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19-05-2013, 09:30 AM
Another fast-car enthusiast! 
The Straits Times
www.straitstimes.com
Published on May 19, 2013
Wong Kim Hoh meets... Daniel Charles
Daredevil firmly in the driver's seat
Grit, enterprise drive 26-year-old car enthusiast through bad patches to build racing business
By Wong Kim Hoh
About two weeks ago, a 50-year-old South African businessman and his 18-year-old son flew to Brussels from Johannesburg.
For the next seven days, the pair had only one thing on their mind: speed. They got behind the wheels of three super cars - a Ferrari 458, a McLaren MP4-12C and a Maserati GranTurismo - and tore down the tracks of the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, where the Formula One Belgian Grand Prix is held.
On one day, they had lessons with Sabine Smith, a TV personality and German professional motor racing driver for BMW and Porsche.
They also drove the speed machines to Nurburgring, a motor sports complex south of Cologne in Germany.
During the trip, the duo stayed in suites in swanky hotels including the Steigenberger Grandhotel in Brussels and Manoir de Lebioles, an ultra-luxurious country manor in the heart of the Ardennes forests. A helicopter ferried them to the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps.
This ultimate bonding holiday cost more than $100,000. It was arranged by Mr Daniel Charles, a young Singaporean in the business of making dreams come true - especially those which involve tar, speed, roaring engines and the smell of burning rubber.
The 26-year-old is the founder of Global Racing Schools, which puts together exclusive driving experiences and race car training for professional and leisure drivers in more than 200 locations worldwide.
He has been hell-bent on entering the racing business since he was 12. "The adrenaline and controlled danger that motor sports offer are unlike anything else you can experience," he says.
If he sounds like a daredevil, that's because he is a daredevil. He built Global Racing Schools in 2007 from scratch and through trial and error; he had neither formal business training nor investors or mentors.
"A big-time entrepreneur once said that to enter an industry, you begin by sticking one finger in. Before you know it, you will have one hand in, and then an arm in and then a foot in," says Mr Charles.
Lanky and articulate, he is the elder of two sons of an oil rig diver and an accountant. "My parents got divorced before I was five. He just left a note on the table which said, 'I'm gone'. My mum was stuck with two kids," he recalls. He has not seen his father since.
Because she had to work, his mother entrusted her two boys to the care of two of her sisters. "I went to live with one aunt in Yishun, my brother went to another aunt in Jurong. I saw my mother only at night. She struggled a lot. She had to work, attend night classes because she had only O levels then, and help me with my homework. But she eventually became an accountant," he says.
When he was 15, his mother got married again, to an Australian IT professional whose surname he took.
Although he gave no trouble at Peiying Primary School, he turned rebellious at Sembawang Secondary. "I was hanging out with bad company. My friends were in gangs, they were smoking, stealing stuff," he says.
With a grimace, he admits he did the same on a couple of occasions. "I was not a full-fledged gangster. I guess I was looking for my identity and trying to fit in," he says. "But I almost got expelled. I was caught vandalising, pouring acid into fish tanks. I did months of detention and cleaning in school. It was epic."
Fortunately he straightened out, helped by a teacher who never gave up on him. "She would make me stay back after class to talk to me and she made me write papers after school. I was resentful then but she really helped me a lot. Her name is Madam Azwiza," he says.
He developed his racing obsession at 12, after an uncle took him to a go-karting track in Jurong. "I was obsessed after that. The smell of sweaty helmets and the fumes from the vehicles, I loved it so much."
He would hit the track every week, just for a 10-minute session which cost $30 then. Funding the habit required a lot of scrimping and saving, and innovative entrepreneurial schemes.
"Students would always forget to bring art paper during art lessons. But I always brought stacks, and would sell each piece for 50 cents. A stack cost me only $2.50 so I was making 500 per cent profit."
He also rented out ties on days when students were required to wear one. "I had several, picked up from school fields or the canteen. I rented them out for $1 a day," he recalls with a grin.
Grand plans to build his own go-kart track started brewing in his head, and led to some zany behaviour. Together with his cousin Andrew Gan, a year younger, he would read up on the business.
