Vernon Kuek’s soap opera of a journey began with a series of  less than promising starts.   

At the age of 14, he dropped out of school to become a cleaner.  

When he was 26, he became bankrupt.  

By the age of 30, he had been jailed three times.  

Despite these major setbacks, Kuek defied the odds – rising from a cleaner to become a CEO. 

Today, the 49-year-old is chief executive of a large cleaning company – Primech Services & Engineering – with some 2,500 employees and an annual turnover of about $70 million.  

Although his has been a life of dramatic turns and twists, he would not change anything, said Kuek. It was his valley moments that led him to a turning point – a supernatural encounter with a God he once hated.  

“I realise we can’t escape Him. He pursues us with His love even when we are not seeking Him. Since then, my aim is to lead a purpose-driven life,” he said.  

Kampung life

In his younger days, Kuek grew up in a kampung in Jalan Tua Kong. Sanitation was not a priority and his surroundings were often very dirty.  

Vernon at age 5.

Back then, the former Bedok View secondary student was not interested in studying and had no particular ambitions.  

In his free time, he would watch TV for entertainment. Then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, he recalled, was always talking on TV about his dream for Singapore to be a clean garden city. Kuek was intrigued. 

He knew that there was an opportunity to be seized here. After all, he was not one for the books and did not feel qualified to go for the more elite professions of being a doctor or lawyer.  

While flipping through a Chinese newspaper one day, he noticed an advertisement by cleaning company A&P Maintenance Services, which was looking for a cleaning supervisor. Then 13, he alerted his father who had just lost his sales job.  

His father was offered the job soon after and he would get his son to help out during weekends, paying him $15 a day to help clean offices and toilets in buildings such as Midlink Plaza. 

“It was good money to me and I enjoyed the job. I was even more interested in it when I found out that managers of cleaning companies could earn about $1,700 a month – $200 more than an engineer fresh out of university in the 1980s,” he said.  

Uninterested in school, he dropped out when he was in Secondary 2 and ran away from home to avoid facing his father’s ire. 

He stayed out for a few months until his father relented and told him to come back to work with him, since he wanted to work.  

That was how Kuek became a full-time cleaner earning $430 a month at 14 years old.  

He was hardworking and showed potential, so the company promoted him to become a supervisor barely six months later. 

They also transferred him to Shenton Way to clean offices and toilets in the Central Business District, a sign that they trusted him with their bigger cleaning projects.  

His pay increased to $800, a big deal back then, as it was only a few hundred dollars less than what his father – the main breadwinner of the family – was being paid.  

“The executives working there advised me to go back to school and study. But being a cleaner wasn’t a job I looked down on. I took it as a challenge to excel in the trade I had chosen. I saw it as an essential service that would still be needed 30 years and more down the road,” he said.  

From his job, he learnt the importance of protocol and discipline and he was given the responsibility of supervising the cleaning of all the offices in the Treasury Building and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, including those of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who was then with the Ministry of Trade and Industry.  

By the time Kuek was due for national service, he was already a senior supervisor pulling in $1,100 a month. 

A youth spent in prison

His years of National Service, however, dragged on three years longer than others.   

That was because during his NS days, he often took leave to be with a girl he was keen on during her school hours in the day. His army officer frequently berated him for doing so. One day he simply went AWOL (absent without official leave) for slightly more than two years after being in the army for just four months.  

For that offence, he was sentenced to four months at Queenstown Remand, apart from having to complete the remaining 20 months of his National Service after his incarceration.  

By then, the girl he was seeing had broken up with him in favour of an undergraduate, as she felt that she would not have much of a future with a cleaner.  

He returned to his former company and continued working hard at his job. So competent was he, that he was asked to start and run a subsidiary cleaning company, which meant hiring his own workers to manage projects given to his subsidiary by the parent company.  

As he handled more and more projects, he began raking in a salary of around $25,000 a month, an exorbitant sum for a 25-year-old in the 1990s. 

His affluence attracted a group of friends only interested in getting him to spend his money on them. While living the high life on trips overseas, he left others to run the company, often absenting himself from business meetings.  

