When Toby Koh joined the family business in 1995, he started by taking on a sales role and doing door-to-door cold calls. That’s how his father cut his teeth in the business in the 1970s, “stuffing a bunch of material into a briefcase and going door-to-door” representing security services Ademco, growing the business to the stage where he could buy over the Asian subsidiary from the U.S. parent company in 1985. Learning from his father’s success, Koh thought, “there’s nothing like the practical lessons of doing it firsthand” and dealt with the inevitable rejections that came his way.
“It was a baptism of fire, and after a couple of months I tried to re-strategize: Hit the top and work my way down instead of going through the receptionist and trying to get through the door,” Koh tells Perspectives@SMU. “There was an SGX-listed property developer that I was eyeing and I thought I’d try to talk to the CEO. I tried calling – I got blocked by the secretary. I tried sending letters and emails – they all got blocked.”
“So I sent a letter in a plain envelope without any letterhead, and I wrote on it ‘Private and Confidential’ hoping it’d get to him. After that, his secretary called me acknowledging receipt of the letter but that ‘we’ll contact you when we’re ready’. It was basically a push-off.”
Encouraged that his letter had not been binned, Koh decided to wait outside his target’s office building early one morning. “When his driver dropped him off,” Koh recalls, “I approached him immediately. ‘Oh, you are the guy who sent that letter!’ he said. I thought, ‘So he remembers the letter!’ I asked for five minutes of his time but he was rushing for a meeting.”
Instead of giving up, Koh decided to wait at the reception until the CEO emerged for lunch. Impressed by the determination of the “persistent little fella”, he promised Koh the requested five minutes if he was still there after lunch.
“I waited till three o’clock – I’d been there since eight in the morning – till he got back from lunch,” Koh recalls with a smile. “He gave me the five minutes and then personally called the head of the property that I was talking about to come to the lobby. ‘You have to talk to Toby,’ he told his subordinate before adding, ‘I want to see his proposal.’ “We got the project and became the incumbent [security firm] for the organization.”
Today, Koh is the Group Managing Director of Ademco Security Group and counts among his customers Fortune 500 companies such as 3M, FedEx, and IBM. Together with sister Audrey Koh, he has expanded Ademco’s reach to six other countries across Asia including regional behemoths China and India. Both siblings came into contact with the family business as children – “We’d go to my dad’s office and do little things like stuffing mailers into envelopes” – and Koh knew he’d be part of Ademco eventually. But he wanted a taste of the real world first.
“I wanted to go out get a ‘real job’, so to speak,” referring to the banking job he secured upon graduating from the University of San Francisco. “I did about ten days of branch banking operations, cutting checks, verifying the signatures and all that. After two weeks I said to myself, ‘I can’t do this! It’s way too monotonous and I’m not learning anything.’”
In a foreshadowing of the entrepreneurial risk-taking spirit that drove his ‘Private and Confidential’ letter episode, Koh approached (in his own words, “ambushed”) the bank’s head of corporate banking “because that’s where the excitement is with the big loans and big deals”. On his third ‘ambush’ he got his wish.
“For a junior fresh-out-of-school person to get into corporate banking is quite unusual,” says Koh. “The good thing was that even though I was so junior I would be talking to the business owners of successful SMEs and corporate executives, CEOs and GMs. The exposure was invaluable.
He adds: “The learning process from a financial and banking point of view, I gained a lot from that role. Eventually I said, ‘It’s time for me to go into the family business."
In the 22 years that he has been at Ademco, Koh has seen the security services industry evolve as technology brought changes aplenty including biometric access systems and the Cloud technology, which appears to have fundamentally changed the industry landscape.
