Khaokho Talaypu: KT Chan

(intro)

KT: In hindsight, yeah, it was quite an extreme decision. New country, new sector, new role, no real reason why we should be successful but it was an opportunity to be an entrepreneur, you know? And it was the best one I had at the time. I had a partner who was willing to do it, I had investors who were willing to do it. And maybe it’s the overconfidence that comes from having been a management consultant but you tend to jump into the unknown without too much thinking about the consequences.

From SMEVentures, it’s The Search Fund Podcast, a show about hungry entrepreneurs who, instead of starting a business, decide to buy one. These are their stories of success, failure, and the lessons they’ve learned.

Jake: This is Jake Nicholson of SMEVentures and on today’s show, we’re joined by KT Chan, one of the entrepreneurs behind Talaypu, a leading multi-brand Thai company with a portfolio of healthy and natural personal care products. KT is a true globetrotter. He’s originally from Malaysia, which lies just to the south of Thailand, and before launching his search and acquiring a company in Thailand, he attended school in Singapore and completed his undergrad studies in the UK before finishing his master’s in the US. Despite the fact that he can’t speak Thai, KT and his partner have successfully transformed Talaypu from a fairly small operation to a team of over 40 people and counting. All of this while facing challenges from giant conglomerate-shaped competitors, including the likes of P&G, and juggling commitments to a three-generation-old family business in Malaysia. KT is six years into an incredibly challenging but satisfying journey as CEO. In this episode, we’ll learn more about KT’s journey and how he made it happen. KT was one of the first people I spoke to about entrepreneurship through acquisition when exploring opportunities in the eastern hemisphere, and before we get started with his story, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank him for sharing his insights over the years. KT is both brilliant and humble and I’m proud to know him. 

(interview)

Jake: KT, it’s been a couple years but really, really glad to talk with you again. Thank you so much for dedicating some time with us. You have a really interesting story and I’m eager to have you tell it. 

KT: Glad to be here, Jake. 

Jake: So, KT, unlike most searchers who were born and bred in the US or some of the more established search fund markets, most of your experience in life and upbringing has been elsewhere. Can you tell us a little bit about where you’re from and how and where you grew up?

KT: So, I’m from Malaysia originally, my hometown is called Ipoh, which is kind of a quiet town that used to be famous as a tin mining center. But, as some of your listeners may know, the tin industry has since been replaced by the aluminum industry and so it’s a very, very kind of flat, quiet town where most young people kind of have moved out to the city. So, growing up there was kind of very easygoing, very relaxed. At the age of 13, I was sent to a boarding school in Singapore where I spent four years and then, subsequently, I went to the LSE, the London School of Economics, for undergrad.

Jake: The boarding school you went to, that was UWC, right?

KT: That’s right, that’s right. It was called UWCSEA.

Jake: Fairly unique school. Tell us a little bit about that and your experience there.

KT: You know, as mentioned, I came from kind of a quiet town where you didn’t really have a large expat community. UWC is, firstly, an international school so no Singaporeans. Secondly, kind of a very kind of outward looking and kind of global perspective kind of school so I was kind of put together with a lot of international students for the first time and I think it definitely kind of challenged me to, number one, just be better academically and non-academically but, secondly, also kind of adopt kind of more of a global perspective on things that were going on. I definitely also remember being quite inspired kind of meeting some of the parents of my classmates, some of whom were from the corporate world and very successful. It is partially kind of scholars but also a lot of private students so, you know, quite an expensive school. So the mix of students were kind of scholars, children of successful businesspeople, of large business families, certain people from the United Nations, and I think like meeting my classmates’ parents, you know, in contrast to maybe some of the characters that I met in my hometown kind of definitely gave me more of, you know, just really opened my mind to kind of all sorts of things, not sure I’ll be able to be specific in the short amount of time but it was a very big kind of change for me and a big kind of time of growth for me and, subsequently, going to London, to the LSE, it was kind of more of the same but this time set in Europe rather than set in Singapore. Again, you know, like meeting all those people, the professors, learning about what investment banking is, learning about what private equity and consulting is definitely gave me like kind of very, very challenging and, in a way, inspiring kind of view of all of the different things that could be done. I did well at school, at the LSE, and I got accepted into the Boston Consulting Group’s London office. I worked there for about three years, I think, after which I spent a bit of time back home in my family business, which is in palm oil. And then I got accepted into Harvard Business School.

