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beri inspired by him
:o
As you sit down with Mr Joseph Ong for a mid-afternoon chat and drinks at 1-Altitude, perched on the 63rd storey of OUB Centre, he asks: 'Are you afraid of heights?'
Indeed, at 282m above ground and boasting a 360-degree view, this is not just Singapore's highest alfresco bar (Marina Bay Sands' Skypark and its chic Ku De Ta club-restaurant stand at a mere 200m), but it is also the highest in the world.
From his vantage point by a floor- to-ceiling window, the director of the 1-Rochester Group, which owns 1-Altitude, is unfazed.
'We are even higher than Sirocco and Vertigo,' he proclaims proudly. The two world-famous rooftop bars in Bangkok stand at 246m and 200m respectively.
And if mere numbers have not quite conveyed how high up we are, he offers some other facts that might: Keeping plants alive has turned out harder than thought - the first batch could not acclimatise and ended up looking sorry and withered.
The original sound system was replaced because the altitude posed problems for the quality of the acoustics.
Then there are the lightning issues. A warning system has been installed to inform the bar management of impending storms, just in case.
But fear not, the only cracks and flashes you are likely to experience are from patrons wielding cameras.
Such problems, however, are fair exchange for cool bragging rights. The foreign media have come knocking. American magazine Sports Illustrated, for instance, is thinking of doing a photo shoot here - what lures readers better than swimsuits and skylines?
The open-air bar, which has a capacity of about 200, is one of three spaces that span a total of 16,000 sq ft across the top three floors of OUB Centre. On the 62nd storey is Stellar, a fine dining restaurant. One floor below is 282, a sports bar with a golf simulator and tapas on the menu.
The project counts as another notch in the belt of the 38-year-old food and nightlife entrepreneur who still holds a full-time job as a regional director of finance with Internet security company Symantec.
Since he founded the 1-Rochester Group with three partners in 2006, the company has rolled out One Rochester at Rochester Park, a bar and eatery set amid lush greenery; 1 Twenty-Six at East Coast Park, which offers seafront dining; two 1-Caramel cafe/patisserie outlets at Handy Road and OUB Centre; and the latest, 1-Altitude.
It also has a more behind-the-scenes venture in 1-Host, which organises 250 to 300 weddings a year at the group's different venues.
Times are good and revenue is expected to hit $15 million this year and $20 million next year.
While Mr Ong fronts the business as a director, his other partners, including his wife Wendy Tong, with whom he has a two-year-old son, Jerome, are involved in other aspects such as sales, marketing, food and beverage and patisserie.
The growth is no surprise, considering how the prefix '1' - it originated from One Rochester's address at 1 Rochester Park - has become associated with destination dining that has a classy, chilled- out vibe. Its clientele are the well-heeled and discerning - expect them to know their claret from their chardonnay, their brie from their blue cheese.
Funnily enough, the man responsible for it all appears to take some pleasure in announcing: 'If you know me well, you will know I have no taste buds, no taste even.'
Dressed in a business suit and with a personal assistant in tow to powder his face for the photo shoot, the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) accountancy graduate certainly looks the part of hotshot yuppie-turned-entrepreneur.
But if he were left alone to run the place according to his plebeian tastes, 'we'll be opening beer gardens', he says with a laugh. 'I was an outsider in this business and I am probably still an outsider.
'I do enjoy good food and what chefs create. But if you ask me to be analytical about what I had, I'll say, 'I cannot remember. It just looks like this'.'
Mr Ong, whose father was a bus driver, dreamt up One Rochester for purely practical reasons. In 2004, while working at Symantec, he began pursuing a master's in business administration from Manchester Business School.
For his final-year thesis, he wanted to show that a good management strategy in business could trump any competitive advantage, such as detailed knowledge of a particular industry.
He devised a business plan and began thinking of how he could execute it as part of the curriculum's practical component.
A food business seemed relatively easy to get into. At the same time, he did not have a 'competitive advantage' in the area. 'I eat lah,' he says. 'But that's all.'
'I really wanted to get a distinction for my MBA. I was very confident that the business plan would work and I didn't think I had much to lose.'
