Terrorist attack survivor inspired to grow multi-million-dollar laundry business

SINGAPORE - When Mr Chan Tai Pang had to go to Jakarta for business last month, his Indonesian associates asked gingerly if he minded being put up at the JW Marriott hotel.

The 67-year-old chief executive of Laundry Network said he did not mind. "I went to bed at 11 pm and slept right through the next morning," he says.

His business partners had not been worried because he is a hard man to please. It was because he nearly died in the hotel in 2003, after a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside the lobby.

The terrorist attack killed 12 people and injured 150 others, and left him with severe burns and in a coma for more than a month.

The Chinese believe good fortune often befalls those who survive major accidents or disasters.

"Maybe it's true," he says with a grin.

Plans he made during his long recuperation helped boost his company's fortunes, more than doubling his annual revenue from $8 million in 2008 to $18.2 million last year.

At first glance, there is little to betray the ordeal he survived. His face is smooth and unlined, if just a little bleached in spots. His hair hides scars on his head.

Then he shows you his upper right arm, a veritable patchwork of keloids and scar tissue. "The back is also quite bad," he says; he had strips of skin peeled from his legs and grafted onto his back.

Just glad to be alive, he says he harbours no hatred against those who nearly killed him.

"I've become more forgiving and patient. Before the incident, I was quite tough. I never used to cry. Now I cry when I hear sad songs or watch sad movies," he says with a laugh.

Born in Xiamen, China, he is the eldest of three children.

"My father left for Singapore three months before I was born to escape the war with Japan. He worked for my uncle who had a paint factory here," he says.

His early years were spent in a farming village with his mother and paternal grandparents. As Xiamen was near Taiwan, it was caught in the war between the Nationalists and the Communists.

"There were bombings every day," says Mr Chan. "I didn't go to a proper school. I went for lessons held in a cave. We lived for quite a while in a cave too, only going back to our homes at night when the fighting stopped."

When he was 12, he saw his father for the first time when the latter returned to Xiamen to bring him here. His mother remained behind to look after her ageing in-laws and joined them here only a few years later.

"We sailed for more than a month in a very crowded ship. There were no cabins, we slept on mats in the common areas of the ship," he recalls.

In Singapore, he lived with his aunt in her home in the Novena area. His father slept in a paint shop which he manned in Rochor Road.

"My auntie was the matriarch of the family and I never felt I was treated as a member in the household.

I was closer to the servants than my cousins," he says.

He attended Tao Nan Primary and Chinese High School, but had to help out every day after school in his father's shop. "There was no time to study. I worked with the coolies in my father's shop after school until 10 every night. I picked up smoking when I was 12; I could have turned out very wrong," he says.

The Chinese High was a hotbed of student activism in those days over issues such as labour rights, national service and discrimination against the Chinese-educated.

As a hot-headed teenager, he took part in some of the protests.

"My father chained me to my bed because he was scared I would run away in the middle of the night. He did the right thing. Some of my school friends actually went into the jungles to join the communists," he says.

He did well enough in his studies to go on to the Chinese medium Nanyang University to study chemistry.

By then, his father had a stake in the uncle's paint business and the plan was for him to come on board too. The prospect did not excite him, even though he had ideas for the business.

"It was hard because in the eyes of my auntie, uncle and even my father, I was always a child."

So when an offer to work in the central laundry of the Goodwood Group of Hotels came his way after he graduated in 1971, he grabbed it.

The sophisticated machines and laundry facilities so fascinated him that he took courses in hotel management and mechanical engineering to become better at his job.

He became the first laundry manager in the Asia Pacific region certified by the National Association of Institutional Laundry & Linen Management in the United States.

Over the next 30 years until 2000, he worked for several hotels including the Westin Stamford and Westin Plaza where he was director of laundry and valet operations for 16 years.

In 1977, when Oberoi-Imperial, the hotel he was then working for, went into receivership because of the financial crisis, he cobbled together $60,000 to start the first HDB laundromat called Systematic Cleaners - later renamed Systematic Laundromat - in Marine Parade.

Getting approval from the environment ministry to start the business was an uphill task.

"In those days, laundry was classified as an offensive trade which caused water pollution in HDB estates.

But I explained to them I was serving the neighbourhood. Moreover, many HDB homes also had washing machines which discharged water into the sewer system.

It took a long time but I finally convinced them," says Mr Chan, who was by then married to a teacher.

