Philipp: Welcome to another episode of, In Your Best Interest, your personal finance podcast. I'm your host Philipp Muedder, and today we will be talking with Raj Singh on entrepreneurship, humility and being frugal. 

Raj came from humble beginnings and is a self-made multi-millionaire, thanks to his uncanny ability as an entrepreneur to increase sales, multiply profits and automate businesses. 

Today, Raj is a serial entrepreneur and enjoys taking the challenge of starting new businesses and transforming them into profitable companies. Dubbed as the “Can-do” man in his industry, Raj has global clients like Shell, Saudi Aramco, Lendlease and Hitachi. 

He created Safety@Work from scratch with less than $200. Today, Safety@Work is a globally-recognised brand that is getting jobs in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Russia and many more. 

An addiction to success led Raj to create more successful companies, from training companies to software companies. The software that global oil giant Shell uses to manage more than 20,000 personnel on an international scale, with revenues in excess of $20 million. All companies are running on autopilot, generating revenue without Raj’s involvement. 

Raj, that's a good introduction to yourself, and I think lots of things that I want to cover [02:00] today with you because I think our listeners are always very interested in learning about entrepreneurship. 

But automating businesses, running them on autopilot, creating different revenue streams is also really important for your personal finances, right? And that's really what the podcast is about. 

And I think people that are interested in learning more about starting a business or starting on the site even to generate other revenue streams and their income is super important. 

I always tell people, hey, the more revenue streams you have, the better it is. Because in bad times, if one falls away, you still have another one, right? So having those in practice seems obviously as a good idea, right? But it's more difficult than people think. 

So happy to have you on today, so we can talk about this and how you set those up, and how you structure your personal finances on that scale as well.

Before we do so, we do like to get a little bit more background on yourself, though. And we usually ask a few rapid-fire questions at the beginning. So Raj, where are you from? Where did you grow up? A little background about yourself.

Raj: Sure Philipp, nice to be here, great to be here actually. Now I'm from here; I'm from Singapore itself, born and raised here. I grew up in a place called Taman Jurong. And honestly, a lot of people think that I had a silver spoon in my mouth. 

I probably had no spoon in my mouth. I mean, we were poor. My dad used to work like 2 jobs, just to put food on the table and just to give us a house. He worked as a bus driver in the day, and at night he'll be a security guard for the same company. 

So that was pretty hard, and we hardly saw him. So money was tight; money was always tight. And as I grew up, I saw friends with money in their pockets or buying new wallets, or even in primary school [04:00] where everybody had a nice knapsacks, and I had a stupid like cheap cloth bag. So yes, born and bred here, grew up here. 

Philipp: How has that shaped your experience with money growing up? Like you said, more on the poor side of the spectrum in Singapore. How has that changed your behaviour or how you think about money? How you spend money?

Raj: OK. Well, a lot of people like to think that money is the root of all evil; it's not. Being poor, I know that money was good to have if you had some. 

And when I was a teenager, I used to, you know, sit up at night and think, look, is there a way for me to get more money, so that my dad doesn't have to work hard. And of course, as a teenager, you're not allowed to work in certain places, you can't do anything. 

So I think, OK, I hope he strikes 4D today, or I hope he strikes the Big Sweep kind of thing? Yes, that never happened. 

So then the next thing is just study hard. 

And I didn't have anyone to turn to and say, OK, which course is good? How do I get information? No. Because the people that lived around me were not that well off. My parents couldn't really understand what's the next course of action for me. They knew, primary school, secondary school then hey good luck to you, if you can go further we'll try our best. 

So when I signed up for my polytechnic class or course, I signed up for electronics and communication engineering. 

If you ask me what that was, I didn't know anything about that course. I didn't have any clue, but I saw my friend signing up for that course, so I thought, OK, it's worth a shot. [06:00] So I signed up for that course. I suffered the 3 years because I had no clue what I was doing. 

And then entered the army. Now from the army, I basically spent 2.5 years, then as I was going to exit. I saw all the people who studied in the same course as me in the polytechnic, going for jobs like semiconductor, electronics companies and all this. And I thought, look, I suffered 3 years trying to study something that I had no interest in. I'm not going to spend the rest of my career going into an electronics company, no. And as luck would have it, I joined the shipyard.

