10 things about: Benjamin Yong, the man with BIG dreams

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 9 — Benjamin Yong, founder and Group Chief Eating Officer of the BIG group, hasn’t stopped — not even for a day — since he first opened Delicious, a cafe inside his mother’s boutique Ms Read, 12 years ago.  

Twenty-five restaurants, one supermarket, one wedding (held in two countries, no less) and, a baby later, he is still hungry for more.

The soon-to-be-38-year-old KL native grew up with the Metrojaya departmental store as his playground, and hung out with seamstresses at a clothing factory.

His father was one of the main driving forces behind Metrojaya and his mother is the founder of Ms Read, a pioneer in Malaysia for plus size fashion, which has its own factory here.

Direct and gregarious, Ben said perhaps his love for food began when he lived with his grandmother in Ipoh for four years when he was seven.

Remembering his time there, he half-jokingly said he was “force-fed” a lot.

Fast forward three decades later, he speaks about how he picked up the art of time management and now, even with a baby and 12 new restaurants and two supermarkets due to open this year, he still manages to sneak out on a date night with his wife.

In his own words:

• I don’t know whether it’s Ipoh or my grandmother. I think more my grandmother... she loves to cook and she loves to force feed and I’m my size because of her because I used to be a very scrawny kid.
• When you grow up with it, it just seems like it’s the most normal thing in the world. So I think that would be a huge advantage in the sense that I grew up, when I was with my dad, I grew up in Metrojaya as my playground, so to me a departmental store is the most normal thing in the world. My mother has her factory with clothes, so I hung out with seamstresses, cutters, and drafters and that seemed like the most normal thing in the world. For example, my daughter will grow up inside kitchens and maybe that would be very normal to her or in her mother’s jewellery business. It’s purely coincidental that we really happen to come from a family of retailers or entrepreneurs so to speak. In that sense it provided more insight, it’s very hard to capture what that insight is, because like I said I grew up thinking that was the most normal thing in the world.
• In retail and restaurants, we run 24/7 theoretically speaking so it’s very difficult to say OK 5 o’clock I’m done and I think growing up seeing that with my parents we’re the same, so when there is an emergency or something that needs to be done, we just get it done.
• So it’s the same thing now, it is a seven-day process but the fact of the matter is, the beauty to a certain degree, is that it allows a certain amount of personal time management that I can, for example just before this meeting, I could scoot home and hang out with my daughter and my wife for an hour and then come back again here and continue. That is the greatest lesson I learned, there are no boundaries.
• It has been an interesting learning process. What we applied when we were a one-store business to a two-store business, to a 23-store business is a little bit different. If I give u a recipe for one cake, it’s fairly straight forward. For example the carrot cake, two cups of flour, one and a half cup of carrots, half cups of pineapples, half cup of walnuts, you see I still remember this by heart.
• Baking is a science in that sense, you just need to follow everything to the measurement, there is very little art in it, it’s more science. You only need to bake one cake at one restaurant right, habis lah. When you are 23, everytime they run the recipe, they bake maybe 36 cakes per session and you would imagine that the same recipe I gave you times 36 is how you do it, but it’s not. Suddenly the whole scale changes completely. So it’s learning that scalability, that’s probably the most challenging part of the business. We are still learning every day.
• Initially when we first started, we always talked about going to Singapore next, Indonesia and it’s quite funny that as you grow a little bit older, some of the objectives change a little bit and sometimes it’s a little bit unfair that your personal objectives blend in with the company’s objectives. I think a lot about it, if we had this interview maybe three years ago, I would say yes by 2017 we are going here, by 2019 we’re going to have 10 stores in China and so on and so forth. I think we have decided to kind of scale down a little bit to let the business grow in terms of the right time and opportunity for us to expand out of Malaysia. Doesn’t mean we won’t franchise it, doesn’t mean that we won’t JV with another local operating partner. I think it’s just at this moment, our focus is housekeeping within Malaysia to see what we can do, how do we do it better, fully realise the potential here first before we start looking at other countries.
• There are always many applications or solutions to a problem. Doesn’t make your solution better than anybody else’s. Somebody showed me in a very simplistic way and I thought that made so much sense. Four plus five equals nine. Six plus three equals nine. three times three also equals nine. There are many solutions to a problem, and we constantly have to remember to keep our eyes open to alternative solutions rather than be so fixed on a one track mind.
• Sunday lunch could be brunch or champagne brunch and here we were sitting at home and just kind of enjoying the day and playing with the baby. It’s quite interesting because you fear that change before it happens, I mean honestly my wife and I were like, ‘Ooh what’s going to happen?’ and we were like we’ll change but we won’t let it change that much and then when it happened, it just seemed a lot more natural than we thought it would be. You think you’d be kicking and screaming. I think it’s not to take this parenting too crazily, even though we will, but it’s just trying to find the balance in between and try to make the best out of it.
• I may have a freak-out in a month’s time but right now, all OK.