Serial entrepreneurs are reshaping South-east Asia’s business landscape

IN TODAY’S small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) landscape, a quiet transformation is taking place. Founders are no longer stopping at building and managing just one company. Increasingly, they are launching two, three, or even up to nine businesses – often within the same industry sector, supply chain, or market. This is not entrepreneurial restlessness. It is strategy.

These serial entrepreneurs design every venture with purpose, solving specific problems aligned with a broader vision of their industry’s evolution. They are shaping how innovation scales, how jobs are created, and how industries are redefined.

At OCBC, we have observed this shift play out clearly on both sides of the border. 

In Singapore, one in three new SME incorporations is started by a founder who already owns and runs an existing company. These entrepreneurs typically manage three entities on average, with Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority unique entity numbers for various reasons, including market segmentation, operations or licensing. Yet, all are anchored by the same strategic mind. 

In Malaysia, the pattern is even more pronounced within our SME client portfolio, where one in three entrepreneurs is an existing operator of multiple businesses across the country. While the drivers may differ, with more sectoral clustering and family-linked ventures, the underlying ambition remains consistent: to build deliberately, scale smartly and diversify for long-term resilience. 

A different growth playbook

Unlike traditional SMEs that expand one unit at a time, serial entrepreneurs build ecosystems. They layer capabilities – upstream into research and development (R&D) and production; downstream into distribution or digital – or segment offerings to serve mass, premium, or cross-border markets.

Take for example, Dr Ng Chin Siau, founder of Q&M Dental Group, which has been listed on the mainboard of the Singapore Exchange since 2009. He started his serial entrepreneurship journey in 1996 with his first dental clinic in Bukit Batok.

Over the years, he developed Singapore’s largest dental chain with diagnostics, dental education and lab capabilities. The group also expanded into Malaysia with more than 40 clinics in key states. Today, Dr Ng heads a vertically integrated healthcare group, with more than 100 clinics and some 300 dentists. It remains founder-led and driven by Dr Ng’s vision and ambitions.

Tan Kok Eng, co-founder of Bio-X Group, is a serial entrepreneur who builds ecosystems, not just product lines. Trained as an IT engineer, he was acquainted with the inventor behind Bio-X’s core product formula years before buying over the company in 2009. 

Over the past decade, Tan has established five distinct businesses across Singapore and Malaysia spanning R&D, manufacturing, services and retail. Under his leadership, Bio-X evolved into a multi-sector enterprise. When Covid-19 struck, his team reformulated an animal hygiene disinfectant for human use and pivoted to digital retail through e-commerce platforms.

Today, Bio-X’s products are applied across agriculture, commercial and industrial disinfection, animal hygiene and public sanitisation. The company’s growth demonstrates his vision of scalable, cross-sector impact.

Then there’s Adam Piperdy, a former radio presenter. Today, he leads nine companies under the Unearthed Productions Group.

He didn’t just grow one event business; he built an entire ecosystem around Singapore’s creative economy, spanning events productions, venue management, pyrotechnics speciality lightings, creative services and integrated marketing. His companies function independently, but collectively move faster than a single large entity ever could.

Beyond chasing diversification, these serial entrepreneurs are building by design, often using the momentum and cash flow of one company to fund the next.

Banking “builders” instead of treating founders as outliers

Despite their significant economic contribution and proven execution capabilities, serial entrepreneurs often remain underserved by traditional financial institutions. This is largely because most banking and support frameworks are designed around standalone SMEs or corporate groups connected by shareholdings. 

Such structures lead to repetitive onboarding processes for each new entity, credit evaluations that are siloed by company rather than by a founder’s overall track record, limited access to capital for subsequent ventures, and a lack of tailored advisory support.

There is no reason not to bank these “builders” since data consistently shows that companies led by serial entrepreneurs tend to be more resilient. This stems from their accumulated venturing experience, the ability to leverage shared resources across entities and deep sector insights. 

Clearly, a new model is needed. To better support these dynamic founders, financial institutions and ecosystem partners must evolve their approach. 

By shifting focus from fragmented companies to the strategic vision and aggregate performance of the founder, banks can foster sustainable growth that goes far beyond just one or two companies. After all, these entrepreneurs are increasingly driving SME-led innovation, creating jobs across diverse functions and geographies, and often pioneering entry into new regional markets. 

Systems could be redesigned to focus on the founder instead of separate entities. This involves creating lending models that treat the founder as the central factor influencing all their ventures, even if these businesses are not connected through corporate ownership.

A “keyman algorithm” could be developed to analyse behavioural and financial data across the founder’s portfolio, enabling financial institutions to offer group-level credit facilities based on the founder’s collective track record. 

Additionally, assigning a dedicated relationship manager to oversee the founder’s entire network would provide comprehensive support. This approach ensures the founder receives backing from an institution that understands the full scope of the operations across different entities, industries and borders.

Putting these principles into practice yields tangible results. At OCBC, for example, this founder-centric model has already enabled over S$1.5 billion in financing for more than 1,800 serial entrepreneurs in Singapore and Malaysia since 2018.

The Serial Entrepreneur programme goes beyond capital, extending services such as strategic advisory on mergers, acquisitions, trade exits and succession planning – support typically reserved for much larger corporate clients but essential for SMEs on their growth journey. 

Building smarter and stronger

In my years of connecting with and serving serial entrepreneurs, I have observed that behind every new company registration, there’s often the same founder, applying lessons from the existing business to build the next one, smarter and stronger. 

The entrepreneurs mentioned may come from different industries, but they share the same mindset. They are disciplined builders who strategically build integrated groups and value hubs. These business talents create jobs, transform industries and reinvest in growth. 

As more SMEs expand through multi-entity structures, the frameworks around capital, risk and advisory will need to keep pace. How systems respond will shape how far these serial entrepreneurs, and the industries they are reshaping, can go.

The writer is head of middle market and services, global commercial banking, at OCBC. She spearheads the bank’s Serial Entrepreneur programme, which aims to extend S$5 billion in financing to 8,000 founders across the region by 2028.