But this has become reality in merely 7 years for the once Zi Char cook. He is now the chief executive officer of the Paradise group of restaurant, including the newly opened Taste Paradise restaurant at Ion Orchard and 7 other Chinese restaurants.
From the age of 12, Mr Eldwin Chua already had experience working part-time at MacDonald's. By 16, he was juggling three jobs a day during the school holidays as a convenience store assistant, a hotel banquet helper and kitchen assistant at the seafood restaurant Palm Beach.
He did not think of the dining industry as his source of income, but just some extra money to buy the things he liked - then trendy things like cassette Walkman, pager and stunt bicycles for his own leisure.
But after National Service, he began to wise up and stop spending money chasing materialistic goods. A door of opportunity was opened to Eldwin in 2002 when his grandfather, Mr Chua Seng Kee, asked him to help run his coffee shop in Defu Industrial State.
Eldwin leased out the stalls, ran the drinks stall himself and soon after, took over the Zi Char stall when its owner quit. The quick-thinking business saw it as a business opportunity because if the Zi Char stall was popular, people would come for dinner, and this would at the same time, improve his drinks stall business.
He helped out in the kitchen, cooking simple dishes like fried rice and noodles. But the stall could not run till the evenings.
Undeterred, he launched value-for-money set meals priced from $16.90 for three persons, and new innovative ideas like the creamy butter crab. The set meals were an instant hit, and the new ideas drew crowds after positive reviews of the stall's food appeared on the Straits Times.
Gradually, with the increasing diners, the converted the once 50-seat stall into a 400-seat restaurant. His crew of staff also grew from three to ten.
Eldwin went on to opening the fine-dining Chinese restaurant Taste Paradise in Mosque Street in 2006. Equipped with 4 years of entrepreneurship experience under his belt, he repeated his time-tested strategy of launching new innovative dishes - this time, the shark's fin in Japanese claypot to maintain its taste and heat. This, alongside with another round of positive reviews, helped his new restaurant take off.
Today, Mr Chua has built a food empire of high quality chinese food. Successful entrepreneurship is really not just about luck, as they always say, but a combination of innovation, creativity and perseverance.
It has been my childhood aspiration to become a entrepreneur one day. I am not sure what kind of business I going to run, definitely not food, but this story has nonetheless greatly inspired me that as long as you have determination and flexibility, you can overcome any difficulty. This has been aptly proven by how Mr Chua's value-for-money set dinner instant hit solved the problem of the lack of customers.
It is indeed difficult to survive in a highly competitive and dynamic environment. Taste and trend changes more quicker than before, but Mr Chua's case has no doubt, motivated me that as long as you modestly take a step at a time, eventually with some perseverance, you would succeed one day.
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