The family that works together...

Stays together — that's what the Teos are betting on

Tan Hui Leng, huileng@mediacorp.com.sg

WHEN Teri Teo told his family in 2007 that he was quitting his full-time job as a sales manager in the plastics industry, selling his car and pumping in some $300,000 of his savings into a recycled plastics business, they were concerned, to say the least.
After all, he was then drawing a comfortable salary of around $5,000 to $6,000 and his daughter, Si Qi, was just three years old.

"They were worried because my wife and I were putting in so much of our savings into the company," said Mr Teo, the 38-year-old operation director of Winrigo.

"As environmental awareness was not so high then, they also wondered if people would buy the concept of recycled plastic."

Despite their misgivings, the extended family threw their support behind the entrepreneur to help him in whatever way they could — from lending the couple $100,000 in capital to introducing business contacts to tips on where to find sources of plastic.

"Sometimes, when I have to go to our Malaysian factory, my sister or another family member lends me their car," he said. Mr Teo has stakes in two factories in Malaysia and Batam in which Winrigo's trademark recycled plastic, R3plas, is produced.

"My sister, who is in the construction industry, also lends us equipment, such as a forklift, whenever I need it."

And it's not just his seven siblings who are involved; his nieces and 11 nephews are also roped in whenever he needs help.

For example, his nephew has helped him in copywriting. A graphic-savvy niece designed the R3plas logo.

"Our family ties are really strong and family members will always chip in when I ask for help without asking for anything in return," he told Weekend Xtra.

Given the Teo family's initial worries, it must be gratifying for them to see Winrigo's promising outlook as an end-to-end solutions provider of recycled plastic products.

Winrigo not only provides plastic resin like other plastic companies in Singapore, it is also involved in the design and manufacture of products such as plastic bags, crockery and even hospital disposal units. Some of its products are biodegradable.

Nanyang Optical's spectacles are made from recycled plastic are made by Winrigo. The dog poo bags you see at Singapore parks, as well as at Sentosa Cove, are also from the company.

Last year, Winrigo achieved $1 million in sales turnover. His target for this year is $1.5 million, and aims to hit $2.5 million in 2010 and $5 million in 2011.

Mr Teo first realised the potential of recycled plastics when he was working for various plastic resin suppliers some 13 to 14 years ago. "I saw a lot of good, usable plastics thrown away and being wasted," he said. "I realised that these could be recycled and resold. It was a business opportunity."

His first convert was his wife of nine years, 31-year-old Madam Lily Toh, who quit her job in finance to run Winrigo's office and accounts.

"All the while, it has been his goal to set up his own business. What I can do is to give him my full support," she said.

Her 59-year-old father, who is a lorry driver in the logistics business, helps transport cargo for them.

Today, Mr Teo works 16 hours a day and draws less than $2,000 a month. Mdm Toh draws about $1,000. They employ another four staff in Singapore.

Mr Teo admitted candidly that the company is still in the red and that he has not yet returned the $100,000 or so he has borrowed from relatives. However, Mr Teo expects his company to break even by 2012. His confidence stems from the fact that both Winrigos' sales and turnover have spiked by 100 per cent since 2006.

This has been achieved even though recycled plastic costs 3 to 5 per cent more than prime plastic, as much more testing is involved to ensure that the reclaimed plastic is of suitable quality.

"Since the end of 2007, we have received at least one call every day from aunties who ask us where they can buy our recycled products," said Mr Teo.

Apart from the satisfaction that he gets from running the business, his involvement with Winrigo has also made the Teos and their extended family realise how vulnerable Mother Earth is.

"My family is now more aware of sustainability in our daily lives, like reusing and recycling items," he said.

"It's important to be environmentally friendly so that we leave a healthy planet for our next generation."

WEEKENDXTRA

From TODAYOnline.com; see the source article here.

Just me and my girl

36 hours alone with my16-month-old daughter

Nick Duerden, xtra@mediacorp.com.sg

ELENA looks skittish, almost frisky. Odd. "I bought one," she says. "One what?" I ask. "A pregnancy testing kit."

She strides to the toilet, pees, flushes and comes back into the living room, the radioactive stick held tightly in her hand.

"And?" I ask.

