It is 5pm and Harold Lee is winding down after a hot, stressful
day by taking swigs from a big bottle of Bintang Beer.
The founder and managing director of courier company XDel is
sitting outside one of his two offices in Hong Kong Street, near
Chinatown.
He started the firm 20 years ago with just one van and one
employee. Today, XDel has a fleet of 10 vans and 35 motorcycles,
and nearly 70 workers. In its first year of operation, its revenue
was barely $35,000; last year, it was $2.5 million.
Getting to where he is today has not been easy. The
entrepreneur, 42, nearly lost the business a couple of times. At
one stage, he was mired in debt to the tune of $500,000.
The days and nights he spent growing the company also cost him
three marriages. This is not something the father of five children,
aged between 10 and 21, is proud of.
"But I guess things happen for a reason," he says
philosophically. "I don't think too much about marriage now. Now,
it's just my career and work. I just feel I haven't achieved what I
want to achieve."
Born out of wedlock, he is no stranger to the bumpier side of
life. His father was a gangster and brothel owner; his mother, a
singer.
He did not see much of his father but remembers visiting him in
prison as a child.
"He was a big-time gangster. Burglary, rioting, you name it, he
has done it," he says wryly of the 65-year-old whom he has not seen
for some years.
His mother, a singer in nightclubs, hotel lounges and
restaurants, started lugging him to work when he was a month
old.
"While she sang, all the other singers would help to look after
me backstage. There were many Taiwanese singers in those days.
That's why my Mandarin is pretty good."
When he was five, his maternal grandmother came to look after
him.
"She was actually my mother's adoptive mother, a very tough and
feisty woman from Guangzhou."
The older woman, he says, taught him to be independent. By the
time he started school, he knew how to keep house, gut fish and
make soup.
"Because she was an amah herself, she had a lot of 'sisters' who
worked as amahs for the prostitutes in Rowell Road," he says,
referring to the red-light district. "She would take me to visit
them sometimes and while she chit-chatted with them, I would run in
and out of the rooms."
The trio led a peripatetic lifestyle until the boy was about 10
and his mother married a musician and settled in Sembawang.
"Before that, we moved many times, from Clementi to Katong to
Telok Blangah," he says.
As a result, he attended three primary schools: Haig Boys',
Telok Blangah Rise and Sembawang.
He started mixing with bad company in secondary school, played
truant and found work in construction sites.
"I was earning $25 a day clearing debris and cleaning flats. It
was good money," recalls Mr Lee, who also picked up smoking, joined
a gang and got involved in a lot of street fights.
One memorable brawl involved nearly 50 people from two rival
gangs in Ang Mo Kio.
"I was chased by someone wielding a parang, and one of my
friends got slashed several times," he says.
Not surprisingly, the rebellious teen was expelled from Anderson
Secondary as well as Ahmad Ibrahim Secondary.
"Fortunately, the principal of Si Ling Secondary in Woodlands
took me in and gave me a chance," says Mr Lee, who completed and
passed his O levels.
He peddled massage equipment in Lucky Plaza and became a
part-time waiter before signing up with the police force when he
was 18. The irony of a gangster becoming a law enforcer is not lost
on him.
"Hey, I was still idealistic, okay?" he says, adding that he did
well as a plainclothes officer with the Central Narcotics Bureau.
"I had a good relationship with the addicts and I spoke their
language."
It did not turn out well, though. He had to leave the job after
barely three years because he roughed up a drug addict who suffered
a hairline fracture on his left wrist.
He started a company, H&D - which he renamed XDel a few
years later - after completing national service in 1993. By then,
he had married a cosmetics promoter and become a father.
"I never thought about starting my own business. But one night,
I saw an ad for a delivery man and the job required someone with
Olevels. I thought to myself, I can't be an employee. I won't be
able to control my destiny. I need to start my own business."
The idea of a courier company came about after he helped out at
a florist where his mother was working part-time.
He saw the demand for delivery services and reckoned it was an
easy enough business.
He roped in a partner and, with a $15,000 loan from an old
friend, bought a van and was ready to go.
But the day before the company was due to start business, his
partner got cold feet. Although he came around the following day,
Mr Lee decided he would go it alone.
"He had jitters even before we started. How could I trust him
for the long term?"
So he hired a driver, because he did not have a driving licence
then, and does not have one now.
What? The boss of a courier company cannot drive?
His retort is quick: "Does the CEO of Singapore Airlines know
how to fly a plane?"
The first day is etched firmly in his memory.
"We parked the van at the Boulevard Hotel and I knocked on the
door of every florist from Cuscaden Road to Centrepoint," he
says.
From florists, he moved on to other companies which might need
help with deliveries.
"I would just go in and give them my name card," he says.
The first year was nightmarish. He took on all jobs - even
house-moving and flier distribution - to make ends meet.
