After A Female Entrepreneur’s Journey at NUS Entrepreneurship Week

She’s only 20, but runs two businesses. The other saw her chain of One.99 stores go from 14 million turnover to bust within a short span of time. Meet Diana Sabrain of Physique Makeover and Sexyfemalemarketing, and Nanz Chong of the One.99 chain.

Many lessons of entrepreneurship and life were dished out by these two enterprising women throughout the discussion. In deciding whether to start a business, Diana talked about the need for both passion and opportunity. If passion does not exist, the entrepreneur will quickly be drained; yet, an ingredient that is often not mentioned is that of opportunity. For her, this means meeting and knowing the right people so that you can do partnerships that will help your business. (We have some tips on networking here, here and here.)

If you’re a budding entrepreneur trying to decide what industry to go into, Nanz invites you to ask yourself,

“What makes you angry and happy very easily? What tickles you? And what can you do without getting paid for 6 months?”

These questions seek to help you find that something or industry that you are passionate about, and which would make your entrepreneurial start a little smoother. However, she also reasons for the other side of the fence: that sometimes it’s wonderful to work for someone for a while, before you dash into some dream or business. You will learn discipline, things like having a report on the table by a certain time.”

Anticipating one of the guilty questions on everyone’s minds, Nanz acknowledged that money is very important and that there is nothing wrong with having money as a motivation for starting a business. Money itself is not the corrupting factor, but the love of money that is. She admitted that for her, she was driven by money to be successful and we all have to agree with her that money is a good motivation. What we must see is that money wears the personality and characteristics of its owner. If you have money, you can help built lives and schools, enrich your education or someone else’s. All of which are noble goals to have.

Moving on to one of the questions many budding female entrepreneurs might ask themselves, is that whether they have to be a man to succeed in business? Both Diana and Nanz agreed that female entrepreneurs do not have to pretend to be macho or to try to adopt ‘male characteristics’. Instead, female entrepreneurs should retain and enjoy their femininity.

Be they male or female, each person has personal qualities that can enable them to succeed in business. In fact, being female can even be a strength amongst male counterparts. Traditionally female characteristics like a greater sensitivity to emotions could be a great strength rather than a weakness, enabling the female entrepreneur to reach out more to her team and employees and thus forge stronger personal links, and in time to come, a stronger company.

Photo from left: Diana Sabrain, Nanz Chong, moderator

About The Author

Gwendolyn Regina T - Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief

Apart from SGE, Gwen is also a Partner at Thymos Capital, where she focuses on early stage investments in technology firms. She has had two exits out of her investments via the firm, one of which is iHipo. A frequent judge for business competitions both locally and overseas, she graduated from the National University of Singapore. Gwen also spent some time in Silicon Valley and studied in Stanford University under the NUS Overseas College programme. Gwen is a mentor at Spanish incubator Tetuan Valley, Polish incubator Gamma Rebels, the Singapore Ambassador for the Sandbox network and the Singapore curator for StartupDigest. She enjoys languages, travelling, dance and adventure sports. Gwen can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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