A Boss Supporting Other Bosses
Online, November 7, 2013 (Newswire.com) - "All CEOs around the world are our potential clients."
Says Mee Kim, president and chief executive officer of CEO SUITE, a company that provides serviced offices worldwide equipped with smart technologies. One can hardly find room in Kim's passport, already full with stamps of immigration authorities of various countries. Kim spends almost half of her time outside Korea, handling office affairs for the 14 CEO SUITE centres in 8 leading cities in 7 countries. The company's clientele now includes executives of multinational corporations such as Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and Visa.
"We have named our company 'CEO SUITE' because our specialty is in providing luxurious working spaces for key decision-makers and executives of companies. Asia is rapidly emerging as the new center of gravity in the international economy. Innumerable companies are vying fiercely to enter this region, but the task of finding suitable office spaces equipped with the required network and technology can be very challenging, especially if this is combined with linguistic and cultural barriers. We expect that the demand for services like ours will increase even more rapidly in the coming years."
Thanks to Kim's relentless effort and dedication, CEO SUITE has grown at a rate of over 30% each year since its foundation in 1997. It is now a flourishing company that generates over KRW 20 billion in yearly revenues.
Kim, a leggy polyglot who looks especially good in cocktail dresses with her boyish-looking cropped hair, is often mistaken for a second-generation Korean-American. Contrary to the fact, however, she was born and raised in Busan, Korea. She never would have imagined the life she is having now when she first began to work at a bank after acquiring her undergraduate degree.
"I had been interested in the English language ever since I was a student, but never imagined that I would be working in this line of industry. It was after I started working at Citibank that I realized I really sucked in math. I even got the entire office in trouble by remitting USD 100,000 by Telex, when I was supposed to send only USD 10,000. I often got the numbers I wrote in invoices wrong. My bosses were softhearted and could not tell me to quit. Instead, they kept fixing me up with guys, probably thinking that I would naturally quit working, as Korean women often did back then, once I get married."
Eventually, however, Kim quit because she wanted to find something she could excel at. She shocked people with her bravery when she left a company everyone would have wanted to work in and brazenly went abroad, to Australia, to study.
Even after finishing her one-year-long master's program in marketing at the University of New South Wales, Kim could not find suitable work for herself in Korea. She decided to look elsewhere and came to acquaint herself with the serviced office industry when she started working at Servcorp, a company based in Australia.
"It took me a while to get used to the new job abroad. I had to put up with various forms of ethnic discrimination and found myself compelled to make a choice. I ended up applying for work in the Bangkok office, which the company headquarters had decided to shut down due to the enormous deficits accrued over the years. When I put in my application, everyone had thought I was crazy."
The first and foremost challenge that the 29-year-old novice CEO had to encounter was the obstinacy of the local employees. Forlorn of hope, they were merely waiting for the company to shut down instead of exercising any further initiatives. "I did regret my choice briefly when I saw a finger-long cockroach crossing my bed, but I decided to change things around and actually got people started on work by throwing parties for them and engaging them in conversations as much as I could. I fully immersed myself in work for months, and it started to pay off."
The Bangkok office saw its yearly revenue triple in just a year since Kim joined the office. The company gave her a promotion, upgraded her accommodation from a dingy motel to a decent hotel, and changed her role to the chief executive over the company's operations in Southeast Asia.
Nevertheless, the company later made a decision that led to Kim's resignation from the company.
"I was the de-facto nominee for the top post in Japan throughout the two years I dedicated to pioneer the new market. In the end, the company decided on a blonde, a former fashion model, explaining that a Western looking person would give clients greater trust than an Asian looking girl. It was an explanation I could not accept."
After resigning, Kim decided to visit Jakarta on an invitation from a friend she had gotten to know when she was a student in Australia. Kim saw a great potential for growth in the newly emerging city. It was also in Jakarta that she first met her husband, a man of Chinese descent with overseas upbringing and education. It was there in Jakarta that she envisioned starting her very own serviced office business. Yet, she lacked the capital. The kind of business she envisioned required a lot of early investment and no bank was willing to loan money to a complete novice entrepreneur.
"I sold my apartment in Australia and took out a huge loan on the house that was under my husband's name. I had to take out another loan on the apartment owned by my father in Seoul. My whole extended family's fortune depended on the success or failure of the first office I opened."
In 1997, Indonesia fell victim to the Asian Financial Crisis and became one of the most dangerous regions in the world with rising rates of crime and violence, a month following the establishment of Kim's first serviced office.
Kim's major clients withdrew their employees from Jakarta and shut down their operations in the region.
"Those were testing times. I returned to Korea on a government-chartered flight, with my newborn baby on my back and with my in-laws. My parents wanted to keep me in Korea, at least until the violence in Jakarta subsided. Yet I could not just sit still. I thought about my business and I decided to take flight at night, and managed a flight back to Jakarta several days later."
Kim found inspiring ideas in the crisis. She began to offer to operate local subsidiaries and branches in Jakarta on behalf of her multinational corporate clients.
"Multinational corporations could not withdraw their struggling operations in Jakarta just overnight. Doing so would have been suicidal for brand images in some companies' cases. Others were prevented from doing so by the terms of their contracts. Yet they could not afford to keep their non-Indonesian employees during the crisis. Seizing the moment, I volunteered to help them with their local operations, especially in the areas of personnel management, tax payment, and the like."
Praises for Kim's business spread rapidly in the expatriate community, and she began to receive hundreds of telephone calls from executives struggling to maintain their operations in Jakarta while evacuating their employees.
"Those who came knocking on my door included not only the executives of multinational corporations, but also of companies without permanent personnel bases in Jakarta. In just a year and a half, I made good on all my initial investment, paid my debts back to my husband and father, and even managed to open a second office."
CEO SUITE then started to grow at a more consistent pace. Kim had gone on to open up more new offices in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, Manila, Bangkok, and other leading cities in Asia. The larger the company grew and the greater the quality and range of services it provided, the higher the satisfaction rate became among clients. CEO SUITE is not just a mere office provider, for travelling executives, secretaries could also help in the accommodation arrangements, and flight bookings.
How does Kim assess the last two decades of her dedication and pursuits?
"Back then, I could not focus on anything else other than CEO SUITE and ensuring its survival. As I struggled with work, the crisis settled, and international clients began to return back to Jakarta. I think I have been blessed. I will continue to work hard, but I will also increase my efforts to maintain a better balance between work and leisure. About a year ago, my husband and I travelled to Buenos Aires and learned how to tango there. We have been practicing tango ever since. We make a handsome pair of dancers."
Kim has also helped to mentor young Korean students and entrepreneurs with their global adventures.
"Young women and mothers often come up to me at book shows telling me that they or their daughters want to become like me. All these praises still embarrass me, but they also remind me of the responsibility I bear and the joy I should share to inspire and motivate people to dream bigger. I want to share the lessons I have learned and help people through lectures and other social programmes."