Mason Tan was a man in crisis.

He was the one who brought fast food chain Carl’s Jr to the shores of Singapore and Malaysia in 2003.

Business took off and by 2008, there were 12 Carl’s Jr outlets in Singapore and Malaysia.

Buffeted by its success, Tan partnered the BreadTalk group and entered the China market in 2007. Beijing was hosting the Olympics in 2008 and they wanted to ride on the wave to enter the market with a big bang.

The big bang did come, but not in the way he had envisioned. In 2008, the global financial crisis struck and his joint venture with BreadTalk was hit.

Apart from facing strong financial headwinds, Tan felt pressured by the business culture in China. In order to secure a prime spot for his fast food outlets in shopping malls, he had to entertain business clients, sometimes at karaoke and drinking sessions which were thinly disguised platforms for womanising.

“Something which is right is still right when nobody is doing it and wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it,” said Tan, 52, who only became a Christian when he was 36 years old.

He was anxious to deliver results to please his board members, shareholders and vendors.

Though he considered himself just a “Sunday Christian” then, he valued the Sabbath and made it a point to visit church every Sunday in China. That in itself was a major commitment, because in the food and beverage retail sector, up to 40% of the weekly revenue rolled in on weekends.

Tan knew he needed to anchor himself in God – it was a trying time to kick start a new business venture in China and he hardly saw his family, who were residing in Singapore.

The last straw came when a senior director called him to resolve some operational issues in the middle of a Christmas service he was attending in Shanghai, China, where Christmas is not a public holiday.

At that moment, he realised he was compromising too much for the sake of the business and began looking for a successor to take over his role.

Due to 2008 Lehman Brothers financial crisis, the business had to take further hits which cost the business venture millions of dollars. The setback threw him into a brief period of depression as he felt personally accountable for the losses he had to bear.

Packing his bags, he returned to Singapore in 2010. By then, he was 45 years old and he did not know whether there could be a reset button for his life.

“Upon reflection, I realised there is no perfect time to serve God, even in the midst of personal financial struggle,” he said.

For the following two years, he took a sabbatical leave from full time work and sought the Lord. He prayed, pored over the Bible, attended courses to identify his strengths and reread books such as Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life and Bob Buford’s book on moving from success to significance. During this time, he took on ad-hoc job stints, such as being a venture partner in a private equity firm.

“In this period of soul searching, I felt God impressing upon me that I could run a fund to invest in people and businesses and help them to grow. My passion then became helping others realise their dreams,” said Tan.

With the support of Dato Dr Kim Tan, a leading social entrepreneur, he set up Garden Impact Investments in 2013.

“God created the garden of Eden for mankind to find love, peace and joy but Adam’s sin broke that harmony and poverty resulted,” said Tan.

“Through the nature of our work, we want to address not only economic poverty, but also spiritual and emotional poverty.”

Garden Impact Investments is a private Singapore-based impact investment holding company. It invests in businesses that create jobs and provide services and products for the poor and marginalised. In addition to financial returns, each investment is monitored for its social impact returns.

In Indonesia, Garden Impact invested in Paloma Shopway, a leading mail ordering catalogue business that hired more than 45,000 home-based women and single mothers to be its sales agents. More than 80% of the business were generated outside the Java island. These women collected orders from people in their rural villages, ordered products via their mobile phones and received a commission when the products were shipped.

Mason Tan (left) visiting local villagers in Indonesia to understand their needs for home-based toilets as opposed to communal toilets

Also in Indonesia, Garden Impact invested in an affordable funeral services provider which worked with insurance providers to provide a low-cost death and bereavement insurance scheme for needy families. This means that those who could not afford to pay for a funeral for their loved ones need not borrow from loan sharks, which charged exorbitant interest rates, or wait for at least two weeks for other insurers to disburse the money. They could hold the bereavement services immediately.

Affordable sanitation project in East Java

In Singapore, Garden Impact made an early stage investment in Agape Connecting People, which employed sentence serving prisoners, ex-offenders, delinquent youth and socially displaced persons to provide transportation and call centre services.

So far, Garden Impact had invested approximately S$3.5 million in 10 projects in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

The focus of such social impact investing is not in maximising profits, but impact. Besides creating jobs for the vulnerable, the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) include providing decent housing to employees and ensuring that their dependents have access to quality tertiary education.

“Regarding financial sustainability, it is enough if the projects generate 5% annualised returns, even though the norm for other traditional venture capitalists is above 30%,” said Tan, its chief executive.

“But God does bless and multiply resources.”

He believes in a company culture that adopts humility and simplicity. There is no company car policy and all work flights are by budget airlines. 

From being merely a “pew-warmer” in church on Sundays, he now tries hard to be a full time follower of Christ in the marketplace from Monday to Saturday. Spending time to study the Bible and daily prayers had become a non-negotiable fixture in his life.

Said Tan: “I hope to do this meaningful work for the rest of my life. The Bible always reminds us our days are numbered. Thus it is important for us seek to honour God by honouring and loving those whom God loved — the poor and the weak.”

Banking on the “Unbankable”

 

 Agape runs two call centres: One in Changi Men’s Prison for 80 prisoners and another in Ang Mo Kio for nine ex-convicts. It is looking at operating another call centre in Changi Women’s Prison in due course. 

Agape call centre employs prisoners, ex-offenders, delinquent youth and socially displaced persons

Three years ago when ex-convict Anil David felt inspired to set up a call centre to create jobs for ex-offenders, no bank would give him a loan because of his criminal record. He had spent eight years in jail for money laundering.

Anil David (centre) was awarded the 2016 Singapore Venture Capital & Equity Association’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year

But Garden Impact believed in people like Anil, the otherwise “unbankable”. It invested in Agape, though it had much difficulty getting corporate clients at the start because of trust issues with the prisoners, given the climate of heightened sensitivity to confidentiality clauses in the Personal Data Protection Act.

Anil and his team worked hard and secured major contracts from companies such as StarHub. In 2016, Anil was awarded the Singapore Venture Capital & Equity Association’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year.