When Royal Pek Wen Yang graduated from Singapore Management University in 2018, he never expected that he would get into F&B.
With three branches islandwide and a fourth one in the pipeline, it seems like Royal's career switch has paid off. However, he tells AsiaOne that this came with its own costs.For Royal, what started out as potential side hustle eventually became a full-time job. As none of them had any prior background in F&B — Alan was in engineering and Fenny studied Chinese language — so they decided to pick up some culinary skills from the chefs who previously worked at the Chinese restaurant.They also started out by selling food from the restaurant's original menu, which consisted of 'cai fan' and stir-fry dishes.
For a while, Alan and Fenny ran the show full-time while Royal helped out on a part-time basis he continued juggling his full-time job. "How can I try to blindly hope that it will succeed if I am only doing this part-time? It just doesn't make sense to me that other people are doing huge stints and committing full-time to their brand and then there's me doing it part-time."