It was 2016. Germaine Leonora Tan was having dinner with friends at home when her father Tan Kim Yong approached the group bubbling over with excitement. “He was like, ‘Guys, I’m going to open a minimart and I’m going to name it Hao’. We were 20-, 21-year-old kids. We just looked up at him. My friends said, ‘Go for it, uncle’. And he did.”
The first Hao Mart opened its doors in Whampoa. Today, its parent company Hao Corp operates the Hao Mart chain of minimarts, Eccellente by Hao Mart supermarkets, and Hao Halal Hub specialty stores. Last year, it launched grocery and F&B concept mall Taste Orchard at the former OG Orchard Point building, though its lease was recently terminated by the landlord OG.
But Hao Mart scion—which Tan has been referred to, perhaps in due part to the fact that the family residence is a good class bungalow at Jervois Hill—is a label she accepts with acquiescence. It might even be a bit of an overstatement. “People know Hao Mart because it’s a mass-market retailer, but my dad is someone with a lot of side quests and this is just one of them,” she explains.
Her father’s “main quest”, as she puts it, is Advanced Integrated Manufacturing Corp (AIM). It provides subcontract manufacturing services to aerospace, defence, medical, and energy companies, and has factories in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the UK. In aerospace, its manufactured components are installed in the cockpit of commercial aircrafts for the likes of Airbus, Boeing, and Gulfstream, among others.
Tan hasn’t just been sitting on the sidelines of the family business. Up until May of last year, she was burning the candle at both ends as both a media personality and Chief Marketing Officer of Hao Mart. Her media career includes her roles as a 987FM radio DJ, an emcee, and a content creator with some 200,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok.
The 30-year-old only made the call to leave Hao Corp because six years of double-hatting had left her spent. Specifically, she was “past the point of burnout”. Her elder brother Justin still serves as Hao Corp’s Deputy Chief Executive.
Moreover, she felt uneasy about never committing fully to either job. “I think it’s okay to have a main quest and a side quest, but neither of them was a side quest—they were two main quests. I was quite overwhelmed and thought to myself, ‘What do I see myself doing in 10 years?’ I didn’t know, but I decided to focus on just being my dad’s daughter. Let him handle the business while I see how far I can go in my media career.”
Media Maker
Tan isn’t the type to bristle at the suggestion that luck has played a role in her success. In fact, she makes no bones about her lucky break.
In 2015, she placed third in 987 Star, a competition in search of the next 987FM DJ. Because it wasn’t the top spot, she wasn’t offered a contract, but a producer-presenter role at Class 95 serendipitously opened up. Winning the gig launched her career as a radio jockey. “Yes, I had to work hard, and I had to work up the courage to ask to be given a chance. But I’d say that some luck was needed for the role to be available in the first place.”
She acknowledges the rarity of that window of opportunity.
“You could be the hardest worker around, but the market just isn’t hiring. Or you could be gunning for a promotion, but the person in that spot just isn’t moving. I’ve seen it happen so many times in the radio industry. I’ve seen people work their butts off for six, seven years, but never get their coveted radio show slots. They end up leaving. I mean, how long can someone wait?”
Germaine Leonora Tan on right place, right time
With fame a double-edged sword, Tan has been on the receiving end of callous remarks, so she no longer reads comments. “Some of my peers Google themselves to see what people are saying about them, but that’s a hard no for me. I don’t feel any temptation to do so. I don’t think it’s good for me.”
While her prominent social media presence might seem counterproductive to her cause, the reality is that a high follower count is now a requisite in her role as an emcee for corporate and lifestyle brands. “Clients want someone with a large social media following because it helps to amplify their brand coverage. It’s no longer enough to be a good host. You’ve got to be a good host people know,” Tan avers.
Competition is stiff even in her radio job because of the small local market. But while she has been encouraged to explore opportunities overseas, she doesn’t believe that the grass will necessarily be greener on the other side. “People say things like, ‘There are more opportunities elsewhere and they pay you more’. It might make sense for other jobs, but for radio DJs, our work is very localised precisely because we cater to the locals.”
Instead, she strives to be at the top of her game through sheer conscientiousness. It helps that she isn’t afraid to divide the pie, passing on hosting jobs she’s unable to take on to colleagues and counterparts. “I’m thankful for all the opportunities and am not afraid to share. I believe that the more you give out, the more you receive.”
Former Marketer
Imaginably, the six years Tan spent at Hao Mart gave her a front row seat to grocery retail’s challenges. “The margins in this business aren’t exceptional, but the costs keep going up, whether for manpower, rental or utilities. Bigger chains absorb more of the costs for consumers, but the smaller chains struggle,” she makes plain. She reckons that the recent boom in specialty supermarkets is a good sign because it’s an indication of smaller chains finding their respective niches.
