Think BIG
Business Times - 27 Jul 2006
BIG Durian production company is a small company with big ideas. Not only is the 10-man team made up of international staff from a wide range of countries, the company also came to the tiny island of Singapore with high ideals of solving global environmental issues.
About three years ago, the management team of Big Durian, set up by foreigners, wanted to start out in Jakarta. The production company was named as an allusion to Jakarta as the Big Durian, akin to New York being known as the Big Apple.
The plan was to host a music tour with Latino stars to promote environmental causes, an idea that came from two partners, Gerard Molles, the chief executive officer and Bjorn Sandes, chief operating officer, who had ample contacts to pull it off.
Clive Wright, marketing director, explained: 'If you live in Jakarta, it's pretty difficult to miss the mess that they're making out of the planet. And so they got talking, got a few beers, met at a pub, and went, you know we want to do something for the environment. The next morning, the alcohol wore off, and the idea hadn't.'
They then teamed up with an environmental engineer, Eric Quincieu, who was then working with the Asian Development Bank. Among the three of them, they decided on an environmental awareness project with an entertainment slant, one that would not preach but rather engage the youth. They decided on a touring rave party within the country, with Latino stars to perform and London DJs spinning music.
'Indonesia at that time was really happening ... People were travelling again after 9/11, so it was really good timing.'
The project got the attention of MTV Indonesia, and plans looked set to go, after a 'stunning presentation' with the management staff there, which Mr Wright prepared together with Mr Sandes.
But things took an unexpected turn. 'A week later, there was a bomb in central Jakarta, and a lot of agents rang and said, don't even think about getting this contract. The whole thing just fizzled out,' he said.
Rather than stay in limbo, he said the team turned to Plan B, and moved to Singapore.
Since then, the 10-person company has evolved into a concept firm that creates content for various forms of media and that can be sold as Singapore intellectual property through licensing and copyrights. Except for one Singaporean, the remaining nine staff make up a cross-continent mix, coming from countries in Africa, America, Asia and Europe.
Besides being 'an accident of history', Mr Wright said that Singapore was an easy second choice because setting up the business here was so straightforward. It took them a mere 48 hours to clear the paperwork and get itself incorporated in March 2004.
He added that the flexibility of the system meant that their working partners could come over to Singapore with little visa restrictions.
Being in Singapore created another accidental opportunity as well. The team presented its environmental ideas to MTV in Singapore but was rejected. Yet in the process, the company realised that one viable project was to produce a TV series, by featuring companies and celebrities raising environmental awareness in different parts of the world.
So, from the series of unfortunate events, they decided to work on a 13-part TV series known as 'Eco 4 the World', a programme featuring personalities such as Sting, Alicia Keys and Mikhail Gorbachev, and their environmental efforts with different green organisations.
That small matter of funding
But before all these plans fell into place, two challenges came their way, said Mr Wright. One was access to investment funds to pay off the $30,000 per month chalked up to run the business, which excludes production costs.
'The cautiousness of local financial institutions is definitely an issue. They worry about us not being local, although I'm a PR so I do count as one. Certain assistance schemes or current investments or grants are made available only to local companies. Then, what constitutes a local company? We're based here, we live here and yet we're not considered a local company (though) we are building a business here.'
While the company had international contacts, they did not have as many contacts here. 'If you did not grow up in Singapore, you don't have the same network as somebody who did. And that compounds the problem,' he said.
'We overcame that by sheer application to find that one investor. We wrote, emailed, phoned and harassed hundreds of potential investors. A lot of salespeople use the rule of 10. To get one meeting, you need to talk to 10 people. To place one deal, you need to have 10 meetings. And that's pretty much how we did it,' he said.
Another solution, said Mr Wright, was to turn to government funding.
Big Durian applied for funding through the Economic Development Board. Among other questions of business scope and scale, he said the latter looked at criteria such as the ability to bring in talent, and create exportable value. 'We hit top marks on all of those, because what we're doing is creating a pure form of intellectual property.'
The result was $600,000 in funding split evenly between UpStream Ventures, an Asian venture capital firm based in Singapore, and EDB. The funding from the latter, said Mr Wright, was the maximum investment amount under the scheme that helps develop early-stage companies.
In partnership with global organisations such as United Nations Environment Programme and Asian Development Bank, the TV series went around the world, from parts of Asia, to Africa and Europe. The project has also included other media outreach, with a website and applications for mobile phones.
Mr Wright declined to say how much the whole project costs, but said that they have employed a 'unique approach' to reduce production costs significantly.
More sponsorship is also set to come in. According to him, the latest funding is likely to be a 30 million yen (about S$400,000) investment from a large Japanese corporation.
Even before the programme's completion, a potential partnership with a global network cable company, which cannot be named at this point, is already interested in airing it globally. This, he said, will give them immense exposure.
The series, which will finish in September at the latest, will also be shown on local cable in the fourth quarter of this year, and is expected to go on MediaCorp's free-to-air channels within the first three months of next year.
With a current turnover of over $1 million, Big Durian plans to ink two to three more project deals, each worth about $2 million. Aiming to do work on the scale of an 'Eco 4 the World' project, Mr Wright said, would help to retain their exposure on global airtime. The company will also double staff size in the next two months, to beef up its production team.
Succeeding, said Mr Wright, all boils down to optimism and persistence. As a local company with a global reach, he added aptly: 'And think big.'
