Think of a child from a poor and troubled family, and the first thought that occurs is that he is unlikely to be very successful in life. But Terry O'Connor has beaten the odds. A youngster from Liverpool who began working at age 13 just to help put food on the table, today he heads a highly successful retail chain that is ready to grow across Asia.
"I think that [struggle] gives you a sense of the value of hard work and transferring the values of hard work is really important. My kids have always done something or the other to earn their money, be it basic things around the house or the charitable work that we all undertake, be it performances at events or roping in friends as volunteers and so on. They have never had an elitist upbringing”
The chief executive officer of Courts Asia Ltd, the Singapore-based electronics and home furnishings chain, has come a long way but says he is far from realising his dreams.
In Bangkok recently to attend an event, Mr O'Connor happily agreed to meet Asia Focus on very short notice, saying it was his policy to never say "no" to journalists. There was a time, he explains, when his company avoided journalists, so reporters would go and talk to competitors, giving them free publicity while leaving his firm in the shadows.
The policy has since changed and when asked for his contact details, the 46-year old CEO — "Call me Terry," he says — even offers his mobile number for future contacts.
Today, Mr O'Connor is considered one of the most accessible CEOs in Singapore's tight-lipped corporate world. He puts it down to the decision he made years ago to seek work that involved interacting more with people rather than the dull clerical jobs he'd been doing.
"If you ask me today, I never thought about achieving this position when I first started my job," he says, though he admits that once he saw his career path taking shape, he was determined to become a top executive by the time he was 30 years of age.
He missed his target, but not by much.
"My own personal goal was 30 and I missed it by two years, but then I was a deputy managing director for two years and my boss was six weeks on and six weeks off, so I was kind of already a half-MD," he recalls.
His climb to the top job was not an easy one, though. Courts, a venerable name in English retailing dating back to 1850 in Canterbury, fell on hard times and went belly-up at home in 2004, leaving only a modest Asian operation concentrated in Singapore and Malaysia, along with a chain of stores in the Caribbean. The Asian operation was spun off with new investors and is now beginning to thrive.
Mr O'Connor began his own retail journey in the UK at age 18 as a trainee buyer — "one of the most boring jobs in my life", he recalls. "I had done work as a shipping clerk and I was bored. I just needed something that would allow me to exercise my social skills and my negotiating ability."
He got the break he sought when the company's chairman asked the buying director to hire a young, "untainted and mouldable" person because he was fed up with people who came from corporate backgrounds. Many of them, the chairman thought, spent too much time on the golf course and seemed better at "selling a story than [selling] the business".
But even the new job Mr O'Connor was offered turned out to be very mundane, mostly updating data in the accounts and filling out purchase orders. Soon, however, more responsibilities came his way.
"I was thrown a lucky curve for me but it was very unfortunate for my boss, who fell ill, and he had to take three to six months off and I was the only person available to do the job," he admits.
The chairman, Mr O'Connor says, was the kind of person who liked to empower others. "He would say, 'If you feel like what you're doing is right for the company, then do it and you won't get into trouble.' "
This was the break the young high-school dropout needed to prove his worth and it offered a lot of opportunity at a young age.
FOLLOW THE BOSS
To this day Mr O'Connor says he has been following his former boss's style of management although he has adapted it to changing times.
"I try to follow what my boss taught me and try to hire young talents. I take a very active human resource role and gave HR a seat at the top table as soon as I had the power," he explains.
Courts Asia is well known for its talent management programme, spending a lot of time identifying people under 30 who have high potential to move up and making sure they get the career help they need. Mr O'Connor admits to a personal motivation for encouraging a youth movement.
"When I was 18 or 19 and facing suppliers, there was a huge amount of discrimination because they would ask me where my boss was," he says.
Courts isn't just about the young, though. Mr O'Connor says people at his company are encouraged to work for as long as they are productive. Courts Asia, he says, pushed up its retirement age to 65 years before the Singapore government did, and there are people over 70 who are still working for the business.
His own views about work and success are rooted in difficult personal experience. "I think that [struggle] gives you a sense of the value of hard work and transferring the values of hard work is really important," he says.