Philipp: Yes, that was my next question. Because I think my next question, which got answered kind of beforehand, is where did you get the entrepreneurship spirit, right? Because you're saying, you didn't have it from your family. You went to school; then you go into the shipyard, which I want to like hear a little bit more now. 

Like how did you go from being an employee, right? To become an entrepreneur. And then talking about entrepreneurship afterwards, right? So how did that become? 

Because a lot of people that we speak with, entrepreneurship always a lot of times comes already from the family, right? Like even if it's not a super successful big business, right? But their family has their own businesses or shops even, right? Which already instilled some kind of like feeling for entrepreneurship. Because it's not for everyone either, right? So yes, how did you get to that point?

Raj: Well, when I first started as in after school, when I was going through school, I even wanted to sign on in NS, be a regular soldier. [08:00] Because it will guarantee a 6-year contract, and you get money every month regardless of what you do. 

My parents would tell me, oh, you study hard after your NS - find a job and stay there. So all that led to me thinking, OK, being an employee is good. And I never envisioned myself to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to just find a job and latch on to it and stay there with the iron rice bowl if possible. And the first job that I had was the shipyard. I had no experience at all, zero, right? A completely different world. 

I had never been on a ship. I had never been on a boat even, never been in a shipyard, never that kind of environment. Started working for them. But then I realised, look, what they say in terms of their policies and what they're doing is totally different. And I kind of quit from that job, ended up in another company, in a construction industry. This time I was working for an entrepreneur, so to speak. He was running his own business; he was supplying me. So I worked for him. He told me, OK, there's this construction site; you go and manage it. So I came from a shipyard, I had no clue how to do construction.

But then I started asking the construction supervisors, the workers, the managers: “Why are you doing this?” “What's happening here?” “Why do you have to do this step and not that step?” I kept asking questions. Of course, I was young, so they answered, thinking, OK, he must be an idiot, so we'll just teach him what we can. At that time I think my salary was $2,300, shipyard when I first started, it was $1,400, and I was like yes, I made it in life, $1,400 a month. [10:00] And I would do overtime in the shipyard because they paid $7 an hour after 7pm. So I'll stay until 9pm. 

And I thought, OK, that will solve all my financial issues. It didn't, it really didn't. But in the construction industry, where my boss gave me the $2,300 and put me in 1 site, and I would say that he saw something, or he was greedy, I don't know. So, in the end, he put me on 6 different sites, and theoretically, I was supposed to spend half a day on each site. 

And that's not possible. I had to find a way to make sure that all the sites had supervision myself and find a way to solve problems and all that, and I was handling 6 different construction sites. 

And after a while, the same boss, he said, look, Raj, we want to start a manpower agency, bringing foreign workers and stuff. I think you're smart enough to go and find out how to do this for us. 

And this was the day where we had dial-up modems. So it's not internet at your fingertips, it's not mobile phones. And I didn't have a modem at home; I really didn't even have a computer at home. 

So I had to go to like the Ministry of Manpower, to the building itself, go and find out how do you open up a recruitment agency or employment agency. Go through all that, come back, digest the information for the boss. 

And he said, OK, can you go and fill up all the forms and do all the application for me? OK. So this was on top of the extra work that I was already doing. 

So I filled up all this stuff. And all that, of course, all the money, he bankrolled, the office space, he did. The guarantee, I remember there was a banker's guarantee that was to be paid and all that, he did that all, I just did all the stuff.  [12:00]

Then he said, OK, well, your job is not done now; I mean, we have a recruitment agency, a manpower agency. So can you figure out how to make money with that? OK. So I spoke to all the construction bosses that we worked with. I said, look, now we can recruit workers from somewhere. Would you want to engage our services on top of the services that you're already engaging? 

And so some of them said no, we already have our manpower suppliers and whatnot. And some say OK, fine. So I had to find out how to recruit workers, and that's where I found that in certain places, we do the wrong things, right? 

So while trying to recruit workers, I realised that OK, so people might hang me for this.There's some agents in Singapore or in different countries; they literally make money off the foreign workers. They charge an agency fee or a recruitment fee of anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000. 

