From a silent fabrication yard to five parks in two countries

My father kept a hardware shop near the port in Surabaya, and the contractors who bought from him on credit were the first business people I knew. He could tell which of them was in trouble weeks before they admitted it, because they began to pay him late and sent a different nephew to collect the steel. I did not realise then that he was teaching me the most useful thing I know about construction.

I studied civil engineering at Wirasena Institute of Technology in Surabaya, graduating in August 1997, and two months later joined PT Sindarupa Konstruksi, a family-owned contractor building factories in the industrial estates around the city. Within weeks the rupiah began to fall. Early in 1998, on a garment factory south of Surabaya, I arrived on a Monday to find our steel fabricator's yard silent. Its men had not been paid for six weeks and had gone home to their villages. Our programme, issued the previous Friday, showed steel erection on schedule. The factory was finished nine months late. Indonesian construction took years to recover, and by 2001 I was one of the few engineers Sindarupa had kept.

In May 2001 I moved to Singapore as a project manager with Daruvan Construction, a family-owned main contractor, building logistics warehouses and pharmaceutical plant buildings. I studied construction management part-time at Rivermere University of Technology and completed my master's degree in 2004. Daruvan made me a project director in 2006. I led a wafer-fab support complex and then, from 2008, a data centre for a financial institution. Those years gave me the contractor's view of an owner: the valuation certified late, the variation never quite agreed, the cash that has to be found before the client pays. In the downturn of 2009 I watched contractors around us protect their programmes by quietly delaying their subcontractors, and I learnt how long that can be hidden from a client who does not ask.

The data centre led to my next role. In March 2011 Halcyra Data Centres, a colocation operator owned by an infrastructure fund, hired me to direct the delivery of its critical facilities. In five years we built two data centres in Singapore and one in Jakarta, 43 megawatts of IT capacity in all. Data centres taught me redundancy as a practice rather than a word: every pump, chiller and feeder must be made to fail on test, under load, before a customer is allowed near it. They also taught me that cooling is a negotiation between electricity and water, and that somebody has to decide which one to spend.

In July 2016 Selvanta asked me to run its three Vietnam parks from Hanoi. I had built buildings; I had never run places where more than 100,000 people came to work every day. For four and a half years I learnt estate services, wastewater permits, provincial relationships, dormitory standards and the complaints of tenants whose production lines had stopped. By 2020 every park general manager's post was held by a Vietnamese colleague. I returned to Singapore as chief operating officer in January 2021, in a year when COVID-19 restrictions in southern Vietnam obliged many of our tenants to house workers on their own sites to keep producing.

As COO I am responsible for construction, estate services, utilities, safety and the data-centre campus across five parks, with six direct reports and about 1,180 colleagues. Our country directors in Vietnam and Indonesia run the parks; I set the standards they share and decide where they must not differ. I spend about a third of my working time on site. My test for any report is whether a park general manager would recognise it as true from the gate. I ask my teams to bring me a bad number early, and I try to take it to the board in the same week.

Inside our industry I am probably known for three positions that cost money in the short run: that an owner should check whether its contractor is paying the people below it, that a park should agree how it will ration power before it has to, and that a data-centre tenant's request for megawatts should be weighed against what an island's water can bear. I hold them because I have seen the alternatives on site. I am now preparing for a second, non-executive role alongside my executive one, on the board of a company whose business is building or running physical assets.

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Languages / English · Bahasa Indonesia · Javanese · Vietnamese (working knowledge)