Entrepreneurial beginnings: LSE

Jake: Let’s pause there. Back at LSE, you were president of the Entrepreneur Society. Is that right?

KT: How did you know that?

Jake: I can do my research.

KT: That is impressive. Well, I was also the captain of the badminton team. Did you get that?

Jake: I didn’t get that.

KT: Entrepreneur is more relevant, yeah.

Jake: Did you see yourself as an entrepreneur from early on?

KT: No, no, I don’t think at that point. I had met entrepreneurs, as I mentioned, like whether it was kind of parents of friends from successful entrepreneurs who were parents of friends from boarding school or just kind of reading about them as well and so forth, I kind of had a rough sense of maybe the kind of personalities but I didn’t really know what they did. The Entrepreneurs Society at that time was a small society. I think, today, it might be the largest LSE student society because entrepreneurship has become vastly more interesting, I suppose, as a career option than it used to be. But I suppose I did want to explore the topic. The Entrepreneur Society, being the president allowed me to kind of speak to LSE alums who were successful entrepreneurs. It allowed us to explore the world of pitching, to some extent, so I got much more familiar with business pitches. It allowed us to kind of spend time with university startups, whether they were LSE ones or Oxford ones. And there, you know, again, you kind of start to adopt a bit of, in a way, like anything is possible kind of mindset or you start to learn from like some of the flexibility of the thinking in terms of business model and things like that. And I suppose that kind of stuck with me a little bit, yeah.

Early work experience: BCG and the family business

Jake: Then you chose to go to BCG.

KT: That’s right. That’s right. 

Jake: Why? And tell us about that experience. What did you learn there? How did you change?

KT: Yeah, I think at that point, you know, entrepreneurship was an interesting topic but it wasn’t necessarily my career choice. Having gone to the university, I wanted to get a job in — you know, the best job I could and I felt that BCG is a world-class consulting firm and they kind of offered this kind of promise of the breadth of experience and also very high quality training that I felt would be really, really helpful down the line, not knowing exactly what I wanted to do, you know? The other options as a LSE grad might have been kind of investment banking like at that time or maybe joining one of the corporate companies. Actually, on that, you know, bizarrely, I think it was just a matter of meeting people whom I felt were my people from the firm at BCG, you know? Like they were some of like the nicest and kind of most down-to-earth, super smart people that I had ever met. Having met them, I kind of really wanted to be like them. I’m not sure I ever succeeded but it was really the idea of being able to be part of a firm like that with people like that, like that was the most enticing option at that time. I applied for them as an intern, I failed. I applied a year later for a full-time position and I got in. So that’s how the BCG role started.

Jake: And then you went and worked with your family business for a spell. Can you tell us a little bit about that family business? Was it something that your parents started or how was that set up?

KT: Grandfather.

Jake: Grandfather started it?

KT: Yeah, yeah, my grandfather started it. My granddad was like a classic story of a kind of self-made man. I think my great grandfather emigrated from China and so my grandfather didn’t kind of grow up with a lot and I think he started off with a corner shop, the kind of corner shop where you kind of drag a cart on a bicycle to the port to get your stock and then cycle back and that would be the kind of journey where he would have to stop halfway and take a night at an inn and then get the stock back to his house so it’d be two days whenever he wanted to replenish stock. It was that kind of challenging start. Eventually, he saved up money to buy into a rubber — piece of land to grow rubber and that kind of eventually grew in size. Rubber prices were rising, I think because of World War Two. And from rubber, continued to, you know, buy and sell, buy and sell, and expanded into palm oil and then eventually into palm oil milling, which is just pressing of palm oil for oil. And that’s kind of more or less the business as it is today. Not a giant business but kind of maybe like a large SME. When I joined, I was generation three. My father and my uncles were still managers of the business so I was just kind of put into kind of get some experience at the factory and some other different parts of the business. At the same time, I made some applications on to B school and I got accepted into Harvard and so I went.

