 Good evening. So good evening once again, I'm Gary. Before we officially start, can we just give Angela and Emily a big round of applause for putting together this wonderful event? I say this because, even though I'm a speaker, I've been doing this for the last 10 years. I did venture into events. I know how painful it is to actually put together big events, successful events, and they have been doing this for the last 12 installations. So it's huge work, and many times the organizers don't always get the recognition for all the hardware that they put in. So one of the things that I always take a point to do is to recognize the efforts that they've been doing. So as Angela mentioned earlier, I've been doing this for the last 10 years. I am a speaker. These are the two companies that I first built, started with, and more recently I've mentioned to other businesses they are still in construction, and literally there's one new one coming along the way, literally in construction. And that is in my family business, right? My dad is 74 years old, so he really wants to retire, and because he's been doing this for the last 30 years, he's getting really tired, and he said, you are either going to take it over, or I'm going to close it down. And he's been doing this for the last 30 years. So I said, you know what, since I've been doing this for a while, and the only person who has some sort of business experience, and I said, yeah, why don't we go for another adventure, right? I do not know how that's going to turn out, but hopefully we'll have another story to tell in the future. These things here just makes me look a little bit more important than I really am. But really it was just some of the nice milestones that recognition I came about in this journey over the last 12 years or so, and I look forward to sharing with you some of these experiences. I went to a party recently, and one of my friends said, hey Gary, you know how are you a motivational speaker? Which is weird because I've never considered myself as a motivational speaker. For a very simple reason, only when you think about Nike, what comes to mind? Just do it. Can you just turn to your neighbor and say, just do it? You're all very obedient, all Singaporeans, right? Then you reply to your neighbor and say, do what? So when I was starting out with my career, I was thinking, I don't want to go down that path where I'm just another motivational speaker sharing ideas, things that may not always work, like what Angela mentioned, about theory and practicality. So I said, you know what? I've always been interested in teaching. I've always been interested in business. So why don't I marry the both of them and see where that can make it work? But I wanted to give it a short fist. So when I first started in 2006, officially as a trainer, I was working for other people and we worked with kids. This was a leadership program and it went pretty well. So I said, maybe there's a potential for me to go further. I started writing blogs about communication, public speaking. And for one reason or another, it took off. People from different parts of the world coming in and saying, we love your work. Can we use it in our books? Can we do this, do that with the material, the content that you have? I said, wow, wonderful. So I thought I was on to something and I said, okay, go by all means and maybe you can start a business around it. So we started our venture in 2008. We speak ventures with communication. We started with schools again. The schools loved it. We went into primary schools teaching the kids how to present themselves, influence, sell themselves. And I went up a little bit further in the journey. We went to JCC, the Paulies. We took part in competitions and really kicked ass, right? We won the competitions a couple of times. And after a while, I got too expensive and I said, Gary, thank you very much, right? Three quotes, you're too expensive, bye-bye. Which was okay because subsequent years, they all lost, right? But the biggest milestone came when, shortly after I graduated from NUS, my professor came through and said, Gary, you know what you're doing? You know you're not going to continue your work in the real estate industry. I studied real estate and said, but I have students, my PhD students, who really need help in their communication skills. Can you come in and help? And in return, you'll be a lecturer of NUS, which sounded pretty cool, because all I had was a bachelor's degree and I was teaching postgraduate students, the PhD students. So I thought, yeah. Which was great because my brother had a PhD and could one up over him, right? He said, yeah, in your face. But what went, what was even more outstanding was shortly after, about the same time, I was hit-hunted. And from schools to university and unto corporate, things went pretty well. I was hit-hunted, I worked, started working in corporate leaders in HPE, Google, and it was wonderful. It was supposed to be a short-term stint, just giving me some corporate experience, but I stayed for two years. Shortly after they promoted me, I got bored. I said, thank you very much. I want to come back to business. And that is where the fun began, right? This was one of the final pictures we took in more of the trainings. When I came back into the business, this is where we fucked up, right? When we came back into the business, I said, you know, I've been away from the business for two years. It's about time to come back, re-emerge myself. Let's have a party. Let's organize an event where we will have 400 people come together and we will talk about entrepreneurship business development, all right? I left the business in, I left my corporate job in, I think, July. No, sorry, in July. And I said, yeah, I think we can put together an event in about six months. So I plan to leave in March. I left in July. And I think in September, we put together an event. Now, I gathered a number of partners together, and we said, you