Her company, a multinational corporation in the chemical industry, was in the midst of a major restructuring, and her entire department was threatened with layoffs.

One day, her department chief Alex Tan Pang Kee, whose job was in even greater jeopardy, invited her to join his new business venture. Recalls Lek: "'Doris, you want to do this?,' he asked, and I said: 'Ok, let's go.' And the car took off.

With that, Lek became employee number one at Matex, a company supplying dyestuffs and specialty chemicals, while distributing high-end computer equipment for working with color.

She was well aware that it was going to be a rough ride.

Doris Lek, COO, Matex

The challenges were very high," she says. "We did not have much money, so we did everything ourselves. If we had to send goods at midnight, we would do it. We did all the services with our own hands. We did dyeing, we did formulation, we did testing, we did our own accounts, we did everything. We had to be hands-on.

Those were heady days, when she frequently drove her S$1,000 Subaru, destined for the scrap yard, to visit customers in Batu Pahat, Malaysia. It was a case of "doing anything that could help the company make money", she says. This included providing IT support for the systems that she sold.

I received a call early one morning in the early 1990s: 'Doris, the computer cannot work. Something is wrong.' So we rushed all the way to the customer, and we found that the plug was not turned on," she laughs. On another occasion, she answered a complaint about a faulty system, only to find that the user had accidentally changed the brightness of his monitor, turning the screen blank.

The mother of one shares such stories readily, but she knows that these belong in the past now. In her 15-year career with Matex, she has seen the company evolve from a two-person operation to the regional business with almost 400 staff today. In place of the beaten-down car that she owned in 1992, she now drives a slick, new saloon car. When she started off, a table, chair and fan formed her office, but she now has her own little room. It's not much, but sometimes she looks up from her work, and marvels at the road she's traveled.

The administrator is now chief operating officer, yet there are some traits that have never changed. Lek still retains the spirit of hard work and enterprise--she is often the first to arrive and the last to leave the office.

With IT, she challenges her employees to take the hands-on approach--as she herself had, so often in the past.

When there are IT requirements, Lek expects Matex's IT manager Wang Wan Song to evaluate the problem and obtain quotes from three different vendors. But that's not all.

"He knows I'll ask him the last question: What will happen if we want to do it ourselves?" says Lek.

It was such mentality that saw Wang undertake the formidable task of putting together the company's corporate video for its IPO, a job that would have set Matex back at least S$40,000 (US$23,609) if outsourced.

"One morning, I went to his house to fetch him and we went to the Esplanade," recounts Wang. "He borrowed Alex's video camera. He and his son went to shoot, and he did most of the cutting and pasting," says Lek. "If I'm not wrong, he edited more than 20 times."

On another occasion, Wang decided to assemble seven PCs from scratch, saving 30 percent from the list price of off-the-rack full systems.

This is an approach that not all business owners will appreciate, and Lek jokes that Wang's heart is now weaker as a result of all his exertions. But to Lek, the efforts have proven beneficial on the whole.

She says: "If you look into the issue, it's easy to pass it to a vendor to do it. But I find that by giving ourselves a chance to go into this, we see how this can be done. The kind of pain that we went through, at the end of the day, we learnt from it. This is one of the most interesting parts of the technology."

Besides, the cost savings is always welcome, even for a newly-listed SMB like Matex.

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