His aim was to 'redefine alfresco dining'. At that time, before areas such as Dempsey became popular, outdoor seating was about 'throwing a couple of chairs together in a carpark'.
When the Rochester Park enclave in Buona Vista became available for lease, he envisioned putting customers in a garden setting there, amid black-and-white colonial bungalows.
Together with his partners, all of whom were his friends, he raised $500,000 to open the bar-restaurant. He recalls: 'My sister said, 'You're opening a 15,000 sq ft bar in the middle of nowhere? You've got to be stupid'. Everybody thought it was going to be a beer garden,' he says again.
Considering his lack of expertise in the area, his management strategy was not only to hire people with industry knowledge who could do the job, but also to work out a non-hierarchical system in which they could function without always having to report to the top bosses.
It worked. One Rochester did so well - it turned over $1 million in its first year and $2 million in its second - that he began looking at ways to expand. He also got the distinction he was gunning for.
The 1-Rochester Group, he decided, would strive to be a niche player by opening new lifestyle concepts in new areas. 1-Twenty Six, for instance, followed in 2008 because he wanted to open a beach hangout of a different ilk.
He says: 'Beach bars were all about jumping into the pool. We wanted people in high heels to come to the beach and have cocktails.'
A quest for good coffee and macaroons led to 1-Caramel last year, while the desire to have a 'sky unit after having a land and sea one' saw the birth of 1-Altitude.
Still, Mr Ong sees himself more as a savvy number-cruncher rather than a lifestyle maven. He baulks at the thought of say, spending money on designer chairs.
The general manager of 1-Caramel, Ms Melanie Ng, 26, says: 'A typical conversation with him would be for me to say, 'Love the Emu chairs, we could use them for the alfresco area'. He would reply, '$2,000 for a chair? Can we get them from China?''
Group operations and marketing manager Juwanda Hassim, 36, adds: 'We have daily sales report and every outlet knows what the other outlet makes. He has the ability to look at the numbers on the spot and find problems.
He is careful with money and this stems from a tough childhood. He grew up in a one-room flat in Redhill, what he calls the 'ghetto of Singapore'.
When he was 10, his bus driver father lost his job when one of the bus engine propellers came loose and sliced into his foot. He was unable to work after the accident and died of liver cirrhosis nine years later.
His mother was the sole breadwinner of the family, working as a seamstress to bring up Mr Ong and his two sisters.
He began fending for himself from a young age. 'I remember frying vegetables for myself when I was five', he recalls. 'We were so poor that many times, we did not really have food on the table.'
At times, their neighbour, who ran a bakery from home, would give the family burnt ends of bread loaves. 'We would take the bread and comfort ourselves by thinking it was the best part of the loaf,' he says.
For his Primary School Leaving Examination, he scored just two points above the lowest score in the national cohort and was posted to the Normal stream in the now-defunct Mei Chin Secondary.
Seeing how his classmates and teachers were equally disheartened, he was determined to do better and was promoted to the Express stream the following year.
'But I was made to think, by students and teachers, that I should be grateful to be in the Express stream... that I was not qualified,' he says. 'I was told 'Don't think of yourself as somebody who can achieve a lot'.'
Refusing to let the negativity get to him, he scored well in his O levels, graduating as the second-best student in his school with an aggregate of 13 points.
He studied at Anglo-Chinese Junior College, selling Christmas cards part- time to pay for his fees and expenses, and then at NTU. He was a top salesman, mostly because he looked so 'pitiful', customers would buy from him, he says.
After university, he worked in auditing firms Arthur Andersen and Ernst and Young before joining Symantec. He met his wife when they were both working at Arthur Andersen and they got married in 2004.
On his wife, who prefers to stay out of the limelight, he says: 'She has been the one supporting my vision and she is a constant strength in a lot of things I do. She gives me the additional strength and concentration to do the work I do.'
Despite the rough start, his family is now more than comfortable. His elder sister is a senior manager with an electronics company while his younger sister is in human resources. His mother, now 61, lives with his younger sister.
They make it a point to attend his bar and restaurant openings, though he says his mother, who is used to simpler days, has yet to come to terms with his newfound success.
