Wednesday, 30th September 2026
PART 3: THE GREAT BOSS (AND THE NOT-SO-GREAT STAFF)
As I look back fondly upon my time in the corporate world, I have had various bosses, colleagues and staff.
Among my bosses, the one whom I admire the most has got to be Mr HLG.
He is a typical businessman who has this uncanny ability to see opportunity when everyone else sees adversity. People see the problem, he sees the solution. I will give you 2 very concrete examples, so read on.
(5) PricewaterhouseCoopers / Tricor Business Outsourcing (Mar 2000 to Dec 2004)
When I initially rejoined PwC in March 2000, we were operating as a department within the firm's structure. Due to a series of regulatory changes that accounting firms worldwide had to comply with (as a result of Enron's collapse, and then SOX), we subsequently had to operate under separate legal entities, wholly-owned by the local PwC partnership, and finally had to be totally independent of PwC when the entire business was divested to Bank of East Asia, and rebranded as Tricor Singapore.
During my initial week, I recall being shocked by the fee numbers I saw: not at how high they were, but how low they were! As an auditor in PW, I was used to seeing clients being billed five- (ie. $10K+) or even six-figure (ie. $100K+) amounts.
At SICC, the horizon stretched exponentially. The Club had cash reserves that stood in the mid-nine figures (ie. $500M+), and had placed seven-figure (ie. $M+) funds each with a handful of asset management companies.
When working in Solomon's SW as a post-sales consultant, one of our customers was a major cigarette distributor. During my training sessions with a particular user, he would perform daily transfers from the non-bonded warehouse to the bonded warehouse, and pay Singapore Customs the corresponding tobacco duty amounting to several million dollars each time.
Well, guess what the monthly accounting and payroll business processing outsourcing ("BPO") fees were like? Typically three, at most four figures! Mr HLG then explained to me that it was a volume game, a classic case of "little drops of water making a mighty ocean".
Unlike in audit, where each manager had maybe two dozen or so clients in his portfolio, it was not unusual for BPO managers to handle close to a hundred clients, while those in corporate secretarial services had hundreds of them. If each client's annual fees totalled say $10K, each manager would typically be handling an annual portfolio of $1M!
When meeting a potential or existing client, Mr HLG would park his 7-series BMW some distance away and walk to the entrance of the building. Unlike real estate or insurance agents who had to show off to their clients how successful they were in order to gain their trust, Mr HLG said the reverse held true for clients who wanted to outsource their accounting or payroll function. They tended to be cost-conscious to begin with, so had they seen that he could afford to drive a fancy car, they would have thought he was earning too much and would bargain down their fees!
I remember being told by a colleague how the PwC partners were very grateful to him because he had made the department the most profitable one for them. When we became a separate legal entity, the dividends declared after tax were distributed to them individually without being subject to further tax. And when we were subsequently sold off to Bank of East Asia, they each pocketed a tidy sum from the sale.
Audit may be a Big Four's core, high-profile business, while deals and advisory may be the one with the highest margins, but the former requires highly-qualified (and thus expensive) staff, while the latter is non-recurring in nature It is the outsourcing business that has the best of both worlds: steady, repeated, volume-driven, low-risk, and scaleable income, requiring just a handful of qualified management staff but the rank-and-file work could be carried out by those with diplomas or less.
The firm also had a policy that partners had to retire at 57 (now increased to 60) to make way for younger blood. While most of Mr HLG's peers had to leave their lucrative jobs, he remained gainfully (and gleefully) employed as the Managing Director of Tricor, and only recently retired, when he was well into his 70s.
OK, let's talk about the 2 cases which showed how shrewd, resourceful and enterprising Mr HLG was.
CLOBbered
These investors were kept in limbo until March 2000, when a company called ECSB was appointed to carry out the "migration" of these shares from Singapore's Central Depository ("CDP") to Malaysia's Central Depository ("MCD"). ECSB charged investors an admin fee of 1.5%, effectively pocketing RM300 million. Mr HLG, via PwC's then share registration arm Barbinder, assisted ECSB with the massive paperwork, for which I understand the fee involved was a cool seven-figure sum.