Stumbling onto search: exploring entrepreneurial options

Jake: And Harvard is presumably where you came across this idea of entrepreneurship through acquisition.

KT: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. 

Jake: Did it speak to you right away or did it take some time? How did that evolve?

KT: Yeah, I mean, in the first year, I think they do one case specifically about the acquisition of a small company. Wasn’t a particularly notable case. Yeah, I think it was pretty interesting. I definitely kind of still remember that company, you know, and I guess you do hundreds of them and that’s one of the ones that I still remember. And, more importantly, when I was in my first year, I met Nakrin Narula, who became my co-founder at Springtide. So, Nakrin’s Thai and I’m Malaysian and I think in my year, there were three Malaysians and only two Thais. So, the Southeast Asian community, I mean, of course, you know, it’s bigger than Malaysia and Thailand but it’s not such a big community and we would kind of go out for dinner from time to time. Whenever I kind of caught up with Nakrin, you know, he’s also from a family business based in Bangkok and when we talked about this idea of — that was kind of shown in the cases, we kind of got pretty excited about it. I guess, because the idea of taking over other kind of SMEs, having come from a family business background, seemed interesting. It seemed feasible and achievable. It seemed logical. Our personal experience with succession issues, our personal experience with the solidity of some of the business models and profitability of some of these smaller businesses. You know, we were pretty convinced about what we heard that there’s money to be made in investing in SMEs. And then, in the second year, so we took on the Entrepreneurship through Acquisition course, which is run by Professors Yudkoff and Ruback, where you kind of delve into many more cases. And I think throughout that, we were talking about how we would kind of adapt that for Southeast Asia, kind of more potentially as a theoretical exercise but I would say kind of eight, nine months before graduating, we both agreed to start Springtide and do it together and kind of we pushed ahead.

Jake: Now, out of curiosity, did you or Nakrin have the option or the opportunity to go back home and take over the family business?

KT: Oh, I can’t speak for Nakrin, he’s fourth generation and I’m third so taking over is — I think that’s a complicated word, you know? So I guess the simple answer is no, not sure. Not sure, probably not.

Jake: Sure. 

KT: But was the family business in our minds as we selected this career path? Definitely, it was front and center, you know? I think that’s maybe something worth kind of spending a minute on that we weren’t so compelled by the idea that completely excluded any other potential careers, including working in the US, continuing in the corporate world, working with startups in tech or what have you, all of those, you know, they’re so exciting as options kind of post MBA, but when we really think about like a few things as people in our positions, number one, if the family business calls on you, you need to be able to help, maybe not full time but you need to be able to help. Number two, you want to have a certain amount of flexibility to kind of raise your family. I mean, Nakrin was married at the time and a kid was coming soon, you know, unfortunately, I guess, I have met many successful people who, you know — how do you say? In the final analysis, didn’t spend quite enough time with their families and were unhappy as a result and I was determined not to repeat that. So I wanted to choose a career where I would have the flexibility to kind of spend enough time with our family. I think, number three, it was a way of doing something entrepreneurial, which I think both of us wanted to do, that still struck us as feasible, like to us, like doing a search fund or acquiring a small business and growing it, it’s not a moonshot, you know? Like there’s a lot of reasons to love in terms of the risk-return profile of doing something like this and we already kind of knew the right people, whether it would be investors or find brokers, etc., who could help us on the execution phase. So, when you kind of chalk up the scores, pros and cons versus other career kind of options, it definitely landed with search funds. So, would we have done a search fund if neither one of us were in family business? I’ve never thought about that, you know? Your questions on this podcast are definitely helping me think about such a new thing. Yeah, maybe not, you know? I don’t know. I think, at that time, it definitely influenced the decision.

Two-countries-two-partners: Searching in Thailand and Malaysia 

Jake: You and Nakrin, Nakrin is Thai.