He says: 'She's a bit worried because this is not the life we grew up with.'
Referring to the Malay word for fierce, he adds: 'And she wonders if I'm being too 'garang' opening one restaurant after another. To her, what's happening now is all very strange.'
'I'm still poor,' he says, half in jest.
It is his Symantec job that pays the bills. Any profits from the bar and restaurant ventures are channelled back into the operations.
He is able to balance the two jobs because as drawn up from the start, the management structure of the 1-Rochester Group is such that staff 'do not have to report to me on a daily basis'.
His achievements are driven by a belief that 'it's not about where you come from, but how you work'.
The 1997 movie Gattaca, starring Jude Law and Ethan Hawke as two brothers, one with superior genes, got him thinking about his lot in life.
'I was from a poorer gene pool,' he says. 'I wasn't given the experiences other people have. I took my first plane journey when I was 27, to Hong Kong.
'But the movie really inspired me. It ends with the line, 'There is no gene that measures the human spirit'.'
For this reason, he identifies with his 200-strong staff, some of whom share the same background as him.
'Easily, more than half of them grew up in the same environment as me. Most of them did not get the opportunities that I got. Sometimes, they make mistakes but we have to give them a chance.'
You wonder how he finds time for himself, with two full-time jobs on his plate.
There is 'very little' life outside work, says Mr Ong with a sigh. 'I intertwine all my activities, business or private. All my friends are my colleagues, all my colleagues are my friends.'
What keeps him motivated is a continual desire to redefine what success is.
'A lot of people saw graduating from university and entering the corporate world as success. After all, I came from a poor environment and was now a graduate and was living a lifestyle I could never have imagined I would live when I was young,' he says.
'But that wasn't enough for me. I'll keep going.'
[email protected]
my life so far
'Many of my friends in the estate I lived in didn't see a way out of the poverty cycle. They quit school early, worked for $3 an hour and that was life. It just carried on generation after generation'
Mr Joseph Ong on growing up barely making ends meet in a one-room flat in Redhill
:oAs you sit down with Mr Joseph Ong for a mid-afternoon chat and drinks at 1-Altitude, perched on the 63rd storey of OUB Centre, he asks: 'Are you afraid of heights?'
Indeed, at 282m above ground and boasting a 360-degree view, this is not just Singapore's highest alfresco bar (Marina Bay Sands' Skypark and its chic Ku De Ta club-restaurant stand at a mere 200m), but it is also the highest in the world.
From his vantage point by a floor- to-ceiling window, the director of the 1-Rochester Group, which owns 1-Altitude, is unfazed.
'We are even higher than Sirocco and Vertigo,' he proclaims proudly. The two world-famous rooftop bars in Bangkok stand at 246m and 200m respectively.
And if mere numbers have not quite conveyed how high up we are, he offers some other facts that might: Keeping plants alive has turned out harder than thought - the first batch could not acclimatise and ended up looking sorry and withered.
The original sound system was replaced because the altitude posed problems for the quality of the acoustics.
Then there are the lightning issues. A warning system has been installed to inform the bar management of impending storms, just in case.
But fear not, the only cracks and flashes you are likely to experience are from patrons wielding cameras.
Such problems, however, are fair exchange for cool bragging rights. The foreign media have come knocking. American magazine Sports Illustrated, for instance, is thinking of doing a photo shoot here - what lures readers better than swimsuits and skylines?
The open-air bar, which has a capacity of about 200, is one of three spaces that span a total of 16,000 sq ft across the top three floors of OUB Centre. On the 62nd storey is Stellar, a fine dining restaurant. One floor below is 282, a sports bar with a golf simulator and tapas on the menu.
The project counts as another notch in the belt of the 38-year-old food and nightlife entrepreneur who still holds a full-time job as a regional director of finance with Internet security company Symantec.
Since he founded the 1-Rochester Group with three partners in 2006, the company has rolled out One Rochester at Rochester Park, a bar and eatery set amid lush greenery; 1 Twenty-Six at East Coast Park, which offers seafront dining; two 1-Caramel cafe/patisserie outlets at Handy Road and OUB Centre; and the latest, 1-Altitude.