So I mean, imagine if I would go up to you and say, look do you want to work with Singapore? Yes. OK, pay me $5,000, and we'll try and get you a job. And these workers don't earn that much back home. Their currency rates and all that, most of them are not of good backgrounds. 

And when I heard that, this was what? I think 1996/97 when I was starting to do that with my boss. And I said, look, this is not the way we're going to go. We're not going to hire new workers, we're not going to charge them this agency fee. 

So I went on my own. I spoke to workers around the construction industries. I said, “Do you have friends who want to switch jobs -”

Philipp: [14:00] So you didn't want to go and recruit new workers, right?

Raj: Yes. I didn't want to recruit new workers because then there's this stigma of the worker having to pay $5,000 - $6,000 just to come here and work. And to me, that's not right. 

And I grew up in an environment where my dad was working so hard for a boss. And I didn't want someone else to suffer that fate as well. 

So I spoke to construction workers. I said, look, I don't want to recruit new workers. I don't want to overcharge people. Is there a way that we can do it in a legitimate way? Where we still make some money for the recruitment but not go down this route? 

So from there, I started getting workers contacting me, saying, “Look, I'm working for this company, but I'm going to leave. I want to come back to Singapore. And I understand that you're not going to charge me $5,000. I'll pay for my own flight, but to be fair, I think we should pay you like $400 to $500 for all the trouble that you're going to go through.” 

I thought, OK, so for me to go and find a job for them, and they're going to pay me $400 - $500 and then I will have to do all the documentation and whatnot. I think that was so much better than charging them $5,000 - $6,000.

Philipp: When you were doing the recruitment agency, were you already being a partner of your boss? So is this like your first area into this entrepreneurship route? Or were you just be an employee at the time still?

Raj: I was still an employee. I was not getting extra pay, and all my expenses, I literally had to do it myself.

And after a while, I thought, OK, I was doing well for the company. I had 5 or 6 jobs that I was doing; I was doing this recruitment stuff for them. 

And to me, it's like, OK, it's a thrill doing something someone believes in me, [16:00] and I was doing it. 

But after a while, it felt unfair because I could see my colleagues who did nothing and get ahead in the company. I was like, no, it's time to go, so I quit. I quit, and I found a job in a company that was doing work in the oil and gas industry.

Philipp: So another job then at that point, still no entrepreneurship. So how did that start, and when did you say hey, look, I had enough of being an employee. Did you go all-in on entrepreneurship right away? Or did you do something on the side while you're still working at a company?

Raj: So when I joined the oil and gas company, I was very happy because look, now I'm getting $5,000. There were days that I didn't really need to do anything because there were no jobs or no projects for the company. 

But it was literally an iron rice bowl.I spent like 6 years in that company. 

But towards the end, me and another project manager were clashing all the time., so I quit. 

Philipp: Yes. With no backup plan at that time?

Raj: Nothing. It's just that I didn't want to be in a situation where there will be a fight, or I will do something stupid, or life would not be great, so I quit. 

And then reality hit me because hey, I got no money, like no money coming in. I've got a car to pay for, I've got parents to take care of. I've got bills to pay; I was like, oh, what have I gotten myself into?

Then I went to Tuas South, because there were a lot of nutritional plants or pharmaceutical plants being built. And I went there, went to a coffee shop, contractors hang out at coffee shops, OK. Don't ask me why, maybe it's better coffee. [18:00] 

But I saw a project manager from Bovis Lend Lease, and I told him what happened, and we had worked together before. I mean in the oil and gas company, we did some work for Pfizer and Lendlease or Bovis at that time was the main con, and this guy was in charge. And he said, “Oh, you’ve quit? I'll hire you immediately,” because I guess my work attitude was not bad. 

And I almost said yes, I said wait, give me a day, give me a day. Let me settle something, I'll come back to you tomorrow. I said to myself no, I'm not going to take up a job working for someone. I don't want to be employed. I set up a company. 

The next day, went back to the guy and said, you can engage my services, but I will not be employed. And he said yes, sure. Either way, it works fine for me. As long as you're here solving my problems, whether you want to be employed or whether you want to charge a fee for your service, that's fine. So that was my first dip into entrepreneurship or owning a business or running on my own.

