Fei Siong Group

Time horizon is competitive advantage

I've eaten at dozens of Fei Siong outlets without realizing they were all the same company.

85 Redhill Teochew Fishball Noodles. Tenderbest. Maki-San. Thai Tantric. Twenty different brands across 205+ outlets in Singapore. Walk through any mall and you've probably bought from them.

S$210 million in annual revenue.

Here's what I didn't know until recently:

The guy who built it never graduated primary school.

Tan Kim Siong was 13 years old when he started working at his grandmother's fishball noodle stall at Redhill Hawker Market. Not helping out on weekends. Working. Full shifts while other kids were in school.

At 15, he dropped out completely. Became a hawker assistant. The kind of job where you're prepping ingredients at 4am, serving customers until lunch, cleaning until 3pm, then doing it again.

He did that for 13 years.

Most people quit a job after 13 months. Tan worked 13 years before he could afford his own stall.

Age 28. First stall. Fishball noodles near the former National Library.

Most 28-year-olds are three years into their career. Tan had been working for 15 years and was just getting his first stall.

That's not a disadvantage. That's 15 years of watching how hawker businesses actually work. What sells at 7am. What runs out by noon. Which suppliers deliver on time. Which ones water down the stock.

You can't learn that from a business plan. You learn it from showing up for 15 years.

But here's where it gets interesting.

Most hawkers who make it big take their successful concept and franchise it. One brand, scale it everywhere.

Tan built 20 brands.

Not one chain with 200 locations. Twenty different concepts. Japanese. Thai. Chinese. Korean. Western. Each targeting different customers, different price points, different occasions.

That's exponentially harder than scaling one concept.

But when you're 13 years old and your grandmother's fishball stall is the only income keeping your family afloat, you learn something business school doesn't teach:

One income stream can disappear overnight.

So you build twenty.

Today: 205+ outlets. 1,500 employees. S$210 million revenue in 2024. Projected S$400 million by 2030.

His flagship brand is called "85 Redhill Teochew Fishball Noodles." The address of his grandmother's original stall. The one he started working at when he was 13.

Never graduated primary school. Built a S$210 million F&B empire.

The story isn't "dropout becomes successful." That's the wrong lesson.

The story is: he worked 13 years before his first stall. Most people quit after 13 months. Time horizon is competitive advantage.

When everyone else optimizes for the next quarter, you're building for the next decade.

What would you build if you planned for 13 years instead of 13 months?