What others saw as dogsbody "sai kang" work, having to deal with the forms of some 163,000 disgruntled investors who had to reluctantly part with 1.5% worth of their stock portfolio, Mr HLG saw as an opportunity to assist them in bringing their 18-month wait to an end.
Oh ya, 163,000 of the 172,000 investors accepted ECSB's offer. Our $2.5M fee worked out to be about $15 per investor, which was definitely a bargain to them. But this fee was the equivalent of an entire year's worth of fees from several hundred other clients added together.
Monday Blues
When conducting a due diligence sometime in 2002, IBM discovered to its horror that the PwC Consulting ("PwCC") entities in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, China and the Philippines (collectively known as "EAMCS") had inadvertently omitted to withhold the relevant tax when billing each other for their staff who were performing regional work in one another's countries.
For example, let's say a PwCC Singapore staff who was implementing Oracle for client XYZ Group had to travel physically to XYZ Thailand to carry out work over there. Whatever fees that were billed by PwCC Singapore to PwCC Thailand for work carried out in Thailand itself would be considered as Thailand-sourced income and thus subjected to Thailand's withholding tax, and vice versa.
To cut a long story short, everywhere else around the world, IBM acquired the entire PwCC entity lock, stock and barrel (ie via a "share sale"), but in this part of the world, they only bought over the individual balance sheet items that passed muster (ie. via a "net asset" sale), leaving behind the EAMCS entities and with it, the problematic balance sheet items such as tax liabilities.
Once again, what others saw as "sai kang", Mr HLG saw as an opportunity to do a proper clean up of the said entities, record the relevant withholding taxes, pay them together with whatever late penalties were imposed, and ultimately have them wound them, all at a reasonable fee, of course. From the proceeds of the US$3.5B sale to IBM, PwC Global set aside a sufficient sum for this dogsbody work, and the said EAMCS entities took a good three to five years to be finally put to bed. If one uses a conservative estimate of just S$20,000 per month for the work done, the total fee over the length of the project must have been quite substantial :p
I am very conversant with the above-mentioned cases because I had the awesome privilege of being personally involved in both of them.
While Mr HLG appears to be rather task-oriented to most people, he has a compassionate side to him as well. When he learnt that my son had to start peritoneal dialysis in September 2000, he spoke with the partner of Baxter Healthcare (which was also a PwC client then) and through a series of connections, we were given the staff (ie. discounted) price on the monthly supply of bags of dialysate fluids. This continued all the way for the next 8 years, until he got his transplanted kidney on 10 April 2008.
Mr HLG also confirmed me way ahead of my 6-month probation period, so that he could intentionally include me in the nominal roll of staff entitled to receive the bonus payout for the financial year ended 30 June 2000, and he did not even prorate the amount, even though I only joined in March that very year!
When he wanted to join SICC sometime in 2003, he got me to be one of his proposers. A photo of the two of us was featured in the Club's magazine (the largest one, because my ex-colleague John, the graphic designer, made sure of that haha).
It was taken at Introduction Night, when new members are officially welcomed by the General Committee.
Well, if he was such a great boss to you, why did you quit in December 2004 to join a German semiconductor company, on a one-year contract basis, some of you may ask.
The short answer to that is I was not a great staff to him. He must have aged 10 years during my 58-month tenure under him :-(
In particular, the PwCC project faced a lot of unnecessary hiccups. We required the assistance of PwC-related colleagues from the other regional offices, but they were not in any hurry to complete their share of the work, to put it nicely. Their fees were time-based, so it was to their ironical advantage to be inefficient and to continue dragging their feet. I was not task-oriented enough of a project manager, to the chagrin of Mr HLG. He had to resort to micro-managing me, insisting that I give him a daily status update in person every morning before heading out to the client's place in Ngee Ann City.
Although increasingly frustrated with me, to his credit, he did not sack me but allowed me sufficient time to look for another job, bless his heart.
Well, God causes all things to work out for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. It was at that German MNC that I was first introduced to the gospel of grace. More details in the next post :-)
