His future wife, in contrast, was “a very conscientious and attentive student” with whom he’d struck up a conversation after showing her his PalmPilot. Noughties flex aside, the marketing majors were both beguiled by the same north star. Having studied selling dreams for a living, they’d sold themselves the dream of starting their own business.
So, when a friend approached them to sell steam cleaners for commission, they swooped in on the offer.
“We’re crazy risk-takers. We told ourselves, ‘What have you got to lose? If it doesn’t work out, then let’s get a job’,” recalled Ng.
Bristling with optimism — or depending on your general outlook, foolhardiness — they plonked down their entire savings of S$2,000 each to bootstrap SuperSteam, a distributor of professional cleaning equipment and chemicals. They conducted the requisite research, rehearsed their pitch and cast off into the ponderous, pavement pounding unknown of sales demonstrations.
Revenue came in fits and starts, while rejection and feeling tuckered out from hauling bulky equipment up flights of stairs were all in a day’s work.
“We rented a van at S$50 per day, which was all the money we had, so we often skipped lunch to buy petrol,” recounted Ng. University peers expressed shock at their life choice, eschewing the comfortable corporate world to rattle around in clapped out second-hand vans.
At the nadir of their early struggles, they were forced to move their operation from an office to the garage belonging to Ng’s mother. But the couple plugged away at their sales spiels nonetheless, boosted by supportive family, friends and strangers who purchased their products. Eventually, they changed tack, targeting commercial clients such as food manufacturers instead of individual consumers. To wrest an edge over established competitors, they worked closely with customers to understand their needs, travelled to improve their repertoire of equipment and began formulating cleaning chemicals. The latter is a process Ng described as complicated, creative and akin to “cooking chicken soup.”