KT: Yes.

Jake: And you’re Malaysian, and you decided to search for a company in either Thailand or Malaysia, right? 

KT: Yes. 

Jake: Knowing that — did you have any experience working in Thailand before?

KT: No. As mentioned, you know, the bulk of my experience was with BCG in London and then, at that time, decided that, “Hey, time to start looking towards home. Never worked in the family business, let’s go spend some time there,” so worked in the family business, which is back home in Ipoh, so not in the capital. No experience really with Malaysian corporate. So, no, nothing at all in Thailand up until then and then, you know, with HBS, also no.

Jake: And had Nakrin worked in Malaysia before? 

KT: No. 

Jake: So I guess I’ll ask a slightly provocative question. Why did you guys — why were you guys committed to working together rather than each searching in your own country?

KT: Right, right, you know? Very good question. I would say, you know, like, as a starting point, I think, number one, like we were friends to start with. Number two, I do think that very instinctively, we knew that what we were doing was not going to be easy and it would be kind of nicer to go through the difficult times and the challenges with a partner rather than do it by yourself. I think kind of going 50/50 on two countries, again, just felt like a better kind of risk-reward than going 100 percent in one country. Not to mention that I didn’t have a strong view that Malaysia would be a better country than Thailand for search and Nakrin didn’t have a strong view that Thailand would be better than Malaysia as a search. So I would say with both head and heart kind of going with the two country-two partners approach kind of appealed to us. I don’t know whether he was thinking the same. Maybe for him it was head only, you can ask him.

The acquisition: Khaokho Talaypu

Jake: So, let’s fast forward. Post-acquisition, you have bought this — tell me how to pronounce it.

KT: Khaokho Talaypu.

Jake: Khaokho Talaypu.

KT: It’s one of the best I have ever heard. You know, from someone based in Singapore.

Jake: I had the privilege of spending a little bit of time in Thailand. So — and you are co-managing director with Nakrin of this company, which makes bath products. Shampoo and such?

KT: Absolutely, absolutely. So, Khaokho was actually one of the earlier businesses that we met on the search. As with all your other guests, you know, we kind of just activated bunch of brokers, financial advisors, lawyers, accountants, etc., who might be aware of a business of the right size for sale. When we met the owner of Khaokho, we were very excited. This was a man who founded the business out of passion. He was a lawyer in Bangkok, got kind of disillusioned with that, took the money he had, went to a place in Thailand called Khaokho, which is kind of a mountainous region so, being elevated, they’ve got different weather there so they can plant different kinds of herbs and flowers there. And so, being a fan of kind of nature and the power of natural ingredients, he set about planting from scratch, you know, basically a forest of medicinal herbs and flowers. And as the years went on, I mean, this was a 30-year journey, as the years went on, he started to produce value-added products out of said herbs and by the time we met him, he had 300 SKUs covering personal care products for hair, body, and face, food products, snacks, spa products, massage oils, all sorts of different categories. But, as he looked to retire, his son was not interested in taking over. His son was trained as a chef and didn’t want to do anything other than start a restaurant. So, the business was for sale. We saw a brand that had a passionate founder, therefore, high quality products, very solid but flat sales, albeit small, much smaller than the typical kind of search fund target, by the way, but very stable already in all the distribution channels, which is critical in FMCG, so all the supermarkets and hypermarkets, and good margin and able to sustain that performance with something like 5,000 US dollars a year in marketing expenses. So the guy was, you know, definitely decided to retire and was investing close to zero into the growth of this business and we thought, we don’t know so much about FMCG but the right number for marketing is not zero and he’s got all these products and made with so much kind of — invented with so much devotion, you know? Like there’s plenty in there. Anyway, so the strategy was kind of take over the brand, move it from Khaokho to Bangkok, and, in Bangkok, of course, apply ourselves but also try to convince talented local staff from large MNCs to come and join us. We were lucky. A lot of the earliest hires that we met were strong hires and they’re with us and they continue to kind of be in leadership positions in our business today and we managed to convince people from, you know, Reckitt Benckiser, from Beiersdorf, from leading MNCs to come and join our little project —

Jake: Wow.