“My bosses eventually found out about it and withdrew all the contracts. I was left with debts of $200,000,” said Kuek, who filed for bankruptcy at the age of 26 when creditors started knocking on his doors.  

He cried for five days, he confessed, and then soldiered on to scour the newspapers for another job.  

Eventually he took a job as a supervisor in a cleaning company that paid him $1,300 a month, a far cry from his previous salary. Instead of the fancy BMW 318 that he once drove, he was loaned the use of an 18-year-old pick-up truck by his company.

Determined to work his way up the career ladder again, he also took up a second job supervising the services of a cleaning contractor at a shopping centre to supplement his income.  

The contractor was impressed by his work and made him a franchisee, channeling to him several big cleaning projects for hotels and condominiums.  

Incredibly, not even a year after he was declared a bankrupt, he was again making a five-figure sum every month. 

But there was a problem. He faced cash flow problems as he did not have enough funds to pay the salaries of his workers every two weeks. Payment from the cleaning contracts usually came in after staff salaries were due.

Desperate to ensure that his cleaners received their pay on time, Kuek forged a signature on a cheque under his joint business partner’s name, intending to use the money to tide them over in the interim.

His joint partner reported him to the police for criminal breach of trust in 1999.

Once again, he would spend six months in jail.

The prison cell that he was confined to was the size of a one-room flat. He shared it with nine other inmates. Lying down to sleep in the small space meant that they were living almost cheek by jowl.  

Two months into his sentence, the 30-year-old Vernon sat up and listened to the soft snores around him with a particularly heavy heart.  

“I was in despair and feeling utterly hopeless as I thought about my life,” he said.  

Having bounced back from bankruptcy, he thought he had finally managed to get his career back on track, only to land up in jail again.  

He felt alone. His then-girlfriend had left him and his parents had not visited him in prison so far.

The future looked bleak.  

A supernatural intrusion 

“Why is my life like this?” he asked, to no one in particular. There was nobody for him to talk to. All of them were fast asleep.       

To his astonishment, he discerned a figure descending from the ceiling in what looked like clouds. He was wearing a white robe and bathed in a bright light.   

The man said: “Son, I have a plan for you and your life ahead. Just follow Me with patience.”  

And he disappeared.

Kuek was shocked. No one else was awake.

Could it be Jesus, the Christian God whom he had disdained since childhood because his parents, relatives and neighbours used to warn him to stay away from churches and the God of the ang mohs (foreigners)? 

When his fellow inmates woke up, he went over to a Filipino Catholic man whom he had noticed praying every day, and asked him what Jesus looked like. The man told him Jesus was often pictured in a white robe.  

That night, while the Filipino inmate was praying, Kuek also sat up and talked to God for the first time in his life.  

“If you are the real God, arrange for my parents to visit me and let me have a Bible so that I can know You better,” he said.  

“I was curious. Why is it, at the rock bottom of my life, no other God appeared to me but this guy? Is He the real God?”  

The very next week, his parents visited him.

When he asked how they had found out where he was imprisoned, they told him they had just received a call from the authorities informing them of his whereabouts.  

Vernon with his mother.

Shortly afterwards, he was transferred to the next block to be an “admin I/C”. When he was escorted to the block and the warden opened the gate, he saw a Bible directly in front of him on the bunk bed of the inmate whose job he was about to take over.  

“He was due to be released, so I was also supposed to take over his bed. In the end, I didn’t borrow his Bible as I had already asked my family members to bring one for me, but it was yet another answer to my prayer,” said an incredulous Kuek, who began attending chapel services in prison.  

Confiding in a counsellor at the chapel services about his encounter with the man in white, Kuek asked what it could have meant.

God has chosen you to do His work, was the reply.  

“I didn’t really understand and thought that meant being a missionary. I was reading the Bible every night then but could not understand it much,” he said.

But he was beginning to see God’s protection upon him in prison.

“I was friendly with the prison officers and because of that, many gangsters in there thought I was a spy and threatened to beat me up. But each time that happened, somehow those people would end up getting transferred out,” he said with wonder.  