Philipp: I think not everyone is born with an entrepreneurship background, it's sometimes life that leads you to it naturally. Just like it did for you, right? You finally figured out, hey; I don't want to have someone telling me what to do; I can do the job. But I want to be employed as my company in this case. 

So now that you work with a lot, you started more and more businesses, and I want to get into that in a second. You also work a lot with entrepreneurs and business owners; you mentor them, you teach them.

What are some of the most valuable [20:00] traits an entrepreneur should have that you think, right? Like is it like resilience, right? Mental toughness, having a lot of ideas? What speaks out to you that you've been seeing?

Raj: Wow, there's a lot of traits. It's not one thing that stands out, it's many things. When you're talking about resilience, first thing that came to mind, for example, when I was working for the Japanese company for 5 to 6 years, we had subcontractors of our own. 

When I started my own business, and I went to some of these subcontractors and said, hey, remember me? I've started my own business now, and if you need any help, let me know. And I remember this other guy, he's a subcontractor.

And he said, ha, now you're screwed, because then he went on to say oh, I will see you fail. And that was like, wow, I never imagined that turndowns could be so bad.

That you have to understand that sometimes a no is OK. And there are many times that you don't make a sale. There are many times that people don't want your services. Some people might even tell you to your face like this guy did to me. And it felt bad, but you just have to carry on. 

So resilience, yes it is important; there are many heartbreaks that business owners or entrepreneurs will face. I mean, you might have a good employee, a great employee, but they'll leave. 

And things never go as planned. I mean, you can plan all you want; you can try and get close to it. Like last year, who planned for COVID? [22:00]

Philipp: Not many people, right?

Raj: Not many people. So it's hard, you've got to have this resilience. You can be on top of the world one day and struck down the next. And then you just have to put on your boots and walk again.

Philipp: Yes, absolutely. So what do you suggest then people who are thinking about entrepreneurship, they like the idea of having different income streams, right? But they have a family maybe to support, right? 

They can't necessarily give up, cut ties with their current, you know, existing employer, for example, because they do have ongoing bills. 

How do you suggest people go about it from a from that standpoint? Do you tell people to save up a certain amount before taking the plunge? Or, you know, test things out while they're employed? What's usually your suggestion there?

Raj: OK. So I'm going to answer this question in a couple of parts. Number one, I really sincerely hope more people go and talk to the not sexy industry entrepreneurs. Let me explain, the sexy industry, the IT, you guys, you guys are great, the tech industry is great.

You know everybody wants to look up and ask how do you do this, how do you manage this?

But I would rather people go and talk to the construction industry, the shipyard, the business owners, the small businesses there. See how they grew, how they put up with failure.

When I started in 2006, the first job, I used to buy coffee for the contractor bosses and ask them, “What's your take on business ownership?” “How do you deal with staff and all that?”

I've got a staff who quit [24:00] and did this, what happens, or stuff that doesn't come to work, or came to work drunk, and what do you do and all that. 

So the more I spoke to them, the more I learned from them. I use their experiences as my own knowledge base; if you want to call it that, number one. So talk to people.

Like I knew this guy, the first contractor that I spoke to, he would tell me, look, he faced bankruptcy, he paid off all his debts and then grew his company again. And what mistakes he made and what he's not going to do anymore. 

And to me, that was like wow, you can't find it in books; you can't find it somewhere else you know. And so, first step is to go and talk to people, go and talk to business owners and entrepreneurs, you know. 

Sit down and really ask them their pain points, their frustrations, their hates, their loves, whatever. 

Second, now I quit the job without anything, but I didn't really have a family, as in like I didn't have kids, I didn't have a wife. I had parents; I had a car, so yes, worst thing that could happen was we'll eat bread and drink water, that's about it. 

But if someone were to ask me, Raj, I've got 2 kids in school, I'm going to quit my job and start a business, I'll say hold first. Honestly, go talk to people, go do your research. 

Understand who your customers are, understand what their pain points are, understand everything that you need to do before you jump in. 

And if you can do, well, there's no better way of saying this but do a side hustle. See whether you can get some extra income from there to grow your business. So I've got a person working with me, not working with me; [26:00] I'm his mentor. 

He's working for a furniture company, and he wanted to do his own stuff. And I told him OK, then do something at the site, you're free in the evenings, you're free on weekends.