"You're going to be a father."

I am not proud of my reaction. I place my head between my knees, as if in an aeroplane about to crash, and the room spins. A strong wave of nausea reaches my throat and I open my mouth, tongue exposed, to vomit. An empty wretch. I burst into howling tears.

"I was hoping for a better reaction," says Elena.

Nine months later, the mother of my child has her legs in stirrups. In the midwife's hands is a baby — mine.

From the baby comes a noise: A sigh, a weary grunt. It is then placed into my hands and I'm told to take the six steps back towards my girlfriend. Elena takes it from me and holds it against her breast. We look from one another to it, and back again.

"Happy?" asks one of the midwives. Truthfully? I have absolutely no idea.

It is 7am on a blazing Saturday morning when Elena leaves me fully alone with our daughter for the first time. She is going to a hen party in Dublin and will be gone 36 hours, promoting me to sole parent. I'll be fine, she tells me. Of course I will. Amaya is 16 months old now, walking and almost talking, a daily wonder to me. Parenthood has finally become fun.

A quarter of an hour later comes the familiar staccato cry from Amaya's room. I bound out of bed with an enthusiasm that scarcely represents my usual morning self, cross the landing in three steps and burst into her room. She is standing up, wailing from what she considers unforgivable inattention, but breaks into a sunshine smile at the sight of me. This bodes well.

We look down into the garden and she points to one corner with mounting excitement. There, we see a mother fox and her six cubs, tiny and gorgeous, the colour of autumn and full of the bounce of new life.

We are captivated by the sight until, after 10 minutes, Amaya wants to get down and do something else. I place her on the floor and stay by the window to watch the mother fox tending its young. From behind me, I hear a noise, the sound of choking.

I turn around and see my daughter still on the floor, her face now a bright and urgent purple, mouth gaping. Her eyes are huge with panic, and she is gesturing at her chest. I drop to the floor and begin to pat her back, gently at first, then harder. Nothing. I have no idea what I am supposed to do, and for several painful moments I draw a complete blank. She continues pointing.

I tilt her head back and look inside her mouth to see that something large and yellow has become wedged at the opening of her throat. It is half of the plastic casing of a Kinder Egg toy, slippery with saliva. It slides out with merciful ease.

Amaya is now breathing freely. She pants like a dog. She clambers on to my lap and hugs me tightly, pressing her hot body against mine. She has never done this before, and I hug her back with equal force, an avalanche of guilt mixing with overwhelming relief.

For the remainder of the day, I am a model parent. I feed Amaya, play with her, keep the television off. I push her high on the swings, accompany her on the roundabout till we very nearly see my Japanese takeaway from last night again, and help her up and down the slide until the sun sets.

At 8pm, she is lying in her cot with only the light from the rotating musical mobile keeping the room from total darkness. In the shadows, her eyes find mine and lock on. Tears flood my eyes.

I sit on the floor by the bars of the cot and allow her to fall asleep with my finger in her grasp, setting an unwise precedent for the nights to come, but right now I don't care. I just want to be right here alongside her, to draw out the moment for as long as I can.

Elena arrives home, finally. As my wife bends down to kiss me, she sees tears streaming down my cheeks. Instantly, she panics: "What is it? Is it Amaya? What happened? What have you done?"

I shake my head, smiling. "I think maybe my daughter loves me," I say.

She looks at me, confused. "And you've only just realised?" THE GUARDIAN

WEEKENDXTRA

From TODAYOnline.com; see the source article here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mommy Mode (momblognetwork.com)

Tinker, tailor, soldier, banker

So much money, so little time for family — why you should think twice before entering the finance sector

David Leonhardt, xtra@mediacorp.com.sg

THE big influx of highly educated workers into finance in the last two decades has been the subject of some national hand-wringing in the United States lately. President Barack Obama, college presidents and economists have all worried aloud that Wall Street has hoarded human resources that might otherwise have gone to science, education, medicine or other fields.

Now, new research is suggesting that the shift also brought another cost — a cost that fell mainly on the people, especially women, who took jobs in finance. Among elite white-collar fields, finance appears to be uniquely difficult for anyone trying to combine work and family.

