By John Lui

Singapore's 12th richest man could not get a job when he graduated back in the 1970s.

The young Chew Hua Seng, then 24, was the son of a fisherman and his humble origins gave little hint of the millionaire entrepreneur he was to become.

The fresh graduate had his sights set on a safe and steady job working for a respectable financial institution such as a bank. After all, he had managed to gain a degree in business administration from the then University of Singapore.

However, he recalls in a recent interview with LifeStyle: 'I sent three letters and no one replied.'

The banking industry's loss proved the commerce world's gain.

He decided that if no boss would hire him, he would have to be his own boss, and that year - 1979 - set up a shipping, insurance and timber broking company, which he named Sitra after the initials that make up its business.

It evolved into furniture maker Sitra Holdings, listed on the Singapore Exchange.

But he is best known for being founder, chairman and chief executive of Raffles Education Corp, the largest private education provider in Asia.

Mr Chew, 54, has an estimated net worth of US$460 million (S$659 million), making him Singapore's 12th richest person, according to a recent Forbes magazine ranking.

The commerce world's gain has also been Singapore's gain. Recently, he pledged $100 million to set up the Chew Hua Seng Foundation for the economically disadvantaged.

The foundation will be run by his wife Doris, 39, and the $100 million will be injected over 10 years to support needy students and other worthy causes in Singapore, China and the region.

Born the fourth of eight children, he spent his boyhood years sleeping on vinyl sheeting in an attap house.

The family plied the typically Teochew trade of fishing and lived in the Teochew enclave around the mouth of Sungei Punggol.

He is holding the interview in his modestly appointed office on the third level of Raffles Education Corp's main office and campus at 99 Beach Road at the colonial-era building which used to house the Central Police Station.

When asked about his childhood, he does an unexpected thing. Instead of replying directly, he draws a diagram of his father's fishing method.

In precise, firm strokes, he shows the positions of the floats and sinkers and where he, his brothers and father stood. They were river-mouth fishermen, shore trawlers, people who walked, waded and pulled nets by hand.

In the fisherfolk food chain, they were below those who fished from boats and above those who used hooks and lines, he says with a chuckle.

'My mum thought that we had to get out of doing this.'

Any parent would want better for his children, he says. His parents made sure he went to an English-language school, Montfort School, because that was where a better future lay. There he would stay, as someone who had to 'study very hard to be an average student', he says jokingly, up to pre-university. He would turn out to be the only university graduate in his family.

Among the first recipients of the Chew Hua Seng Foundation's largesse is Montfort Secondary School, which will build an indoor sports hall and a rest-study area.

The poverty of his youth, he says, built 'energy and striving' in him. There was no other way except upwards. 'You cannot 'don't want to do',' he says.

He felt the sting of being poor in Primary 5 when he was old enough to realise that not all kids were packed into buses as he was. They came in cars.

'Other students come in new shirts and you have a shirt that's been washed many times,' he says.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Mr Chew today is known for always being impeccably groomed.

At the interview with LifeStyle, he is wearing a stylish tieless dark shirt-and-jacket set - a polished appearance which serves to emphasise how far he has come in life.

Despite his lack of money, he never allowed himself to feel inferior even from that young age, he goes on to say. Confidence is what is needed to be a successful businessman and it came in handy right from an early age. As a boy, he helped sell the family fishing catch at the outdoor market.

Later, he sold insurance to pay his way through university. He did well enough that, together with money saved from his national service naval officer pay, he was able to buy a motorcycle and a second-hand Morris Mini Minor while still an undergraduate.

As for his first venture, Sitra, it is now one of the more celebrated home-grown small-medium-sized businesses. It made a gross profit of $4.2 million in the first half of this year and it is today run by Mr Chew's older brother, George, 58.

Mr Chew is not involved in it, having left the business in 1985.

Ironically, when asked what drove the then-24-year-old Mr Chew into business, he says it was nothing in particular.

He was not filled with a raging passion to be an entrepreneur or to be his own boss. 'At that point, I had no desire to be my own boss because I did not know how to be a boss,' says Mr Chew. He wanted a bank job, but thinks he would have eventually branched out on his own sooner or later. It just happened sooner than he thought, he says.

It has not been all smooth-sailing, though. In 1993, his streak of success nearly came to an end. He would emerge 'humiliated, broken', he says quietly.

A typhoon hit a ship carrying his cargo, damaging the timber. Then, a business venture shipping cars to China went sour. He ended up owing foreign banks around $10 million. He was not bankrupt, but he was 'almost there', he says.

To pay his debts, he sold all three apartments he owned, stocks and cashed in insurance policies, among other moves.

He moved his family into a rented two-bedroom private flat in the east. There they stayed for four years until his financial situation improved.

'My wife and I just had to accept the situation and move on,' he says. 'Some people might brood and indulge in misery, but I decided, 'over is over'. You can't undo things.'

He carried on timber trading. At the same time, he nurtured his new investment, the Raffles LaSalle design school, then run by a partner.

This was to eventually become Raffles Education Corp.

Today, it has 24 schools in nine countries and posted a net profit of $99.4 million for the 2008 financial year.

Its Beach Road headquarters is home to the Singapore campus of the various schools, among them Raffles University, Raffles Design Institute, Raffles Business Institute and Raffles Merchandising School.

These days, despite the 24/7 nature of his work, when Mr Chew is not travelling, he spends weekends having home-cooked dinners with his wife, three sons, aged eight, 15 and 18, and daughter, 16, at their Nassim Road bungalow.

For dinner, his mother-in-law, who lives with them, cooks Penang Nonya food and other dishes. The family also lunches with his mother and goes to church. They are Methodists. He is not a country club member and does not play golf because, as he has said previously, it takes up time he could be spending with his family.

His philanthropy is an offshoot of his view that people have very little control over both the good and bad things that happen in life, he has said.

Still, his own can-do attitude to life can be seen in how, as the son of Teochew-speaking fisherfolk, he managed to adapt well enough in an English-language school to get to university. 'Just speak it and someone will correct you if you do it badly,' he says. You'll never learn from mistakes if you become too proud, he adds.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Sept 21, 2008.

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