"Our income was only $35,000. No matter how I tried, it just
wasn't enough to pay the instalments on the van and the salary of
the driver."
He had to borrow from friends and family to stay in
business.
He lost count of the number of times the van was
repossessed.
"And if we had a traffic summons or needed to change the tyres
or pay for repairs..." His voice tails off as he shakes his
head.
He clocked 15-hour days, making deliveries by day and processing
orders at night.
By then, his marriage was over.
"My personal life was in a shambles. But I was very stubborn. I
was not going to give up. I had to make it work."
Things started to look up in the third year when the company
landed the job of making deliveries for RS Components, a
distributor of industrial parts.
"We started with just 10 deliveries a day for them, but that
grew to more than 100," he says, adding that monthly turnover
started hitting more than $20,000.
Buoyed by optimism, he started hiring and expanding. He also
roped in an old friend to write him a software application which
would help him to automate work processes and keep a record of all
transactions.
The good times, however, did not last long. The 1997 Asian
financial crisis delivered a punch to the gut that left Mr Lee and
his company reeling.
Business dried up. By then, he had seven vans and more than 10
employees.
"The biggest mistake I made was buying seven vehicles. It cost
more than $3,000 a month to maintain one, a huge chunk of my
operation expenses," he says.
Soon, he was defaulting on his rent, the instalments on his
vehicles and his workers' Central Provident Fund contributions.
Before he knew it, he was weighed down by a $500,000 debt.
Friends advised him to file for bankruptcy.
"But reputation was very important to me. I wanted to show
people that I was not a fly-by-night operator," he says.
He auctioned off all his vehicles, and negotiated with banks and
all his creditors.
"I told them, 'I'm here and I'm not running away. Let us work
out a payment scheme'," he recalls. "Strangely enough, they trusted
me. Then again, I guess they didn't want me dead. They just wanted
me to repay."
He adds that he made sure to honour his word and kept his
creditors and staff informed about his financial situation.
He also devoted every waking hour to restructuring the
business.
He started outsourcing deliveries to smaller players. Instead of
full-time employees, he began hiring part-timers with their own
vehicles.
He did everything he could to streamline operations and cut
costs while looking for new business.
It took nearly four years, but he cleared all his debts.
"Whatever money I made went to paying everyone I owed," he
says.
Today, the rebuilt XDel is lean and sturdy.
"One of the biggest things I did right this time around was to
insist on an IT infrastructure," he says.
He invested close to $500,000 in a versatile custom-made IT
system that does almost everything - from tracking deliveries to
invoicing and comparing delivery performance in real time.
"We automated everything in the system," he says, adding that
the result was significant manpower savings. "My motto now is to
always keep my costs relevant and not to overspend."
XDel, which counts several merchant banks, Nets and Eu Yan Sang
among its clients, now averages more than 700 deliveries daily,
charging between $5 and $30 for each.
Mr Goh Heng Huat, the former managing director of RS Components,
remembers being very impressed by the young entrepreneur he met
years ago.
"He was young, polite and very promising so I gave him a
chance."
The two have remained friends ever since. Now retired, Mr Goh,
67, is not surprised at Mr Lee's success.
"He works very hard, and his mind works very fast. He is always
coming up with new ideas. He just does not give up."
Mr Lee says he is no longer the excitable puppy he was when he
first started the business.
"I'm now an old dog. I don't jump every day and don't get
excited easily," he says. "But I am very prepared. When an
opportunity comes, I will just grab it."
Mr Lee, who has plans to franchise the XDel brand, thinks that
being aware of his limitations has helped him weather many
storms.
"It is impossible for one person to know and do everything. You
know what you know, you go and learn what you do not know. And if
you know you can't do certain things, just surround yourself with
people who do," he says.
Sheepishly, he admits he has not been quite as tenacious in
saving his marriages.
His second wife, whom he married at 25, gave him three children;
the union lasted barely four years.
He married again not long after, had another child and got
divorced at 34. Although he and his first wife do not speak, he is
good friends with his two other ex-wives.
"I was too fanatical about rebuilding the business. It was very
difficult to try and hold a business and a family together," says
Mr Lee who is now single and lives with an old friend in a Novena
condominium.
"But if I hadn't been fanatical, what would my life be
today?"
Candidly, the entrepreneur - who has roped in his stepfather and
one of his three stepbrothers to work for him - admits he is
probably not the world's best father.
"But in a way, one of the reasons why I'm working so hard is
them. I don't want my children to have it as tough as I did."
He says he is driven by a need to know what he can achieve.
"You know what my third wife told me? She said, 'Harold, it's
not that you have not achieved what you wanted. It's just that you
keep pushing up your bar.'
"Maybe she is right. But this much I know: We cannot decide
where we came from, but we can definitely decide where we are
headed."
And Mr Lee feels he has a long way to go.