Finance, on this score, is worse than law and worse than academia. It is far worse than medicine, which emerges from the research as the highly-paid profession with the most flexibility. Near finance at the bottom of the list is consulting, another field that became more popular in the last two decades.

The research, by Professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, answers a question that college students, for all their careful career planning, rarely consider: Which jobs offer the best chance at balancing work and family life? A decade or two after college, however, that question often comes to dominate conversations among friends and between spouses.

On almost every aspect of work-life balance, finance and consulting look pretty bad. People who take time off in those fields suffer large penalties, both in terms of money and career opportunities, once they return to full-time work. And part-time jobs are hard to come by, which often forces people to make a choice between working a 70-hour week and leaving a job entirely.

One set of statistics neatly summarises the findings. After surveying Harvard College alumni 15 years after graduation, Goldin and Katz estimated the average financial penalty for someone who had taken a year and a half off and then returned to work. In medicine, that person earned 16 per cent less than a similar doctor who had not taken time off. Among people with no graduate degree, the gap was 25 per cent. For both lawyers and PhDs, it was about 29 per cent.

For MBA's, a group dominated by finance workers and consultants, it was 41 per cent. Given how much money many make, they can probably do just fine even after such a pay cut. Yet the size of it suggests that time off puts them on a completely different career track.

"The good news is that there are at least some professions where women have been able to carve out a set of policies that are compatible with family life," Columbia professor Jane Waldfogel, who studies families, told me. "The challenge for the next generation — and it isn't just about women — is to extend this to other occupations."

Professors Goldin and Katz, who are two of the country's leading labour economists and have published the crux of these findings in the American Economic Review, studied Harvard graduates from the last 40 years. That allowed them to compare a fairly similar group of students over a long period, but had the disadvantage of creating a decidedly atypical survey group.

So the two economists compared their results to two other surveys — the National Survey of College Graduates, run by the National Science Foundation, and a study of University of Chicago business school graduates — and found broadly consistent patterns.

According to the most recent National Survey, for instance, 21 per cent of doctors in their late 30s and early 40s work less than 35 hours a week. The share was roughly 14 per cent for MBA graduates, as it was for lawyers and people with PhDs.

The idea that medicine offers more choices than other elite professions may come as a surprise, given that medical training requires notoriously long hours of study. But once doctors reach their 30s, many of them seem to be rewarded with a wider set of options than their counterparts in other fields.

Also, in medicine, group practices are now the norm, and the doctors take turns being on call. A family's primary obstetrician isn't guaranteed to be the one who delivers the baby. In many practices, every doctor will see a woman at least once during her pregnancy, so that she knows everyone who may deliver her baby.

Wall Street, consulting firms and law firms have resisted this group approach to work. The partners claim the work is too complicated to be handed from one employee to another. In some cases, that's no doubt true. Often, though, I bet it isn't. "Why are women's bodies less complicated than someone's account?" Goldin wryly asks.

The general resistance to group work — and to flexibility — instead seems to stem from old habits, much as obstetricians once would have scoffed at the notion of a group practice. The downsides of allowing people to share work would probably be outweighed by the benefits of being able to hire talented people who want satisfying careers and aren't willing to work 70-hour weeks.

For now, that group remains largely female. But there is some reason to hope that fathers will be increasingly drawn to such jobs as well. Over the last four decades, according to the economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, men have increased the average amount of time they spend taking care of children.

The question of how to balance work and family is almost inevitably a thorny one. Easy answers, free of compromise and sacrifice, are rare, especially for people who don't earn nearly as much money as doctors.

But if you're a teenager or college student trying to decide what to do with your life, you at least may want to start thinking about the question. I promise: Most of you will spend a lot of time thinking about it later. THE NEW YORK TIMES

WEEKENDXTRA

From TODAYOnline.com; see the source article here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Economic Scene: Careers That Work for Families (nytimes.com)
• Reduced inequality: the upside of the recession (economist.com)
• Work vs. family, finance vs. medicine (hermenaut.org)
• Honoring Catalysts For Girls' Science Education (xconomy.com)
• without education... (schansblog.blogspot.com)
• Mummie wars (economist.com)
• Societal changes through tuition rates (washingtonmonthly.com)