"My kids have always done something or the other to earn their money, be it basic things around the house or the charitable work that we all undertake, be it performances at events or roping in friends as volunteers and so on.
"They have never had an elitist upbringing; they have always been well grounded and been able to work with anybody and converse with anybody. I think the pragmatic nature of my own upbringing hopefully was transferred to them as well."
To make sure that the children understand their father and where they have come from, Mr O'Connor tells them the stories of his life, "not in a melodramatic way" but to show them how fortunate they are to have been granted a gift and not to waste it.
"And ultimately once you shape their values, then one does not have to preach to them every now and then," he says.
EVERYTHING YOUNG
Young Terry O'Connor grew up in a council house with a brick outhouse in Anfield, a stone's throw from the grounds of the Liverpool football club to which he remains devoted.
He recalls his father as "a hard-drinking Irishman [who was] in and out of work most of the time", and his mother as a thoughtful but troubled soul. Still, the couple did the best they could for their two sons but family finances were often dire and the parents' relationship was strained; they divorced when Terry was 11.
Finances got even tighter, and Terry worked various odd jobs to bring in money. His schoolwork began to suffer and after he completed his O-Level exams at age 16, he got a job as a door-to-door salesman. He returned to school briefly but the lure of work was strong.
Doing everything at a young age seems to be a theme in Mr O'Connor's life, from work to corporate success to marriage and fatherhood. By age 19, he was working in retail by day and tending bar at night to pay off his mounting bills. As it happened, he fell in love with the boss's daughter at the pub where he was working.
"Obviously if you're going into the same establishment every evening there's plenty of opportunity to get to know each other," he recalls.
"I thought she was younger than she was and she thought I was older than I was. I guess I was mature for my age and once you spill the beans to each other it's too late," he says of the 13-year age difference.
Within nine months after they met the couple were married in June 1988.
"I tell my friends that we did everything very early. [I was] married by 20, had kids at 23 and 26, now if I reflect that it' the greatest thing we did."
Would he repeat everything if he had the opportunity to change things?
"Yeah of course, I would repeat everything. I'm 46 and I can go on a holiday with my kids on a peer and social basis. Maybe if I was 10 or 20 years older, then, we would not have this kind of relationship."
His son is now in Australia doing odd jobs and finding his way and his daughter is in the UK studying graphic design. Both receive very little financial support from their parents who were dollar millionaires by their early thirties.
UNRELENTING DRIVE
Mr O'Connor became the CEO of Courts when the company was in receivership and had only nine stores in Singapore. Now it has more than 80 stores in Singapore, Malaysia, and now Indonesia. But he's far from finished.
"Oh God I hope not," was his answer when asked if he felt he'd reached the pinnacle of his career. "The moment you think the best is behind you, then your dynamism starts to suffer."
After 14 years as CEO, he's now looking to find the right talent to lead the company to the next level, but he expects to remain a presence at Courts Asia for a long time yet.
"I don't really believe in the concept of retirement," he says. "It would be nice over the next 20 years or so to have a couple of mini-breaks or sabbaticals if the opportunities arise."
However, he says that the moment he and the new talent feel that one of the people on the team is ready to take on the CEO's job and this would be good for the company, "I would have no hesitation to vacate my position for that person. I could sit on the board or help in some other way.
"The ambition will always be there but if I'm in the way then I will get out of the way for that person, and I will never get that person out of the way."
The company's vast operations also give him the opportunity to train people for top jobs via rotation as heads of operations across many areas.
Courts Asia today is mostly owned by private equity investors and they will exit at some point. That would lead to changes in the board and the chairman's role and there would be obvious succession issues, he says.
"If we have a succession it would give me more time to do things that are different as well," he adds. A case in point has been his recent spell as an author.
Why Not? The Story of a Retail Maverick and Courts, has sold more than 7,500 copies so far. It details Courts' corporate journey interwoven with personal reminiscences in a way that Mr O'Connor hopes will inspire young people, not only to enter the retail industry but also to find the voice and courage to move up the corporate ladder.