KT: — and five years on, kind of happy to say we are about five times the size, revenue wise, of what we acquired. And, more importantly, for me, last year, we were officially the number one shampoo in the herbal category in Thailand, which means, at least from a strategic point of view, from a defensibility point of view, that’s a position that we should not lose and it kind of — how do you say? Like verifies the thesis that you can take over a sleepy local brand and make it a local champion brand, so to speak. And since then, we’ve been trying to kind of replicate that.

Realizing synergies: The search partnership

Jake: Now, KT, I wanna go back to this idea of you being new to the country, new to the industry, new to the role, the language, you do have a partner who checked several of those boxes but you are also managing director of this company —

KT: Yes, yes.

Jake: — and you wanna make some pretty significant changes and do things. How did you manage that? Was it a clear division of responsibility? You did things that didn’t require that local knowledge? How did you leverage the partnership to make that work?

KT: With regards to the partnership, I think like — and, again, I think it’d be interesting for you to talk to Nakrin about this, but it wasn’t a high risk — because I had Nakrin, it wasn’t such a big risky decision for me to go in, you know? Like you have to understand that the guy is, firstly, he’s very strong, kind of as a decision maker, as a manager, as a business person. But, secondly, he’s also like extremely, extremely accommodative and supportive of me as his non-Thai-speaking partner. He and I knew equally little about the sector, he and I knew equally little about managing a small business, but he was the only one who spoke fluent Thai so he definitely supported me a lot in the earliest days. Very simply, if it could be done without speaking Thai entirely, I would work on it. If it needed Thai-speaking capabilities, he would do it. And as you can imagine, most of it is his. And for everything that, as much as possible, we worked on things together and we tried to make decisions together. I think we were very conscious of the fact that we were going into something new. He and I are naturally — yeah, I would say that we tried to be as careful as possible. So we would check each other’s work a lot, we would check each other’s decisions a lot throughout the whole process and that helped navigate, yeah, some of the uncertainty. But in hindsight, yeah, it was quite an extreme decision. New country, new sector, new role, no real reason why we should be successful but it was an opportunity to be an entrepreneur, you know? And it was the best one I had at the time. I had a partner who was willing to do it, I had investors who were willing to do it. And maybe it’s the overconfidence that comes from having been a management consultant but you tend to jump into the unknown without too much thinking about the consequences, I suppose.

Pulling levers: Building a local champion

Jake: KT, I think we first spoke maybe four years ago and you’re now five-plus years into this company.

KT: Yeah. 

Jake: When we first spoke, I don’t think you were anywhere close to — I don’t think you were even considering being five times what you were then five years down the line. If I recall, you didn’t consider that to be a goal that you could reasonably have.

KT: No, no, I think at that stage, we were probably still just struggling with kind of operationally having like uprooted a business that was based in a different city seven, eight hours away which had its own factory to a totally different model where we would work with OEM manufacturers, manage differently, completely building out digital teams, digital channels, building out marketing teams. Yeah, I think our concern was operational, just get the boat to float.

Jake: And so what have you done successfully or not over the past five years to bring the company where it is today? What are the levers you’ve pulled, in consulting or MBA speak, to make that happen?

KT: Yeah, I can’t really think about like one aha that like summarizes all that we’ve done. I think if I had to be pushed, I would say that what we’ve done to some degree of success is you’ve got Nakrin and myself who come from kind of consulting backgrounds and MBA backgrounds so we’ve kind of got ideas and frameworks from maybe larger companies or theoretical concepts but not so much real world or small business. You’ve got — then we also attract a bunch of people from MNCs with the idea of, “Hey, apply your skills that you’ve learned at these world-class MNC companies to a local brand and try to build a local champion.” And not all that works on a large scale should be applied to a small company and so a lot of our time starts off with like, “Okay, here’s what an MNC would do,” or, “Here’s our idea of what a large company should do and then let’s kind of mold that or cut it down usually, simplify it, based on the constraints and the resources that we have for a smaller company,” and that applies to so many things from kind of strategic planning process to marketing plan to analysis of sales to, you know, everything, like all the aspects that go into running a small consumer goods brand.