Upon his released, he attended church for a few months. But his resolve petered out.

Because of his good track record as a franchisee, his former employer took him back and gave him the role of operations director.

But his path would take yet another unexpected turn. In 2000, one of the subcontractors he appointed was caught hiring foreign workers illegally. Being the operations director, he was charged too. Back he went to jail.

“I didn’t know the subcontractor was doing such a thing,” said Kuek, who had to serve his third sentence shortly after his second, as the two sentences did not run concurrently.   

He emerged from jail only four months later.

Back he went into the job market, joining WIS Holdings as an operations manager. 

In 2008, he joined a church in Tampines because “it seemed so peaceful”. By 2010, he was baptised.

That year, however, he was plagued by business failure. He felt he had no choice but to turn to loan sharks. Church members rallied and donated money to him. But he decided to move to Johor Bahru to live for two years to reduce expenses.  

Around that time, Kuek was transferred to Primech, which WIS had acquired. He would commute from Malaysia to Singapore every day for work.  

God was all but forgotten in his busyness.

Rock bottom

Although he finally had a steady job and income, his life felt empty. One night, he was feeling particularly down when he heard a familiar voice. 

“Go and look for Charles,” the voice said. He knew that voice. It was the same one that spoke to him years ago when he was in the prison cell.  

At that time, he had only met Charles two to three times prior. Charles was an investor in his franchise and he remembered Charles praying for him each time they met.  

Within two hours of hearing the mysterious instruction, Kuek met Charles at a café near his house and poured out his life story.

Charles’ reaction was to invite Kuek to his church, Faith Community Baptist Church, and, a few weeks later, to his cell group.

Vernon with Charles at a LoveSingapore event.

 “My life changed 360 degrees after that. God changed my mind, heart and attitude. My career and spiritual life turned around,” said Kuek.  

When he first took over Primech, it employed 200 people and made $500,000 a month. Over seven years, staff strength increased to 1,500 and revenue rose to more than $3 million a month. 

When he wanted to leave in 2017, WIS Holdings asked him to help sell Primech, whose clients include the Changi Airport Group, United Overseas Bank, as well as a long list of luxury hotels. He brought in Hong Kong-led consortium Sapphire Universe, which bought Primech in 2018. 

Kuek now has a 30% stake in the company, and continues to run Primech as well as four other cleaning-related companies that it has acquired, including A&P Maintenance Services – the first cleaning company where he and his father had their start.

Life has come full circle. 

Amazing Grace

Kuek has been intentional in bringing biblical principles to the workplace.

“In the past, meetings could be filled with vulgarities and people would throw documents at each other. We tried to change the culture,” he said.  

The company looks out for its staff, even if it is at the expense of the bottom line.  

Vernon in church. After finding God, his life has taken a 360 degree turn, he says.

Should clients fail to provide Primech’s cleaners with a place to rest in between assignments, or should its staff suffer any verbal abuse, the company would terminate the cleaning contract, Kuek said.

He clings to Proverbs 3:5-6: Trust in the Lord with all of your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. The verses guide him in running his companies. 

“Frankly, I don’t know how to run a company or lead people, so I surrender it totally to God to help me in these areas,” he said. “In the last three years, God has sent so many angels into our SME companies to reform them in aspects such as management, HR, finance, marketing and many more.”  

His staff regularly volunteer with various charities in Singapore, and Kuek has plans to work with churches in neighbouring Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia to build Christian schools and offer jobs to the locals. 

Staff from his company volunteering with elderly beneficiaries under MYMCA.

“I used to think doing His work means being a missionary, but now I know I can do God’s work even in the marketplace, at home, and in cell group,” he said.  

“Amazing Grace”, the hymn, resonates deeply with him – how radical is the grace that “saved a wretch” like him. “I am trying to rely on God to come to total surrender and repentance.

“I have done some bad things and gone some merry go rounds until I learnt my lesson,” he said simply. “I am thankful that God forgives us and never gives up on us until we understand His purpose.

“For hope to be real hope, it needs to be linked to Christ. All other hopes are illusions.”