Learn to use that time to hone your skills, whether it's marketing, whether it's building some kitchen cabinets or wardrobes for someone and start getting small jobs.

And he started doing that on Carousell, and he started doing that with more and more jobs, and he was occupied every other week or weekend rather. And after 6 months, he's finally going to quit his job and concentrate on this full-time. 

So my advice to people, I mean it sounds fancy, it sounds great to be an entrepreneur. But first, go and talk to business owners, look at their heartaches and heartbreaks. Don't look at the glamorous stories only; go talk to them, then do your research, do a side hustle rather than jumping in. But if you're young and you've got no bills to pay, try, go ahead, try.

Philipp: Yes, because if you fail, you can still always find a job, right? So I think that that's quite important. But obviously, nowadays, the fancy thing to do is people want to have startups and venture capital money to go build these gigantic businesses that disrupt their industries, right?

But what you have been saying like hey, look, but you can side start with a side hustle. Where do you see the pros and cons of going with venture capital right? And investors versus bootstrapping something?

Raj: OK, so I mean to me.

Philipp: Because I feel like nowadays it's a lot of times people like they think oh, without that [28:00] I can't start a business, right? It's almost like I either go big or go home, right?

Raj: Yes. So I see a world that's very different now. 

I see a world that people come up with tons of pitch decks or pitch ideas, hoping to get someone to invest in their business, and they spend so much time doing that, they forget to actually start a business.

Or they only think, look, I can only be an employee, or I can only be funded by someone. No, you can do something on your own. Before VCs were with the flavour of the month, people had to start something on their own. 

I mean, you don't have to start huge, with a billion dollars in your bank account or a million dollars in your bank account. I started with nothing. When I quit my job, I didn't have a paycheck; they didn't pay me because I quit my job. 

So literally, I owed them, and the laptop that I had in 2006 was sponsored by my wife-to-be. So it was not even mine. 

So it's possible to start something with 0 dollars, but you really got to bootstrap, you really got to be smart, not waste money on dumb things like, oh, let's have like 10 beanbag chairs because they look so cool. 

You’ve got to start asking if we're going to spend anything; how does it add value to us? And yes, you can start a business or start a side hustle with 0 dollars. 

Like I said about the mentee that I have the furniture guy, now how much did it cost him to put an ad on Carousell? And then to get the materials from the hardware shop, and go to someone's house and fix a cabinet, or fix a drawer, or fix some handle.

And then he made that difference. [30:00] And at the same time, he's learning an experience, he's learning how to advertise himself, he's learning how to say no to certain customers and say yes to others. 

He's learning how to negotiate for better rates, and he's learning a skill. So to me all this, no offence to the VCs who are out there, or to people who think VCs are the answer to everything. 

They're not; you can start a business on your own, right?

Philipp: You can absolutely do that still, right? And that's good for people to hear. Because a lot of the big SMEs and now medium-sized enterprises, a lot of them back in the days, they started by just people having an idea and working literally their butts off, right?

For many years before they become big. So it is definitely still possible. It's not that you have to grow a business with the purpose of selling it in a couple of years, right? 

Because that's I think, already the wrong approach when you think about starting a business. I think starting a business and thinking about longevity, and wanting to build these different income streams when it comes to financial planning is very important, right? 

So when you started having some success, you started your own business by, you know, being hired by this other company to do some work. You started many other businesses over time, right? 

So did you always think, I want to try to get into the personal finance space, right? And kind of see how you manage your money. 

Basically, what was your thinking about starting these different companies? And were you always thinking about like, oh, I want to create different income streams so that I can retire well sometime?

Did you plough the money and the profits back into the business? Or did you start investing [32:00] into stocks? What's kind of like your personal financial planning situation?

Raj: So when I started having some success, when I was supplying myself to the client companies, the contractors and then they started saying hey, can you do more?

And initially, it was not because of, oh, I want to grow my company. Oh, I want to get more money, it was just OK, can I help them? Can I do more for them? There’s an opportunity here; they need my help, and who knows where this will go. 

So I started providing more manpower. And then when I got asked by them, hey, can you do other things? Like can you do training for us? We like to send people for training or something else; I thought, OK, there's an opportunity here. 

