Forty years ago, a 16-year-old boy left Betong, his small hometown in the South, with only 60 baht in his pocket to look for golden opportunities in Bangkok.
Times flies and the wheel of fortune has favoured Vichit Prakobgosol. He is now owner of CCT Group, one of the top three tour companies focusing on Chinese tourists. He also owns two hotels, Garden Cliff Resort & Spa Pattaya and The Westin Siray Resort & Spa Phuket.
CCT sold more than 200,000 package tours last year and expects sales to grow significantly this year. It has 50 tour buses and 20 vans to serve its customers.
Today, Mr Vichit's business is worth 6 billion baht.
"Turning 60 baht into 6 billion baht was not easy. It was a journey full of chances, problems, successes and failures as well as luck," he says.
Mr Vichit recalls that when his mother gave him the money to travel to Bangkok, he decided to use only 10 baht for meals and transport and kept 50 baht in a purse for future use.
When he arrived in Bangkok, he went to study at Dusit Commercial Vocational College. At the age of 20, he graduated and got his first job in a big tour company, Mandarin, which served the Taiwanese market.
However, he was employed as a messenger rather than a tour guide as he expected.
Nevertheless, Mr Vichit joined the company's group tours to help senior tour guides every weekend without extra pay, hoping to be promoted to tour guide one day if he acquired Chinese-language skills and gained enough experience,
Eighteen months later, his dream to become a guide came true when there was a shortage of tour guides during the Chinese New Year festival.
"I did everything to serve my first tour group. I would have carried my clients if they wanted me to do so," he recalls.
"After all the hard work, I earned 10,000 baht for the first time in my life and I still remember the moment I got such a big sum of money."
After that, he never rejected any group of tourists, either big or small. Professional guides preferred big tour groups but he took care of all clients equally and became the company's rising star guide.
He was always busy handling tour groups every week and managed to earn 1 million baht a year, more than the other guides.
Mr Vichit worked at Mandarin for 12 years as a tour guide and then left to join VV Express, founded by one of Mandarin's shareholders, as operating manager in 1991.
In 1993, he left VV Express to establish his own tour company, CCT Group, with his savings of 3 million baht. After three years in business, tourist arrivals from Taiwan slowed down. This caused the company's monthly profit of 1 million baht to plunge dramatically.
"We needed to do something otherwise we would go broke. We saw the potential of the Chinese market despite China being a communist country and most Chinese people were poor at that time," he says.
During 1990-91, tourist arrivals from China were lower than 100,000, according to CCT Group.
Mr Vichit used his business connections in Taiwan and Hong Kong to contact tour agents in China.
It was not easy penetrating the Chinese tourism market because it was dominated by big travel agents and only government officials had passports and were allowed to travel abroad.
He knocked on the doors of many Chinese travel agents to introduce his CCT Group. That was the start of his tour business in the Chinese market, which helped the company generate higher profits.
CCT sold Thailand package tours at US$40-50 per head per day and did not have optional tour sales.
In 1995, competition began to intensify as China opened up and its people started to travel overseas. A price war began and package tour prices dropped sharply to $25 per head and then fell to $10 in 1996.
The growth of the tour business in China and the increasing number of tour operators in Thailand led to the problem of zero-dollar tours in the following years. The situation later worsened with rising kickback payments between Chinese and Thai tour companies.
But being a pioneer of the Chinese market, Mr Vichit's company managed to stayed ahead of its competitors.
As Chinese tourism started to boom, Mr Vichit invested more than 1 billion baht to open Garden Cliff Resort & Spa Pattaya to tap into the market.
In 2011, CCT Group allocated a 2.5-billion-baht budget to open Westin Siray Resort & Spa Phuket to capitalise further on the ever growing number of Chinese visitors.
"The Chinese market still has room to grow. China is a very big country with a huge population. If only 1% of Chinese people visit Thailand, we will benefit a lot," he says.
At 56, Mr Vichit remains a workaholic. He says the secret ingredients of his success are responsibility, hard work, patience and keeping promises.