"We would do research, come up with layouts of our track, look at land prices, weigh the pros and cons of regional locations. We even called up go-karting operators in the United States, telling them we were interested in bringing their concept over to Asia," he says with infectious enthusiasm. "We were kids, what did we know? But we just wanted to know, so that if and when the day came, we would be ready. We just needed one lucky break."
Not surprisingly, his O-level results suffered.
"I got 38 points," he says, referring to the aggregate for his best five subjects. "I took it again as a private candidate the next year, and scored nine points."
He went on to study marketing at Nanyang Polytechnic.
His mother and friends thought he was mad.
"Marketing was a 19-pointer course. With nine points, I could have qualified for better courses like bio-science but I told myself I needed to know marketing if I wanted to do business. Moreover, the Formula One was all about marketing anyway," he says.
By then, he had already started his first racing business, DNA Mo-torsports, with his cousin. The company distributed racing products, from engines to suits and helmets.
"I decided I needed a well- known name so I found out what the top three brands in the industry were. Two were already in Singapore. I wrote to CRG, the one which was not, and said: 'You can either remain in this market with no dealer or you can appoint me until a better guy comes along.' There was no tie-in contract, so they gave it a go," he says.
"All that I asked was that they put my name down as distributor on their website."
The first order - for a $15,000 go-kart and engine - came very soon after. "The guy could have ordered it directly from Italy but he did it through me, a 16-year-old kid," he says.
But everything that could go wrong went wrong. Not only was the shipment delayed, it also ended up in South Africa. And when it finally arrived, certain parts were missing.
"When I opened the package, I got a shock. They were just parts and there was no instruction manual on how to assemble them. They assumed you knew how to put it together," he says.
He had to call a competitor to help him assemble it.
"It was awful. It's like you are the Ferrari dealer and you have to get the Lamborghini guy to fix your engine," he says. "Fortunately my customer was a forgiving guy. He actually ordered another engine for me just to have spare parts."
The episode, he says, was hard to live down. "The industry remembered me as the guy who did not know how to fix a go-kart," he says.
But he refused to give up. He built himself a website and started stocking other motor sports products. "At one time, I was stocking 7,000 different types of products - from helmets to gloves."
DNA lasted two years. It did not, he candidly says, make much money.
"It wasn't something we did for money, it was fun. We did everything blind, learnt everything the hard way and followed what business books said we should do. We'd turn up at go-kart tracks in suits because we wanted to create a good impression but people were laughing at us."
But the experience taught him a lot, made him a lot of friends and got him a wide network of business contacts. It also laid the groundwork for Global Racing Schools which he set up six years ago.
One of his customers asked him if he knew where his child could get training to be a professional racer. It set him thinking.
"The idea was to link up people who wanted to be race drivers to racing schools overseas," he says, adding that he negotiated with these foreign schools for a commission each time he sent clients their way.
"My first client was a Singaporean. He was going to be in Germany on a business trip so we assigned him a racing driver and a car at the Nurburgring," he recalls.
The business took quite a while to take off.
"We'd get maybe one enquiry a month, and a client once every three or four months," he says. "We didn't make money for three years. Fortunately, we had no overheads."
National service made things more complicated. Made a technician, he had no access to the Internet during the day so he brought in a partner to help him run the company.
He would spend nights answering e-mail and doing night classes for a marketing degree from Curtin University in Australia.
His cousin, Mr Gan, 26, says: "He basically survived on four hours of sleep every day. I remember him going to the pasar malam to buy four alarm clocks so that he could wake up in the morning. But it also shows how determined and dedicated he was."
Mr Charles focused all his energies on building Global Racing Schools after completing his national service.
Along the way, he went through some pretty bad patches.
His partner pulled out, one of the cars he had arranged for a client got damaged and cost him $120,000 in repairs, a company in the United States sued him for copying its business concept, some suppliers did not want to pay him his commission.
"It was a low period. I was in over my head," he says with a sigh.
But he refused to throw in the towel.