It also has a more behind-the-scenes venture in 1-Host, which organises 250 to 300 weddings a year at the group's different venues.
Times are good and revenue is expected to hit $15 million this year and $20 million next year.
While Mr Ong fronts the business as a director, his other partners, including his wife Wendy Tong, with whom he has a two-year-old son, Jerome, are involved in other aspects such as sales, marketing, food and beverage and patisserie.
The growth is no surprise, considering how the prefix '1' - it originated from One Rochester's address at 1 Rochester Park - has become associated with destination dining that has a classy, chilled- out vibe. Its clientele are the well-heeled and discerning - expect them to know their claret from their chardonnay, their brie from their blue cheese.
Funnily enough, the man responsible for it all appears to take some pleasure in announcing: 'If you know me well, you will know I have no taste buds, no taste even.'
Dressed in a business suit and with a personal assistant in tow to powder his face for the photo shoot, the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) accountancy graduate certainly looks the part of hotshot yuppie-turned-entrepreneur.
But if he were left alone to run the place according to his plebeian tastes, 'we'll be opening beer gardens', he says with a laugh. 'I was an outsider in this business and I am probably still an outsider.
'I do enjoy good food and what chefs create. But if you ask me to be analytical about what I had, I'll say, 'I cannot remember. It just looks like this'.'
Mr Ong, whose father was a bus driver, dreamt up One Rochester for purely practical reasons. In 2004, while working at Symantec, he began pursuing a master's in business administration from Manchester Business School.
For his final-year thesis, he wanted to show that a good management strategy in business could trump any competitive advantage, such as detailed knowledge of a particular industry.
He devised a business plan and began thinking of how he could execute it as part of the curriculum's practical component.
A food business seemed relatively easy to get into. At the same time, he did not have a 'competitive advantage' in the area. 'I eat lah,' he says. 'But that's all.'
'I really wanted to get a distinction for my MBA. I was very confident that the business plan would work and I didn't think I had much to lose.'
His aim was to 'redefine alfresco dining'. At that time, before areas such as Dempsey became popular, outdoor seating was about 'throwing a couple of chairs together in a carpark'.
When the Rochester Park enclave in Buona Vista became available for lease, he envisioned putting customers in a garden setting there, amid black-and-white colonial bungalows.
Together with his partners, all of whom were his friends, he raised $500,000 to open the bar-restaurant. He recalls: 'My sister said, 'You're opening a 15,000 sq ft bar in the middle of nowhere? You've got to be stupid'. Everybody thought it was going to be a beer garden,' he says again.
Considering his lack of expertise in the area, his management strategy was not only to hire people with industry knowledge who could do the job, but also to work out a non-hierarchical system in which they could function without always having to report to the top bosses.
It worked. One Rochester did so well - it turned over $1 million in its first year and $2 million in its second - that he began looking at ways to expand. He also got the distinction he was gunning for.
The 1-Rochester Group, he decided, would strive to be a niche player by opening new lifestyle concepts in new areas. 1-Twenty Six, for instance, followed in 2008 because he wanted to open a beach hangout of a different ilk.
He says: 'Beach bars were all about jumping into the pool. We wanted people in high heels to come to the beach and have cocktails.'
A quest for good coffee and macaroons led to 1-Caramel last year, while the desire to have a 'sky unit after having a land and sea one' saw the birth of 1-Altitude.
Still, Mr Ong sees himself more as a savvy number-cruncher rather than a lifestyle maven. He baulks at the thought of say, spending money on designer chairs.
The general manager of 1-Caramel, Ms Melanie Ng, 26, says: 'A typical conversation with him would be for me to say, 'Love the Emu chairs, we could use them for the alfresco area'. He would reply, '$2,000 for a chair? Can we get them from China?''
Group operations and marketing manager Juwanda Hassim, 36, adds: 'We have daily sales report and every outlet knows what the other outlet makes. He has the ability to look at the numbers on the spot and find problems.
He is careful with money and this stems from a tough childhood. He grew up in a one-room flat in Redhill, what he calls the 'ghetto of Singapore'.