Jake: And you were able to do that, partly, as you said, by drawing on your frameworks and your experience in consulting and your education but also by bringing experienced industry veterans into your company. And that’s — I’d like to hear a little bit about how you did that. That’s a challenge for a lot of small businesses is attracting that kind of talent. Did you just say, “Hey, look, we have a cool product and we’re fancy Harvard guys, come join us”? How did you get them to come?

KT: I guess I have my ideas on them but I don’t know, you know, you have to speak to the staff as well but — especially in the early days, you know, some of them took salary cuts to come and join us too. Yeah, I think they must have been quite excited by the idea.

Jake: Yeah, you sold the dream.

KT: I don’t think it was much more than that. I think they could see that we were dedicated. I think it was important that we were not pure investors. I think they could see that Nakrin and I were pretty hands on. On their first day, you know, like I would ask them what laptop they prefer and go buy the laptop. As in they knew that the people that they were gonna be working with was really, really direct. And then, aside from that, kind of, I think, commercially, they can see the opportunity and, professionally, I think what we try to pitch is the opportunity to grow by really testing some of your ideas on fresh brands. I mean, these guys, we had a lady who used to run Dettol kind of in Asia Pacific, but Dettol’s such a strong brand, you know? How do you know that your plans were actually any good? It’s Dettol. So, you know, I think for some, the opportunity to test their skills on building out a local brand was important. For the junior recruits, what we said was we’re gonna spend as much time with you as possible so you can grow as fast as possible so we’ll teach you everything we can and, more importantly, you’re gonna learn so much because we’re gonna ask you to do so many more things than you’d be asked to do at your current job and you’ll either hate it, hate the lack of structure and leave, or you’ll fight through it and you’ll kind of emerge with like kind of three or four years’ worth of experience having worked here for two or three years kind of idea. 

Jake: Brilliant.

KT: For the more senior people, on reflection, I think what we could offer was a little bit more flexibility. I think that was important. I think to this day, it’s part of our HR document that, especially for the senior leaders, we have a bit of profit sharing, though the company is not super profitable, we’re spending most of our spare money on marketing. The other part of the pitch was that, you know, more leave days than average. We are okay with flexible working hours. We trust you to kind of do your job without having you sign in and sign out which a lot of companies still do. So that allowed certain profiles who maybe had to take unusual hours to take care of parents, take unusual hours to take care of kids, who were struggling to meet their familial responsibilities, you know, that appealed to them to join us and to be able to do a better job outside of work. I think that’s it.

Jake: Are you planning to continue growing organically? Other strategies for how long?

KT: Yeah, I think we’re excited by the fact that Khaokho has successfully grown into a local champion in its very niche subcategory of herbal shampoo. Just to give you a sense, like the herbal shampoo category, if I’m not mistaken, is something like 3 percent of the total shampoo market so it’s not like we’re such a big company but we’re number one in the 3 percent. By the way, before we became the leader of said 3 percent, there were probably kind of 40 local brands, all small, playing in that 3 percent, and today that’s been consolidated to kind of two or three brands, of which we are the largest. So, we can still see those opportunities in other categories in FMCG. We’re gonna focus in personal care so we’re looking at categories like deodorants, maybe something like hair color. We’re looking at inhalers, which is kind of an oil or a bag of herbs that you kind of sniff to refresh yourself. We’re looking at certain packaged food categories as well, certain snack foods, certain sweeteners. Those kinds of smaller categories where a small, local brands has the right to win and maintain a leadership position in a niche, yeah. So, the other kind of thing that we think about as we look to expand our portfolio of brands is to make sure that we’re staying in categories where a small company also has the right to win not just on the front side, on the commercial side, but also on the operational side. So, we focus on sectors where Thailand as a country is strong on the manufacturing side, so personal care, packaged food, like we mentioned, and being strong on the manufacturing side means that there are certain external economies benefits that come from that ecosystem. It’s easier to hire technical experts. It’s easier to hire all sorts of experts. It’s easier to engage a factory on an OEM basis so you never have to kind of build your own. It’s easy to have freelancers to consult on certain one-off projects as you enter a new sector. So we’ve been also very, very conscious as we kind of select where we will play next, but that chapter is yet to be written, yeah. We are just about to start that in the next few years, I think.