Novel for Singaporeans, the coin-operated laundry concept took off and within a few years, Mr Chan and his wife - who left teaching to run the company - had nearly 20 such shops all over the island.

They set up Laundry Network, listed Systematic Laundromat as a business division and diversified into providing laundry consultancy and services for airlines and country clubs.

The business flourished over the next decade; monthly revenue in his shops could hit $300,000. "Our paid-up capital was $600,000 and we had more than $2 million in cash. Everyone believed life was very good."

In 1995, the Economic Development Board identified it as a homegrown enterprise which had growth potential and offered it a brand new factory space in Woodlands at a discounted price.

Flush with success, Laundry Network grabbed it and borrowed more than $4 million for state-of-the-art machinery.

It was a big mistake. The 1997 Asian financial crisis hit shortly after, and business dropped drastically.

"And we had a lot of repayments to make," recalls the towkay who also lost $800,000 when a laundry consultancy deal with a major Jakarta hotel went south because of the rupiah's devaluation.

Over the next five years, the couple sold two factories in Aljunied and two shops in Thomson Plaza to keep their business afloat.

"My father also sold a house to help us. It took us five years before we found our feet again," says Mr Chan who left his job with Westin in 2000 to devote his energies to Laundry Network.

But through it all, he never laid off any of his workers.

"We had to delay paying salaries for a couple of weeks on one or two occasions but the staff did not complain. It's about relationships. Today, we have about 30 staff who have been with us for more than 20 years," says the entrepreneur who has about 300 people on his payroll.

The turbulent road to recovery was made even more so by the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 and Sars two years later.

Then came his brush with death in Jakarta on Aug 5, 2003.

"I'm a free thinker but I really believe some things in life are fated," says Mr Chan who was in the Indonesian capital to design the laundry facilities for the JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels.

With great humour, he starts chronicling the ironies of that fateful day.

He was supposed to have left for Singapore in the morning but his business associates had booked him on the afternoon flight instead.

"But that was not the worst," he says.

His annual travel insurance had lapsed the day before the blast but his wife had arranged for the new one to start the day after, when he was due to fly to the United States for another business trip.

"So I ended up paying $25,000 for the most expensive flight out of Jakarta arranged by International SOS," he says, referring to the medical and travel security services company.

But he has learnt to look on the bright side. He counts himself lucky he was in the hotel's coffeehouse - and not in the lobby waiting for his ride to the airport - when the car bomb went off.

"People who were at the lobby had their limbs blown off, and died on the spot," he says.

He passed out and woke up in a smoke-choked, chaotic room.

Face blackened, back burnt, and fingers blistered, he made his way to a lorry ferrying the injured to hospital.

He was flown back to a Singapore hospital the next morning, with a severe lung infection and blood poisoning, and fell into a coma that lasted 37 days.

Doctors told his wife and two children to prepare for the worst. A group of friends, including general managers of several international hotels, gathered to record encouraging messages for him on a tape. His family played the tape continuously as he lay unconscious.

Recovery was long and slow, with many painful skin operations and months of occupational therapy and physiotherapy.

But he was already thinking about ways to change his business model.

"I asked myself if we should go into the yield business or the volume business," he says.

Deciding that radio frequency identification (RFID) technology would take his business to new levels, he staked $5 million over three years researching and developing new technology as well as equipment automation.

Laundry Network also applied for and got funding help from the National RFID Centre for laundry tracking systems, one which was used in Youth Olympic Games.

"RFID gave our business a new lease of life," says Mr Chan, now a leading laundry consultant in the region.

His company today has five business divisions, 25 laundromats, eight laundry plants and employs 300 people, including 50 part-timers, dealing with airlines, dormitories, country clubs, serviced apartments and hotels. One of its biggest clients is Resorts World Singapore where the uniforms of 20,000 staff are collected, laundered and returned daily.

Mr Andrew Kan, 60, has known Mr Chan for more than 25 years. The senior sales manager of US-based Alliance Laundry Systems LLC, says: "After the Jakarta bombing, everyone in the industry thought he would not survive. But he came back from the brink of death to rebuild the company by investing in high technology."

Mr Chan says his trials have taught him not to take life for granted and to appreciate what he has.

Now a grandfather of five children aged between two and 10, he says: "I never liked apples but when I was given one not long after I woke up from my coma, it felt like the best thing I'd ever tasted."

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