know what? You guys are going to do this. You're going to help me promote the event. And I'm going to put together speakers lined up, right? What I didn't realize was as I was trying to put together the entire event, everybody was saying that I'll bring in 100 people or bring in 100 people or bring in 100 people by the end of the event, or rather towards the actual event, I realized that there was only one partner that actually brought in the numbers. But I had promised people and I was marketing the event as one that had 400 people. So I had one more month left to scramble and put together the numbers if not it would look entirely terrible on my credibility, especially when I said that I'm going to promise 400 people there. So I was scrambling, I was running around, I was going to networking events, I was speaking to network owners, and I said, you know what? I have this event coming up. Would you like to promote it on my behalf? But I had nothing to give them. And by the grace of God, really, one way or another, I found another partner which we eventually became close friends with and said, Gary, we like you, right? And for you, we will do a publicity, we will run the publicity for you for free. And one week before the event took place, I had another 200 people who signed up just by this partner, which was amazing. The final enrollment for this event was 500 and we have about 383 people who attended that one day event, which was a huge reliever for me, right? And one thing that taught me was you need to really get hold of the real partners committed partners for your event in order for things to go well. So I said, you know, that was an adventure. I've learned my lesson. Tell you what, let's do it again. So we ran another event, slightly smaller scale because I learned my lesson, supposedly, and said, so I said, okay, we're going to have an event for 300 people and this time you're going to run it at Sun-Tex City, right? But I realized, guess what? The same thing happened again. What happened at the event was there were lots of things, we wanted to run something in March and because of the holidays, because of Chinese New Year, and one of the repeated lessons that came up was being a trainer and being a speaker, running events was something that I had some experience in, but marketing it, promoting it wasn't exactly something that I was really particularly strong in. So even though I was able to promote it, I didn't have the necessary muscle and the resources to go full out to really rally as many people as possible by my own effort. So as we were pushing it, as we were drawing near to the event, the same things happened again. That was the inability to reach as many people as we wanted to and one more thing happened in March 2016, or 2015, which really challenged or changed the landscape or sort of out of our expectations. What happened in March 2015? Somebody passed away and the entire mood of the country just crashed, right? Nobody wanted to sign up for anything. The entire headlines was dominated by Mr. Lee Kuan Yew passing away and even for Sunday City, which we were all supposed to promote the event with their big screens after their refurbishment meeting places, the entire big screens where the roads, where the cars would pass by, see it and say, no, this is a great event, and the buildings in front and behind the buildings were dominated by this picture. So once again, I realized that the ability to market and promote the event was entirely crushed and compromised because of events that were out of control and more importantly, beyond this, it was my inability to get hold of partners who could really also promote the event on our behalf and so one of the things that happened was, I felt, entirely defeated and broken. Imagine having gone through about eight years of steady climbs and victories and it was just these two events shortly after I came back into the business that's totally flopped. That made me wonder, am I really suited in the business? Where did I fuck up, right? So brokenness became something that was really dominating the mindset in my mind at the point in time and I was totally lost, literally. I was wondering, still suited in my business, should I go back to work? And one of the things I realized that having gone through so many things or so many experiences, I began to wonder, am I really suited to be an entrepreneur? Am I just a speaker? Because I've worked with small business owners, I've worked with corporate leaders, we did make a lot of money together. Whether it's for myself or whether it's for Google, or HPE, what not. I realized that I've been going through my life over the last eight years with so much focus on promoting an idea of success and what it meant to be successful that every time we went somewhere it was all about, how are you doing, how do you make more money? This is great, I'm doing fine, I'm wonderful, I'm better than great. I can help you become even more successful. And that was a conversation I had with lots of people in the business because I think in entrepreneurship we always had to present an image of success and getting our shit together. After a while, and this was an episode that really challenged that idea that am I really who I was? And I vividly recall this moment when I went for a networking event and I met an ex-colleague there who also started a business and I said, how are you? So I did ask the question, how are you? And I said, so what are you doing right now? So that was congruent. And she said, yeah, things are fine and I asked, so what's new with your work? What are you working on right now? And then she just stopped me, right? And she said, Gary, today we are just having drinks with friends. Can you stop talking about work? So I said, sure, fine, no problem. Then she talked about what? And then she struck me, right? Damn, I had no idea. I had nothing else to talk about besides work because my entire life was consumed by work. I forgot how to