He is also running late with his studies; at the age of 37, Tan is finally set to complete his Bachelor's degree.

But underestimate the man at your own risk.

Samson Tan, CEO, LeisureGlobe Holdings

Tan may not have a knack for textbooks--he prefers the practical to the theoretical, he admits--but he has enterprise and persistence going for him. While his peers were still in school, Tan was busy stringing one venture after another, traversing the rocky paths of an entrepreneur.

Today, he is CEO of travel specialist LeisureGlobe Holdings. Employing 170 staff in various countries around Asia, the company expects S$20 million (US$12 million) in revenue this year. It recently started an online travel portal called PlentyRooms.com, touting a fuss-free four-step process to bargain hotel reservation.

In a recent interview with CNETAsia, Tan explained that PlentyRooms.com is a commercial venture and a logical step for his brick-and-mortar business. However, it is also a brand-building exercise and the first salvo in LeisureGlobe's assault on the Internet. He has already registered the PlentyShops.com domain name, hoping one day to turn it into an online megastore.

Tell me about the Web ambitions you have for LeisureGlobe Holdings.
Our main business is ground handling, managing inbound agents, and we also wholesale hotel rooms. At Global Tour Management, our main customers are hotel agents. We package programs for travel agents to sell. It's been running for seven and a half years.

In order for my business to grow globally, I need to use the Internet. I need to build a B2B (business-to-business) site where I put in all the rates, where agents can get rooms instantly and don't need to wait.

I want to springboard to the world using this B2B site.

Now we are building it. We just got our IT team. We are going to use our Indian office to write the program. We only have two people in our IT team, but we are going to increase this to 10 staff next month after India's New Year.

In order to build the software, you need a lot of people. It's a big project.

Even before you start coding that B2B site, you have already launched your business-to-consumer (B2C) online offering, PlentyRooms.com. Why is this so, considering the consumer market isn't your core business?
The core business is already running smoothly. It's traditional, not online, but it's running smoothly.

Let B2C go first. Ultimately, you need to have your own branding. You need to build brand loyalty in the Internet age. We are building that brand on the Internet using PlentyRooms.com.

I studied a diploma in Computer Studies, but I did not finish it. All this while--I don't know why-- I just liked computers. I'm not really fanatical about it, but I like to go on the Net. I like to search, I like to understand things. When the Internet came about, I found it very convenient. You get everything on the Net. From there, you start to learn.

Automatically, you log on to Yahoo.com, you go to some of the competitor sites. I started to have the interest and the knowledge to go into the online business. I've seen people working on it and are successful. I started to study the weaknesses of our competitors, then put the pieces in and that's how we started PlentyRooms.com.

What are some of the key features of PlentyRooms.com?
I've gone around and seen some competitor sites. I find that their sites have a lot of pictures that require a lot of downloading time. I find that a waste of time.

We want to get things done very fast. I think we are one of the fastest in the world when it comes to booking of rooms. You cannot get faster than that. Four clicks; we link up your information; you get your rooms done.

A lot of people have praised me for the site. They find that it's very simple, very basic and not complicated. There's a lot of content to read, and not too many pictures. Even NUS (National University of Singapore) lecturers call me: "Mr. Tan, I think your site is solid. How did you come to do such a simple site?"

Yeah. It's simple. You keep it simple, straightforward, and people will like it.

At the end of the day, when people come to the site, we want them to buy something. We don't want them to look at fancy things and then go off to another site after finding the downloading time too long.

Until recently, you did not have a dedicated IT person. Did you run into any problems because of that?
Two years ago, I wanted to create a platform for all the offices to buy products in one place and platform. So my Thai office would buy something from the Philippines office if it needed hotel bookings from the Philippines. So everything would be more stringently accounted for. Internal control would be up to a level where security is 100 percent.

I went for a LETAS (Local Enterprise Technical Assistance Scheme) grant. I paid an IT company and it failed. I just saw a survey: Out of the SMEs that went for the LETAS grant and got an IT company to set up their in-house software, five out of eight failed, got into problems. Maybe the system analysis was wrong before they started to do coding.

