Joseph Ong: One of a Kind

From growing up in a 1-room flat, Joseph bounced from a potential downward spiral to not only become software MNC Symantec’s youngest vice president for Asia-Pacific and Japan in 2013 at the age of 41. He did it while running the One Rochester Group, which has grown into a $25m collection of lifestyle F&B establishments including award-winning 1-Altitude, the world’s highest bar, as well as an events arm, 1-Host.

In July 2015, a year after he left Symantec, he launched a book, which is really like a tell-all textbook of how to keep a corporate job while running—and growing—a business. The culmination of his 10-year “experiment” with One Rochester Group, a business he started in 2004 as an MBA project, the book Remote-Entrepreneurship outlines a novel approach to management where there is collective leadership and a remote owner.

Melissa Gail Sing speaks to the man with a view from the top about his book, his unconventional leadership style, and how he got to Number 1 in Singapore’s challenging food and beverage climate.

What’s a day in the life of a successful entrepreneur and a key player in Singapore’s F&B scene like?
It always starts with coffee (laughs), which is probably crucial because the day doesn’t stop when your company is constantly growing. There isn’t a day when we’re not thinking about expanding and doing more. My day is packed with meetings—with new partners, team members and so on. We have a collective leadership model so there is a lot of engagement with all the different leaders. Lunch and dinner are usually spent either with the team or partners but at least for half the time, I try to have dinner with my family. Weekends become very precious. They’re still usually very packed with work but it’s not usually something I would give up my family life for. 

What have you been busy with lately? 
September 2014 to May 15 was really all about the book. I did not realise how difficult it is to write a book. It really consumes you. After May, the emphasis shifted to expansion, which is what the company, “a remote entrepreneurial company”, has always been about. If you are starting a business and you want to keep it small then you shouldn’t adopt this model. But if you are going to run it remotely and you’re going to have collective leadership then you will have to grow your business. We’ve been doing that for the past 10 years but I think there’s been a lot more focus on it in the past few months. We’re looking at internal expansions on existing businesses as well as external expansions into different countries, possibly Malaysia, Indonesia and China. 

We get awards for our dining concepts and we have a very vibrant nightspot business. On top of that, we’re Singapore’s biggest wedding planner. We manage four of the National Parks Boards’ weddings and events venues, including Botanic Gardens, Burkhill Hall, Raffles House at Fort Canning, Hort Park’s multiple event venues. So, that’s something we want to keep building on.

When was your book Remote Entrepreneurship conceived? What was the inspiration behind it? And who is it for?
The idea for the book came about two years ago. Prior to that, I had started the One Rochester Group as my MBA project about 10 years ago. I was going to experiment with that and write a book at the end of it about strategy. But as I experimented and started to look at what the outcomes were, I realised that the team members were not just strategising but taking ownership of the business. They were entrepreneurs in their own right. They don’t really own the business but behaved as if they were. 

There was no way, as an entrepreneur, I could have thought of a concept like this when there’s so much variety in the businesses that we do and the activities that we’re involved in. So, about 1.5 years ago, I realised that the book should be about remote entrepreneurship, and about how there should be collective leaders and the remote entrepreneur, which is what I was, to actually start a remote entrepreneurship business and grow it successfully. 

The book is important to people who are professionals but want to start a business. Many may start something small with no intent of growing it because they’re thinking that they’re the ones who are going to run the business. They want control and they may worry that someone may run away with their idea and work for someone else. This is very traditional thinking. The book addresses such concerns. 

What’s the main message of the book?
It’s about how you can start a business, get it going, be successful at it and yet maintain your current job.

What did you discover while penning the book?
As you write, you learn so many things. As I wrote my book, I realised that there were things we were doing that I did not realise was part of a systematic approach to leadership and to management. I took them for granted. I didn’t immediately realise that what I was observing was collective leadership by the collective leaders, management by the collective leaders, and basically ownership by the collective leaders. It was with that understanding that I was really able to turn the entire leadership model into a new environment. I was trademarking this C-Leadership or Collective Leadership in the business arena. Four universities now endorse this concept. We all know about collaborative leadership and leadership as a group. The model that we have, the collective leadership where the collective leaders actually own the business, is very new. It’s something that I believe will become very powerful, not only in the entrepreneurial environment but also in a lot of MNCs and even in some of the government agencies.

You held a senior position at Symantec until you left last year to write the book. Why did you feel the need to leave your job for this? And what comforts did you give up in the process? 
It was impossible to run a business, be in Symantec and write a book at the same time. And I have a family, too. I had to give up something, of course not my family nor my business. Symantec was the only option I had. It’s a very good company. We were going through a lot of restructuring at that time, and it was an opportune time for me to really think of what I wanted to do. 

It’s our 10th year so I’ve done this experiment for 10 years now. I’ve been running the business for 10 years, been in Symantec for 10 years, and married for 11 years. It’s been a very busy period, and I thought it was time to draw the line and jump right into writing this book. It was a really good decision because writing the book made me realise that there’s so much more about this leadership model and about my leadership style that I can really expand upon. I look forward to doing that. 