Plans for the future

Jake: Do you and Nakrin see yourselves running this company for indefinitely? Would you consider selling at some point? I don’t know what the IPO market is in Thailand but is that a possibility for you?

KT: Yeah, yeah, pretty hot right now is the short answer, but I don’t know if — you know, we would have to successfully I think launch at least three or four more brands into leading positions in niches before we could be sizable enough for a listing, but in terms of time periods, I think we’re very open ended. Relative to the other searches, we did not raise from traditional kind of search fund investors. About 40 percent of our capital comes from our own families and about — the rest of it comes from kind of private businesspeople for whom, you know, kind of pretty long or open-ended investment period is acceptable. So, as they continue to see the company growing and they continue to see a viable strategy to expand and build on what we already have, I think they’re also happy to support. And for us, personally, again, you know, when I last spoke to you, I think my team was probably about 8 to 10 people and life was — some days were really, really tough. You have to do everything, big and small, yourself. I think, today, we are kind of about 40 people and so it’s much more solid processes, kind of much more clear responsibilities and scope of work. So, you know, it’s — Nakrin and I are free to work on kind of business development projects, even pursue other SME investment ideas and so on and so forth. And, again, with the support of our investors, yeah.

Jake: Where do you see yourself in 20 years? Do you think you’ll still be running businesses? Do you think you’ll step back and invest? Will you be involved in your family business? Where would you place your bets?

KT: Well, I highly doubt the family business will be sold within the next 20 years so I think to the extent that I am needed, I will be available on call. The other aspect of it, though, is that, you know, I think Nakrin and I talk about this a lot, like we’re so pleased and lucky, we feel so fortunate that things worked out the way they did. You know, as mentioned, like he has been just the perfect partner to kind of learn all of this from and with. On the commercial side, we continue to be very excited about the opportunities available with SMEs. From time to time, you watch what other people are doing and you think about what they are doing but I come back to kind of that set of criteria that we looked at post graduating Harvard, you want something that is interesting, that is rewarding financially, that is rewarding personally, that challenges you, helps you grow, has some impact on the people you work with. You want the flexibility to be with your family when you need to be. You want the flexibility to spend time in your family business if needed. We don’t see anything else that would be better. We do start to see kind of evolutions of kind of our initial ideas on kind of what sectors or kind of how to invest, and, as mentioned, I think right now, our best idea is to kind of focus more on consumer brands which have strong, like industry level, national kind of advantages, and try to build multi-brand companies because, again, it makes sense financially, it makes sense strategically. Yeah, so I think that, for now, I don’t see us running out of things to do for the foreseeable future, yeah, so still very excited doing it.

Jake: KT, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. We may wanna catch up with you again in a few years and see how things have evolved. In the meantime, on behalf of searchers around the world, just wanna thank you for your support and transparency and the inspiration you give us.

KT: Yeah, no problem at all, Jake. I’m very, very, you know, again, big thank you to you as well for doing all of this. I’m so looking forward to hearing the stories of the other searchers as well.

(outro) 

Jake: Since KT and Nakrin’s acquisition in 2015, their flagship brand, Khaokho, has been consistently growing more than 40 percent year on year, transforming into one of the top three natural haircare brands in Thailand. But KT and his partner don’t intend on stopping there, harboring bigger goals of growing into an even larger multi-brand company. With the success they’ve seen and the work they’ve put in, it seems pretty clear that KT and Nakrin are well on their way to greater things.

(outro)

Thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, you can find more at the searchfundblog.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. I’m Jake Nicholson of SMEVentures and you’re listening to The Search Fund Podcast.