"You just press on. I was willing to do anything to make sure that the business survived. Anyway, I've always believed there's a thin line between genius and insanity."
Mr Gan, who has just completed his mechanical engineering degree at Nanyang Technological University, says of his cousin: "We all have doubts but Daniel has an uncanny ability to see past the doubts. He had a very clear vision of where he wanted the company to go."
The turning point came when Mr Charles started to tailor programmes instead of using those offered by schools.
"Very few do what we do. We can offer clients endless possibilities," he says.
Corporate clients started knocking on his door, and helped to get the company into the black two years ago.
Today, Global's clients fall into two categories: corporations and individuals looking for unique driving experiences; and aspiring professional racers looking for training and management advice.
Mr Charles has staff in seven countries including Australia, Belgium, France, the US and Vietnam servicing between 30 and 50 clients a month. Programmes start from $99 for three laps in a Ferrari around a race track to $3,000 for a Formula One driving experience. And if you want to stay in a presidential suite and take a few spins around the EuroSpeedway Lausitz in eastern Germany in a supercar - as a Swedish tycoon recently did - Mr Charles and his team can arrange that too. Just be prepared to pay $20,000 a day.
The young entrepreneur reckons his experiences have made him a lot more prudent and careful.
He has also become a lot more savvy, getting in professionals to teach him how he should control and invest his money.
He wants to scale greater heights.
"We're just scratching the surface with the business. People are willing to spend a lot of money doing this. My dream is to have an office in every major city," says Mr Charles, who lives with his mother, stepfather, younger brother and stepsister in a Yio Chu Kang condominium and gallivants around town in a Ssangyong Musso.
Meanwhile, he has long given up that dream of building a go-kart track.
"It's just not profitable at all."
kimhoh@sph.com.sg
The Straits Times
www.straitstimes.com
Published on May 19, 2013
Wong Kim Hoh meets... Daniel Charles
Daredevil firmly in the driver's seat
Grit, enterprise drive 26-year-old car enthusiast through bad patches to build racing business
By Wong Kim Hoh
About two weeks ago, a 50-year-old South African businessman and his 18-year-old son flew to Brussels from Johannesburg.
For the next seven days, the pair had only one thing on their mind: speed. They got behind the wheels of three super cars - a Ferrari 458, a McLaren MP4-12C and a Maserati GranTurismo - and tore down the tracks of the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, where the Formula One Belgian Grand Prix is held.
On one day, they had lessons with Sabine Smith, a TV personality and German professional motor racing driver for BMW and Porsche.
They also drove the speed machines to Nurburgring, a motor sports complex south of Cologne in Germany.
During the trip, the duo stayed in suites in swanky hotels including the Steigenberger Grandhotel in Brussels and Manoir de Lebioles, an ultra-luxurious country manor in the heart of the Ardennes forests. A helicopter ferried them to the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps.
This ultimate bonding holiday cost more than $100,000. It was arranged by Mr Daniel Charles, a young Singaporean in the business of making dreams come true - especially those which involve tar, speed, roaring engines and the smell of burning rubber.
The 26-year-old is the founder of Global Racing Schools, which puts together exclusive driving experiences and race car training for professional and leisure drivers in more than 200 locations worldwide.
He has been hell-bent on entering the racing business since he was 12. "The adrenaline and controlled danger that motor sports offer are unlike anything else you can experience," he says.
If he sounds like a daredevil, that's because he is a daredevil. He built Global Racing Schools in 2007 from scratch and through trial and error; he had neither formal business training nor investors or mentors.
"A big-time entrepreneur once said that to enter an industry, you begin by sticking one finger in. Before you know it, you will have one hand in, and then an arm in and then a foot in," says Mr Charles.
Lanky and articulate, he is the elder of two sons of an oil rig diver and an accountant. "My parents got divorced before I was five. He just left a note on the table which said, 'I'm gone'. My mum was stuck with two kids," he recalls. He has not seen his father since.
