders, and its Power & Purpose vertical.