What did I give up? Business class travel and staying at five-star hotels. I travelled every week or so to Asia’s finest cities while at Symantec. That’s something I miss, and my colleagues at Symantec, too. The teams at Symantec and One Rochester Group are very different. One is very specialised across Asia-Pacific and the other is really a leadership team that’s very entrepreneurial, so there’s nothing that’s stopping us from doing anything. 

What were your growing up years like?
I was born in the 1970s when Singapore was still developing. I grew up in a poor environment, one of those “ghettos” of Singapore back then. One-room flats were very common. My family and I lived there and I played in the streets. It was common not to have toys then, you just played with whatever you had. 

The good thing about being in Singapore is really the education system, the chances you have to go to school, get an education and be on an equal footing as anyone else. That allowed me to make it all the way to university. Then I became a professional. And when you reach that level in Singapore, there are many possibilities for you. 

I don’t think I understood the concept of a business when I was younger, or what it meant to run a business or to be successful in the context it’s spoken of today. When you’re poor and everyone else around you is too, you never think that there would ever be a chance you could be a professional. I might’ve thought I would have worked in a coffee shop at that point. Otherwise, I had no concrete vision of what I wanted to be that was credible. 

The environment I grew up in taught me to be very street wise, to look at the consequences of my actions, and to study my options. As a kid, when you only have 10 cents, you think very hard about what you want to do with it. In contrast, my own son has no concept of what money is. He doesn’t understand where it comes from or how it works. But back when I was his age, it was very clear. A coin you picked up from the street was a precious thing that made you very happy. The ability to buy your own sweets or tidbits was an amazing experience. Doing chores for your parents or uncle and getting a tip for it was exhilarating. It made me understand the value of money. Even now, I don’t just spend what I earn, I’ll reinvest it. 

What are the values important to you?
Openness. Being willing to accept that you have failed and then move on. I like to tell this story to my team, many of whom didn’t do very well in their studies. With determination, I went from almost failing primary school to the Normal then Express stream in secondary school. I became one of the best students in school, made it to junior college and then university. 

There are multiple businesses that we do and there are many experiments and R&Ds that we do that completely failed. We’ve invested in people, thinking they were going to be great collective leaders but to some but as it turned out, they were more focused on their personal goals. So, even though people say we’re successful today, we have had some failures along the way. 

To be a really successful remote entrepreneur who is relying on collective leadership, you have to learn to accept that failure is part of the equation, too. If you don’t you probably won’t learn as fast and as quickly as you should. When you’re operating within a system of collective leadership, you can’t just focus on your own targets of goals. You have to compromise. 

I think that kind of openness where you accept critics and acknowledge your successes and failures helps the team determine their next target or goal. 

What values do you hope to pass down to your school-going son? 
I’ve been telling him this so now when you ask him what’s the most important thing about running a business, he will say, “You have to keep looking at it over and over and over again.” 

There’s no such thing as just letting a business run once you’ve set it up. You have to keep improving at it over and over and over again.

You’ve taken a very non-traditional route to business. Are you as unorthodox in other aspects of your life as well?
If you ask the people I work with, like my PR team over here, they will say I am the most boring person. I am traditional not in the cultural sense but in terms of the things I like, the fun I seek, and the food I eat. Like most other people, I enjoy travelling, sitting down to have a good, not necessarily expensive, meal. I like gadgets, phones… typical guy things. The only thing I really spend on is my car. I had been driving a Mercedes-Benz since I was 29 but it was only a year ago that I switched to a Porsche. 

Does your son show signs of becoming an entrepreneur? 
The fact that I have to pay him if I want something from him is probably a sign… (laughs). 

My wife, who’s a company director at One Rochester Group, used to be responsible for the weddings business at One Rochester Group. When I left Symantec, she took care of our son full-time. She is not actively involved in the business now but still supports the team on the ground especially with 1-Altitude on some of the ideas. 

What’s the best advice anyone has given you?
Many of my former bosses, at KPMG, Ernst & Young and Symantec, have greatly influenced the way I work and do things. Mildred Tan (Managing Director of Ernst & Young Advisory), for instance, showed me that it’s possible to squeeze seven different things into 24 hours. She was a Nominated Member of Parliament and at the same time, she was running a business at Ernst & Young, highly involved in social work, was an advisor, hugely committed to her family. Then there was Nicky Tan, my boss before Mildred who was the most ambitious man I have ever seen. In our tiny Singapore, he was brave enough to dream about billion-dollar deals. Growing his team, he said to us that within three years, he’d double all our salaries. Who dares to make that sort of statement? Indeed, within three years, goals were met and our salaries doubled, some even quadrupled. He was very focused and made me see that nothing’s impossible. I hope I can one day reach that level.