have fun anymore. Every time I met somebody, I was talking about work and I was exhausted. I didn't know how to feel anymore. And after feeling, I was just anxious and angry with lots of different things. In a nutshell, when I tell my friends' story it could be easily summarized by the first letter of every word. I literally felt dead. I didn't know how to feel anymore. I didn't know who I was and all I could think about was work. So that was a major backup call for Andrea as well. I needed to decide and think about what are some of the things that really defined myself. I needed to discover who I was again and what really defined me. And that really sparked a period of soul searching, was there more to my life than work? Or if I were working or running a business what exactly were the things that I was chasing? Was there more to work than just earning money? Is it just career? Is it family? Or is it relationships? So I did a whole lot of soul searching and I realized I was so focused on the goal that I missed the big picture. I started asking myself again, why are you a trainer? Why are you in business? What are the core values? What are the things that really define you? What were your core strengths? I began to focus more on speaking to people again to understand who and what they stood for and what was important on them. I began to listen more, rather than speaking, sharing ideas. I began to listen what were the pain points and what were their concerns were. I began to speak less as a speaker and listen more as a friend, as a coffee dante. And things just started flowing again because as people shared with me their concerns and the issues and the challenges that they faced in business whether in corporate or as a small business, I began to feel and empathize what were some of the challenges we were going through. And as we did that, we met wonderful people, we spoke, we shared ideas. I began to share some of the lessons that I took away and the amazing thing was as some of my students took some of these lessons, they began to apply it themselves and began working with their own VIPs. And I started to have a sense and feel that maybe I'm not as washed out as I was and maybe there's still some value in what I was doing. I began going back to some of my ex-colleagues and say, you know, is this something we can do? What are some of the other areas that I can be of service to? And we started seeing results with them. And more importantly, as I began training, coaching again, focusing on my core business, I began to have fun again. So we went for networking events and I remembered one of the challenges that some of my friends and some of the people we met and they were sharing that meeting people that they could work with were some of the challenges and it resonated with me because that was also some of the things that I stumbled upon or I stumbled over when I was running my own events. So I said, when it comes to running events, are we doing it just for the sake of money or is there something more that we can do? So with some of my friends I began working and running events as well, going for events and we started building a network of authentic business leaders, authentic community, similar values and willing to invest with each other started to come together. We did this a couple of times and one thing is we realized that even though our meetings took about two hours, we had more and more people staying beyond the event which was great because this wasn't something that initially happened. So we thought there was again, we were on to something. But having said all these things, the partnerships that we had and we first started in 2014 after the stumbling over the events, we started to focus on being small again rather than being big and focus on looking at areas in which we can really complement each other because even though we could run those events by ourselves, I realized that it took a huge amount of energy from me. I couldn't do it by myself anymore and rather than trying to a-zip and hit the massive numbers again, there was a magic in just being small again. So I just want to close with one quick story. In view of all the things that has happened, there was this guy or there were four people at the hospital and they met each other at the hospital because their wives were delivering at the hospital. So the first guy was waiting really impatiently and the nurse came out and said, congratulations sir, you have twins. He said, oh wow, what a coincidence. I work at the Twin Towers in KL. And then the nurse came out again and she went to the second guy and she said, congratulations sir, you have triplets. I said, wow, that's wonderful. What a coincidence. I work at 3M. And then the third guy and the third nurse came out again and she said, congratulations sir to the third guy. You have quadruplets. And he said, wow, what a coincidence. I work at four seasons. And then when the nurse came out and she met the fourth guy, everybody saw him banging his head against the wall. Everybody was wondering why. And he said, it's terrible. I work at 7-eleven. So in the spirit of coincidences, you know that in life we sometimes feel that there are lots of coincidences in our lives. But I truly feel in view of all these things that we have done, I don't feel that these things happened by accident. I think it was a major wake-up call which I'm grateful for because at one point in my life I felt dead, exhausted and totally angry. And I lost a lot of money, almost to the point of being broke. Yet because I lost that, it truly got me to reflect and find myself again. Know what I care about, focus on the things that really made me happy, seeing people grow, supporting businesses. So I think one of the major points I'd like to share with you is just to focus on the major, major on the major, and always remember to make the main thing the main thing. Thank you. Questions? Okay. Apparently not. Of teaching and business. And of