By CHEN HUIFEN

HE may be the new president of the entrepreneurs' group E50 Club, but Andy Lim could just as easily have been a senior civil servant.

He topped his cohort at the Anglo-Chinese School, clinched a prestigious government scholarship and took a first class honours degree in engineering at Cambridge University.

He had all the makings of a policy maker. And he admits himself that he seems an unlikely candidate to head the E50 Club after its two previous presidents, Tommie Goh of 2G Capital and Tee Yih Jia Food Manufacturing's Sam Goi.

'Deep inside, I'm a civil servant, whereas Tommie Goh (first president of E50 Club) came from the school of hard knocks,' says Mr Lim, who is chairman of private equity firm Tembusu Partners and chairman of remittance house Moneyworld Asia.

Still, Mr Lim, who was elected the club's third president last week, is looking forward to his latest leadership role - and has big plans. And in an interview with BT last week, he spoke of some of them.

At the top of the the list is a mentorship programme. As the E50 Club has been around for almost 10 years, its members have a wealth of experience to share.

'So we are trying to get some of the senior ones to, maybe, mentor one or two of the newer ones,' says Mr Lim. 'The seniors can help them to grow.

'It's very lonely at the top. If you're an entrepreneur and you run a business, when you have a problem, who do you go to? With a club like this, where you are among peers, among friends, and they are in different industries - so no threat - we can give fairly candid advice.'

This is already happening informally. But having a structure will, hopefully, make the process blossom. Mr Lim points out that the Young Presidents' Organisation (YPO), a global leadership network, has an enviable system through which every member can sign up for a chapter relevant to them or their business. And chapters are headed by people who conduct meaningful programmes, networking events and visits to one another's companies.

Amid the global recession, some SMEs are having trouble obtaining finance. So the E50 Club is looking at collating a capital pool that members can tap. 'Funding is a big issue now,' says Mr Lim. 'So Sam (his predecessor) has suggested that those among us who are still in a position to fund, maybe form - not a fund - but a pool of capital, so that if an E50 company needs investment, they (contributors to the capital pool) can come in.'

In the longer term, Mr Lim hopes to find ways to help some E50 members transform from entrepreneur-driven firms to professionally managed companies. From his observations, SME operations are generally reliant on their owner-founder. But as an enterprise grows, there comes a point when the entrepreneur cannot be the sole decision-maker on everything. Professional managers have to be appointed at some stage.

Mr Lim also has plans for business missions to the region, such as Malaysia and Tianjin, Beijing and Shenyang in China. And he hopes to recruit as many new members as possible from recent E50 Award winners.

Of course, many of the plans he has for the club, which has some 120-130 members, will depend on members' needs. On that score, Mr Lim aims to find out what their current challenges are and how the club can help. He says that although he cannot claim to be a self-made, rough-and-tumble entrepreneur, he gets along well with those who are, having met hundreds of them in the course of his work as a fund raiser and venture investor.

'Leadership is not about what the president can do but what the E50 Club and the whole committee can do,' he says. 'That's why we have to leverage on our previous presidents like Sam and Tommie to see how, collectively, we can do more for the club.'

This article was first published in The Business Times.