I mean there's trust that has already been built. So can I work on that to help them? It was never like, oh, I want to be a billionaire, that's why I want to open up multiple companies etc. And yes, it did help to grow multiple streams of revenue. 

But if you take a bird's-eye view of my companies, basically they're all interrelated from consulting to training, to even the software solutions that we provide for them. So I still keep within my realm, and I generally work, well we generally work in the construction, oil and gas, marine industries. 

Of course, we do branch out further, but that's the core. And I think it's important that I always remember that, and for anyone else. Now, so the thinking behind that was basically can I support other people, and can I have interrelated companies? 

And yes, they grew into multiple streams of income, that's great. But never to retire. I mean, I still think that people need to do stuff, right? It keeps your mind active; it keeps you active. 

And with [34:00] the money that was made, although my wife calls me a cheapskate, I don't buy new clothes, I don't buy new shoes, I don't do stuff, I plough the money back into the business so that we save for a rainy day. We grow the company. 

So in case, there's a downturn, we can survive. Not blow the money away. And of course, with the money that I also got, we also started buying property.

Because we're in Singapore, so Singapore is land scarce and property prices do go up. So we started buying property. And this was a long time ago, maybe 2005 or 2006 around there. 

And at that time, property prices were different; the stamp duties were different. So that really helped.

Philipp: And did you look at property more in a way like capital appreciation? Or did you look at it more as the ultimate tool to generate passive income?

Raj: OK, to be honest, initially, it was for capital appreciation. I think the first property I got was in Mera Springs condo unit. It was not even developed yet; it was a launch. We bought the property, and maybe a year in, we sold it, we flipped it for that appreciation.

And the thing was not even a T.O.P yet; it was not even completed yet, so we flipped it then before it was even completed. 

And then we used that to purchase some other things. So it was more for appreciation, but of course with the changes in the laws with stamp duties etc. 

And then, of course, we change our tag to not just appreciation but also to generate passive income. So all our properties are rented out, right? Of course, they are still safe because at the end of [36:00] the day, if we choose to sell them, that's the capital appreciation.

Philipp: Awesome. So other than real estate, basically, so do you currently have one business? Do you have multiple businesses? And other than real estate, what else makes up your personal finances?

Raj: OK. So I do have real estate; I do have multiple companies so that in case there's anything that goes wrong in one industry or one sector, you can always depend on something else.

I'm always looking to find new ways to, I guess, chase after dreams, right? But at the same time, in terms of finance, I do invest in notes. I call up the bank; we invest money in notes. 

And then when  they get knocked out, I get some returns. I don't really play stocks or shares, I think that's not my forte, so I don't do that. But I do invest in the notes.

Philipp: I think that's great. I think like having these different income streams, especially now in during Corona as well, right?

I think obviously having real estate and still getting rental income is important when for example, on your business side, things are not going as well. 

So having that freedom and less stress because of it. I think it's a huge asset to own as an individual. And also makes you a little bit less location-dependent, because I think in the future, a lot of people we speak with, their dream is to work from anywhere, right?

And maybe you can own real estate that is appreciating and paying good revenue and rents in Singapore, but you actually move to a country where the cost of living is actually less. 

Because I think a lot of times yes, what people underestimate is in order to feel so to speak [38:00] rich, right? It's having the right income-to-expense ratio, right? 

And you talked about this a little bit as well, it's about the lifestyle you choose to live, right? And are you trying to keep up with the neighbours and the family? Or are you actually trying to get ahead, right? 

And save and start investing so that the investments can work for you. So it was really interesting, Raj, to hear about all of that, and thank you again for doing the talk today. Is there a way for people to get to know you more, or learn more about your services, or you know mentorships?

Raj: If people want to find me, they can always look for me on Facebook. I'm pretty active on Facebook, maybe it's my age, not so much on Instagram, but Facebook - look for me. Or at the same time, they can also search for me. I've got my own personal website if you want to call it that. And they can reach out to me any time.

Philipp: Great, thank you, Raj. And for all the listeners listening, we'll put those in the show notes as well. We'll put some links there so that you can connect with Raj if you want to and learn more about his way of thinking, his way of building businesses.

And how he built the different revenue streams. So thank you so much, Raj; we really appreciate having you on. And I'm sure we might have another episode in the future.