When he was 10, his bus driver father lost his job when one of the bus engine propellers came loose and sliced into his foot. He was unable to work after the accident and died of liver cirrhosis nine years later.
His mother was the sole breadwinner of the family, working as a seamstress to bring up Mr Ong and his two sisters.
He began fending for himself from a young age. 'I remember frying vegetables for myself when I was five', he recalls. 'We were so poor that many times, we did not really have food on the table.'
At times, their neighbour, who ran a bakery from home, would give the family burnt ends of bread loaves. 'We would take the bread and comfort ourselves by thinking it was the best part of the loaf,' he says.
For his Primary School Leaving Examination, he scored just two points above the lowest score in the national cohort and was posted to the Normal stream in the now-defunct Mei Chin Secondary.
Seeing how his classmates and teachers were equally disheartened, he was determined to do better and was promoted to the Express stream the following year.
'But I was made to think, by students and teachers, that I should be grateful to be in the Express stream... that I was not qualified,' he says. 'I was told 'Don't think of yourself as somebody who can achieve a lot'.'
Refusing to let the negativity get to him, he scored well in his O levels, graduating as the second-best student in his school with an aggregate of 13 points.
He studied at Anglo-Chinese Junior College, selling Christmas cards part- time to pay for his fees and expenses, and then at NTU. He was a top salesman, mostly because he looked so 'pitiful', customers would buy from him, he says.
After university, he worked in auditing firms Arthur Andersen and Ernst and Young before joining Symantec. He met his wife when they were both working at Arthur Andersen and they got married in 2004.
On his wife, who prefers to stay out of the limelight, he says: 'She has been the one supporting my vision and she is a constant strength in a lot of things I do. She gives me the additional strength and concentration to do the work I do.'
Despite the rough start, his family is now more than comfortable. His elder sister is a senior manager with an electronics company while his younger sister is in human resources. His mother, now 61, lives with his younger sister.
They make it a point to attend his bar and restaurant openings, though he says his mother, who is used to simpler days, has yet to come to terms with his newfound success.
He says: 'She's a bit worried because this is not the life we grew up with.'
Referring to the Malay word for fierce, he adds: 'And she wonders if I'm being too 'garang' opening one restaurant after another. To her, what's happening now is all very strange.'
'I'm still poor,' he says, half in jest.
It is his Symantec job that pays the bills. Any profits from the bar and restaurant ventures are channelled back into the operations.
He is able to balance the two jobs because as drawn up from the start, the management structure of the 1-Rochester Group is such that staff 'do not have to report to me on a daily basis'.
His achievements are driven by a belief that 'it's not about where you come from, but how you work'.
The 1997 movie Gattaca, starring Jude Law and Ethan Hawke as two brothers, one with superior genes, got him thinking about his lot in life.
'I was from a poorer gene pool,' he says. 'I wasn't given the experiences other people have. I took my first plane journey when I was 27, to Hong Kong.
'But the movie really inspired me. It ends with the line, 'There is no gene that measures the human spirit'.'
For this reason, he identifies with his 200-strong staff, some of whom share the same background as him.
'Easily, more than half of them grew up in the same environment as me. Most of them did not get the opportunities that I got. Sometimes, they make mistakes but we have to give them a chance.'
You wonder how he finds time for himself, with two full-time jobs on his plate.
There is 'very little' life outside work, says Mr Ong with a sigh. 'I intertwine all my activities, business or private. All my friends are my colleagues, all my colleagues are my friends.'
What keeps him motivated is a continual desire to redefine what success is.
'A lot of people saw graduating from university and entering the corporate world as success. After all, I came from a poor environment and was now a graduate and was living a lifestyle I could never have imagined I would live when I was young,' he says.
'But that wasn't enough for me. I'll keep going.'
[email protected]
my life so far
'Many of my friends in the estate I lived in didn't see a way out of the poverty cycle. They quit school early, worked for $3 an hour and that was life. It just carried on generation after generation'
Mr Joseph Ong on growing up barely making ends meet in a one-room flat in Redhill
