Chalking up more Mileage

FOR over 25 years, Yap Boh Tiong's journey has been filled with ups and downs as an SME owner. What makes it even more remarkable is how he achieved all this without taking any government grants or bank loans in the setup of his business. Mr Yap is the chairman and founder of Mileage Communications, a PR and communications firm that specialises in crisis management and media training in Singapore and the region. In an interview with The Business Times, Mr Yap said: "Back when I first started Mileage in 1992, government grants were not a luxury that SMEs had access to as the focus then was on the manufacturing sector and Singapore was still very much in the early days of transitioning to a service-driven economy... Right from the start, we learnt to be self-reliant."

Not everything was plain sailing from the outset. "The first two years, we made losses but we worked hard and by our third year, we started to make money and we never looked back since," says Mr Yap, 70. For Mr Yap, whose career has taken him from Singapore Press Holdings, to Singapore Airlines (SIA) and United Overseas Bank (UOB) among others, the lessons he learnt from senior executives have influenced his philosophy in the building up and running of the Mileage brand.

"I worked for the likes of Peter Lim and the late President Wee Kim Wee of SPH, Lim Chin Beng and J Y Pillay in SIA, Richard Eu and Wee Cho Yaw at UOB. The lessons learnt from them have translated into how I run the business," says Mr Yap.