A successful entrepreneur in his own right, Andy’s achievements were not a given. Even though Andy was awarded the Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT) honour into his first year as a financial planner in 1996, the monotony of peddling insurance products left him on the verge of bowing out of the industry altogether.

After attending a course on holistic financial planning, Andy became reacquainted to the significance of his vocation and his passion as a financial professional was rekindled. Riding on this passion and aptitude to serve, Andy’s performance continued to grow and in his seven years as a financial planner, he was awarded a total of six MDRTs. By his eighth year of service in 2003, Andy finally took on a management role.

The rest, as they say, is history. Today, a holistic approach towards financial planning has become the basis of Andy’s business model. By educating his clients on the range and value of various investment tools, Andy hopes to carve out a financial roadmap that would place his clients on the right track towards better wealth management. Akin to how NTUC FairPrice is a household name for domestic products, Andy has a vision to build a financial supermarket that would become a one stop destination for financial services. Such a vision has thus become the impetus of Andy’s business directions where he adopts a “topdown” approach towards achieving success. By adhering to such an approach, Andy identifies his business goals before developing a series of business strategies that would support them.

According to Andy, having a vision or a dream, pegged against a realistic timeline, has become one of the keys to his success. In his opinion, “A small dream is a dream; a big dream is also a dream. One might as well dream big.”

Apart from dreaming dreams, Andy believes that a successful entrepreneur must also be focused, determined and disciplined. For when the team was met with slow results at the beginning, it was these qualities that enabled Andy and his team to pull through the rough patch and ultimately achieved a breakthrough. By believing in oneself and being susceptible to changes, Andy also equips himself with the confidence to move ahead with times and stay relevant in his business, in order to arrive at his goals.

On top of these virtues, Andy also attributes his success to his philosophical take on business, family, and most importantly, himself. A strong advocate of a Confucian saying, “To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right”, Andy abides by the age old wisdom that integrity, coupled with strong family values and relationships, forms the pillars of a stable organisation and society. Such is the conviction Andy holds towards this principle that on a personal level, he leads his team by example, at home, he relinquished his role in community service in order to devote more time to his family when his eldest child was born. And at work, Andy takes heart in engaging the team’s families at company functions and in doing so, nurture an environment of trust where the dynamics of the team is greatly enhanced.

On hindsight, Andy claims that if he had started out being more proactive in his business endeavours, or had done more networking in the earlier years, he would have acquired the knowledge and skills that were necessary in this trade faster and hence shortened the learning curve. Now a successful entrepreneur in his early forties, Andy feels that one can never be too young or too old to be an entrepreneur, and an exceptional one at that. In his opinion, one can never fall short of becoming a successful entrepreneur if he or she has the willingness to become one. As in Andy’s case, such willingness spurs him to walk the extra mile, to bring his enterprise to a whole new level.