business. I've always wanted to teach, so I went to one of my teachers where I really looked up to and I said, I'm thinking of becoming a teacher, so would you give me some advice? Because I was looking for a degree then. I was about to start my degree in the US. So he said, Gary, have you signed anything yet? I said, not yet. I haven't done anything yet. So he looked straight at me in the eye and he said, Gary, do not do it. So my teacher said, do not do it. So I was curious. He shared with me that even as a teacher in Singapore, more than 70% of the time you will not be teaching. You will be doing administration. You will be organizing events. So he said, go out there and get a job. If you really feel that your heart isn't teaching, then come back. And with industry experience, MOE would really, don't quote me, treasure you even more with your industry experience. I knew as well that I hate to work. I'm not as an employee because serving national service, I was working with the police force. Going to the same cubicle in my office every day was fun for the first three months. But for the rest of the year, it just took everything out of me. So I knew that being an employee and having the same routine every day would be really challenging. I said that I will start something. And when the point came for me to make a decision and I knew that it was something to offer, I said, you know what? We're going to register a business. We're going to market ourselves. We're going to retry to some schools and see whether they bite. And one thing led to another and we just took off. So we did well enough to deliver value. People saw that we're delivering results and we just sold each result to another school. And word of mouth, word and referrals came out and we managed to build something after four years. Yes. Construction? I'm glad you asked this question because going to construction is something that I struggled with for a very long time. Let me be honest, I have no interest in construction. My family business is in civil engineering. So we lay roads, pipes, boardwalks. And the property development industry isn't doing well in Singapore. But yet in the spirit of authenticity and knowing what my core strengths are, my core strengths aren't in construction, administration. I can do some organization but I know what I'm not good at. So going to something that I'm entirely unfamiliar with, knowing this, going through this journey, I know that I can't do it that way. But I know one thing that I'm good at. I know one thing that is in mentoring and coaching and helping people find their strengths and really do well in the areas. So working with people, I could see what they are great at, what they are strong at and even in areas that they are not aware of. So if I can employ somebody, for example, and help them shine, there has been something that has been proven over the last 10 years. I have said, you know what, if I'm going to come into the construction industry, I will apply what I've done in training. I'll use what strengths I have to help them grow and they will run the business. So that's one. The second thing was in terms of priority, family. I spent 10 years chasing my career and lost everything, almost everything. I said, and really it was hard to relate to people. I said, okay, I'm going to focus on something that's more tangible now and that is to honor my dad who has been serving the family for 30 years. In 74, I think that's urgent priority. I've spent 10 years in the marketplace doing what I want. I think now I can come back and serve him. Career, I will have a little bit more time to work on that as we go along. I think ultimately just to quickly answer that question also and also what Andrea mentioned earlier is what gives you peace. Even though you struggle in business and you wake up and you say, is this something that I still want to do? I still love to see people grow and I love to help people develop and chase their dreams. So if this is my dad's wish to retire, I think I can honor him and I'll still have the peace to go. So even though it's a struggle for me, I think I'll have a greater peace to do it with him or for him. Yes, sir. Yes. Great. So anybody who says yes too quickly to me, I get scared. So I run the networking events. So this is my test, right? If you come for the event once and you don't come for it ever again, you're not going to be a partner because there's no consistency and congruence. It's not enough time for me to really get to see whether your heart is in something. If you're willing to invest time, effort and even your expertise to grow something, what I'll do is I really go out of my way to help you connect and help you find referrals. One of the best things is one student that came to me, actually he's here. He's sick but he's here or he's there. He's a bit sick, right? He's crispy. He started his business last year and that was towards the end of my own journey. But he's always been trying to give support to the business as much as possible. So I realized that he took his own time, his own expertise to come support what I was doing. And one challenge that he was going through was as a new business owner, he couldn't connect with people as much or sell as well because he was always focused on the product rather than doing the relationship. So I saw he was doing great work. He was really sincere. He was spending time and his own effort to come for the events but he didn't know how to. So I saw the commitment I said I can give you the competence. And it became the same for all the other partners. Are you focused on helping the community? Are you focused on giving first? Because once the correct and commitment is there, the rest should be much easier. As compared to a person who is competent but doesn't commit to growing the business together. So I think time is important, congruence and consistency is important. We need to test it out a little bit. Great question. Any other questions?