When she used to be the Chief Marketing Officer at Hao Mart, she’d employ guerrilla marketing strategies to overcome budget constraints. When Hao Megamart at The Grandstand was still operational—it only closed because SLA reclaimed the land, she says—she ran a campaign that allowed participants to walk away with all the goods they filled their carts with in five minutes. They ended up clearing the bird’s nests off the shelves, she recounts with a laugh.
Although no longer a part of the business, Tan finds the skills she honed during her stint to still be relevant, particularly in people management. “Managing people was challenging. It forced me to learn a lot of soft skills. It made me go up to my boss at my media job and say, ‘You’re doing a great job’.”
She attributes her work ethic to her father, the son of a bak chor mee hawker who has lived many lives. Prior to becoming a businessman, he held a string of jobs including selling pens door-to-door. He and his identical twin brother founded AIM and share a nifty party trick: unlocking each other’s phones with their faces.
Tan has since moved out of the family home to live with her fiance Andrew Li, the CEO of Zouk Group, but visits her parents at least once a week. Her father continues to impart lessons during these pockets of time together. “He loves talking about everything, whether it’s life or business. He was just giving me the rundown on mortgages the other day.”
They used to have an “unhealthy dynamic” when working together, though perhaps not in the way one would think. “Andrew always tells me, ‘Your dad can’t say no to you’, which is why it was challenging working with him. We can’t have that dynamic at work.”
She pauses when asked if she thinks there is truth to that statement. “I think he finds it difficult to say no to me, but I don’t understand why. Someone tell him he can say no to me. It’s fine,” she replies earnestly.
This is despite him being a “typical Asian father”. “He’ll never say he’s proud of me lah, but when I meet his friends, he’ll be like, ‘This is my daughter, 987FM DJ. Mediacorp DJ.’ He’s affectionate in his own way.”
Rising Altruist
In spite of the aplomb she projects on the outside, Tan doesn’t shy away from confronting vulnerability on the inside. She reveals that she was put through the wringer four years ago when a business she founded, a subscription-based digital platform for children’s enrichment and extracurricular activities, went belly up.
“I was very ashamed of how badly it failed. I refused to talk about it for years. In retrospect, I think I was crazy. How could I have succeeded when I’d already spread myself so thin—running a business on top of my media job and the family business? I went in with blind confidence, but I didn’t have the resilience to support it.”
Germaine Leonora Tan on diving head first
Time has healed the wound. It helps that she had some takeaways from the episode. “For example, when it comes to business, never use your own money when you can raise funds. This ensures you work harder because you’re accountable to someone else. And, I guess, it’s just not your money,” she says candidly as we both crack up.
Bouncing back has taken the form of Brave Voices, an initiative she launched last year that partners with non-profit organisations to teach public speaking skills to children from underprivileged backgrounds. Thus far, she has worked with Children’s Wishing Well and Yong-en Care Centre to hold workshops during major school holidays, and has even taken it upon herself to give the students a tour of the 987FM recording studio.
Whether or not driven by a sense of noblesse oblige, Tan’s efforts can’t be disregarded—every minute she pours into Brave Voices is on a voluntary basis. Because she didn’t have any contacts at the outset, she started out by cold-emailing non-profit organisations about what she could offer. “Many of them have enough volunteers. What they need is someone who can offer something more concrete, like knowledge. I was like, ‘What value can I bring? I’ve been in my media career for 10 years. I guess I know something about speaking.”
Brave Voices originally stemmed from an identity crisis, she reveals. “After 10 years in the media industry, I was like, ‘Who am I?’ I brought this up to my executive coach Alex Butt and he said, ‘You’re experiencing incongruence because you have no identity’. I was like, ‘Woah, this is harsh but true’.”
Undertaking another business venture isn’t off the table for her, but it won’t be taking place anytime soon since she’s preparing for her wedding next year. She and Li are also hoping to add children to their family, which currently includes two dogs, Toro and Miso.
Given that a tree is known by its fruit, Tan’s actions paint us a clear picture of her values: to give as much as she has had the privilege of receiving. She defines success by the relationships she builds. “Money may be a part of it, but success is really who we are in relation to the world. A lot of us associate our identities with our jobs, but what if we lose our jobs one day? Then who are we?
“I used to want to make a big impact, but along the way I have learnt that small steps are equally important. I just want to leave the world a little better than when I found it.”
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Photography Joel Low
Styling Chia Wei Choong
Hair Aung Apichai/Arly using Kevin.Murphy & Tuft
Makeup Nicole Ang/The Suburbs Studio, using Chanel Beauty
Photography assistant Eddie Teo
Styling assistant Megan Lim
