In Partnership With
The healthcare entrepreneur talks about leadership and challenging her team, the importance of working smart, and how wellness and having fun can go hand in hand
Candice Chan has a number of founder and co-founder roles under her belt, including her most recent and significant, Lifehealth Group, a private healthcare company founded in 2018 that’s transforming the way we look after our health with an integrative, regenerative and functional medicine approach. Its subsidiary, LifeHub wellness centre, located in Hong Kong’s Central, of which Chan is CEO, sees a team of professionals offer services that range from acupuncture to nutritional IV drips and colonic hydrotherapy, while an online health shop offers quality health products and supplements.
The health and wellness industry is not new for Chan. Most of her businesses that came before Lifehealth were also in the wellness space, including Younibody, a chain of holistic health centres in Hong Kong.
However, the first time Chan dipped her toes into entrepreneurship, the field was consumer electronics, and the company was one she started with her brother while she was still in college.
Chan was the first person on her dad’s side of the family to graduate from college, yet she hails from a line of fellow founders. “They were all entrepreneurs,” says Chan. “They never focused on education much and never pressured me to be very good at education.”
Nevertheless, an early interest in nutrition drove Chan to study, even if it didn’t stem from a particularly productive place. “It started off as a pretty unhealthy intention,” says Chan, referring to an early obsession with diet culture and being skinny. But fundamentally, a desire to become a healthier version of herself encouraged her to embark on a degree in Nutrition Sciences and later to gain a certification as a Doctor of Natural Medicine.
While Chan's first business was in a different industry, it prepared Chan for the founding of Lifehealth Group and LifeHub, of which she is CEO, in a unique way. “I wasn’t a starving college student. I had an allowance, and so having a project like [our consumer electronics business] was pure fun. I didn’t have all that worry, which helped us push through the first hurdles.”
Her experience shaped her. “It gave me the courage to do a lot of things that I wouldn’t do right now if you asked me to do that same thing all over again,” says Chan, who talks about how she would drive U-Haul trucks across America trying to sell their electronic products at various fairs, and refers to some of the abuse she faced. “I was driving through desert cities and people would come over and say very offensive stuff. I was a young Asian girl and people got racist sometimes,” says Chan, brushing it off. “I just kept pushing through.”
Chan showed an innate determination that is a key quality in any entrepreneur. “We were so relentless in trying different methods to sells things that gave us a lot of learnings. It was the most exponential learning curve I’ve ever had in my life,” she says.
Ever persistent and constantly on the lookout for opportunities, Chan has a new business in the pipeline that will combine technology and healthcare to bring together the female community to share wellness-related advice, but it’s early days to elaborate further. Instead, Chan reveals some of her career takeaways to date, and shares how her priorities have shifted since becoming a mother last year, as well as what she finds most rewarding in her work.