What went wrong in your case?
I left it all to my staff, and my staff all knew nuts about IT. I had six people to sit on the panel to deal with the IT guy. And these six all screwed it up because the IT guy didn't know about the travel business, while these six guys knew about the IT business, but everybody had a different idea.

So this guy kept getting the different ideas. Every time he came out to show you something, everything was wrong.

At the end of the day, I got whatever code he had done and paid him off. I kept it and passed it to my IT manager. Some of the code I could still use. I could still see the logic and the flow.

If you want to build software, think about the logic before you start to talk to the IT people, because the IT people are all talking about logic. When they talk to you, they don't talk to you like the conversation between you and me. It's totally different.

A lot of people fail because they don't understand. And I faced it myself, but I learnt from it. I understand that my staff don't think about the logic. They are not IT trained.

So you decided to look for an IT manager.

"That's the problem with SMBs. You don't know whether to get your own IT team. And if you subcontract again, you get problems again."

After this period, I was contemplating. That's the problem with SMBs. You don't know whether to get your own IT team. And if you subcontract again, you get problems again.

So, at the end of the day, I told myself: If I want to go global, I gotta do it. There's no choice. I gotta do it.

I employed one full-time IT manager, sent him to all my offices. He stayed there for one to two weeks and talked to everybody. Since he's a logical person, I made him learn about the business. From there, he knew the business very well.

With IT people, genius is one thing. You need them to be trustworthy. A guy in India could be selling your program by the backdoor tomorrow. So you need somebody trustworthy, and give him certain access only. I had to learn Java, go for a simple, basic course. I asked my lecturer how to keep the source code with me.

You have dabbled in computing before. How do you think your knowledge has helped you?
You need to be hands-on in order to get the benefits. No doubt he is writing the program, he's doing the coding everyday. But I'm sort of sitting next to him. We work as a team.

I dare say that I can go with this guy to a bigger project. I'm very comfortable with him. I know that we can do it.

IT outsourcing is always a sticky issue with business owners. Should they or shouldn't they? I think outsourcing is not a bad idea, but bosses need to have a little bit of IT background. For me, I prefer to get somebody in-house who is trustworthy. He can really help me and we click very well.

I don't mind even giving more incentives. This is an incentive-based world. If you give him more incentives, I don't think the guy will go. Give him more incentives, he works well, he's happy. Everybody is here for our families, that's how I look at it. If you can make sure that it benefits him and his family, he will stay long. I think that's the way out.

Whatever you want to outsource, it's better you have one IT person in-house. You need someone like a system administrator to coordinate. It's very important.

We failed because we didn't have an IT guy. Actually I was the IT guy, but I was not free. I passed it to those guys, which was wrong, and it was a failure we learnt from.

What's next?
I have another enterprising idea. I actually set up one more Web site called PlentyShops.com. Because I have offices in 14 countries, I can use the network to tap the local businesses. With PlentyShops.com, I can actually sell any product that is saleable on the Net.

Isn't that like Amazon?
Yeah. Something like Amazon. Anything that's saleable on the Net. Even slimming pills, which ladies like to buy online, can be sent to their houses.

You seem to be going big with your "Plenty" branding. Apart from PlentyRooms and PlentyShops, you also have PlentyPoints, your loyalty program. What are you doing with that?
We have only the customer's name and e-mail. We don't have much of their particulars. We'll build that later.

If you ask people to fill in all this, join as a member now, a lot of them will not do it. We already know that, so we don't want to tell people to fill in.

Once we start to get these names and e-mail addresses, we will send a form for them to fill out. We ask them questions like: Normally, when you travel, how many people do you travel with? What kind of beds do you like, king-size or queen-size? At the same time, we ask about their income structures and other things.

So we understand our customers' needs and preferences. Say, a certain customer likes resorts more than hotels. Then anytime we have a special price with resorts, we will send it to this bunch of people, so at least you get better responses. We have that in the pipeline.

Soundbuzz's 6-terabyte music box

Back to Special Report Home