Because she had to work, his mother entrusted her two boys to the care of two of her sisters. "I went to live with one aunt in Yishun, my brother went to another aunt in Jurong. I saw my mother only at night. She struggled a lot. She had to work, attend night classes because she had only O levels then, and help me with my homework. But she eventually became an accountant," he says.
When he was 15, his mother got married again, to an Australian IT professional whose surname he took.
Although he gave no trouble at Peiying Primary School, he turned rebellious at Sembawang Secondary. "I was hanging out with bad company. My friends were in gangs, they were smoking, stealing stuff," he says.
With a grimace, he admits he did the same on a couple of occasions. "I was not a full-fledged gangster. I guess I was looking for my identity and trying to fit in," he says. "But I almost got expelled. I was caught vandalising, pouring acid into fish tanks. I did months of detention and cleaning in school. It was epic."
Fortunately he straightened out, helped by a teacher who never gave up on him. "She would make me stay back after class to talk to me and she made me write papers after school. I was resentful then but she really helped me a lot. Her name is Madam Azwiza," he says.
He developed his racing obsession at 12, after an uncle took him to a go-karting track in Jurong. "I was obsessed after that. The smell of sweaty helmets and the fumes from the vehicles, I loved it so much."
He would hit the track every week, just for a 10-minute session which cost $30 then. Funding the habit required a lot of scrimping and saving, and innovative entrepreneurial schemes.
"Students would always forget to bring art paper during art lessons. But I always brought stacks, and would sell each piece for 50 cents. A stack cost me only $2.50 so I was making 500 per cent profit."
He also rented out ties on days when students were required to wear one. "I had several, picked up from school fields or the canteen. I rented them out for $1 a day," he recalls with a grin.
Grand plans to build his own go-kart track started brewing in his head, and led to some zany behaviour. Together with his cousin Andrew Gan, a year younger, he would read up on the business.
"We would do research, come up with layouts of our track, look at land prices, weigh the pros and cons of regional locations. We even called up go-karting operators in the United States, telling them we were interested in bringing their concept over to Asia," he says with infectious enthusiasm. "We were kids, what did we know? But we just wanted to know, so that if and when the day came, we would be ready. We just needed one lucky break."
Not surprisingly, his O-level results suffered.
"I got 38 points," he says, referring to the aggregate for his best five subjects. "I took it again as a private candidate the next year, and scored nine points."
He went on to study marketing at Nanyang Polytechnic.
His mother and friends thought he was mad.
"Marketing was a 19-pointer course. With nine points, I could have qualified for better courses like bio-science but I told myself I needed to know marketing if I wanted to do business. Moreover, the Formula One was all about marketing anyway," he says.
By then, he had already started his first racing business, DNA Mo-torsports, with his cousin. The company distributed racing products, from engines to suits and helmets.
"I decided I needed a well- known name so I found out what the top three brands in the industry were. Two were already in Singapore. I wrote to CRG, the one which was not, and said: 'You can either remain in this market with no dealer or you can appoint me until a better guy comes along.' There was no tie-in contract, so they gave it a go," he says.
"All that I asked was that they put my name down as distributor on their website."
The first order - for a $15,000 go-kart and engine - came very soon after. "The guy could have ordered it directly from Italy but he did it through me, a 16-year-old kid," he says.
But everything that could go wrong went wrong. Not only was the shipment delayed, it also ended up in South Africa. And when it finally arrived, certain parts were missing.
"When I opened the package, I got a shock. They were just parts and there was no instruction manual on how to assemble them. They assumed you knew how to put it together," he says.
He had to call a competitor to help him assemble it.
"It was awful. It's like you are the Ferrari dealer and you have to get the Lamborghini guy to fix your engine," he says. "Fortunately my customer was a forgiving guy. He actually ordered another engine for me just to have spare parts."
The episode, he says, was hard to live down. "The industry remembered me as the guy who did not know how to fix a go-kart," he says.
But he refused to give up. He built himself a website and started stocking other motor sports products. "At one time, I was stocking 7,000 different types of products - from helmets to gloves."
DNA lasted two years. It did not, he candidly says, make much money.
"It wasn't something we did for money, it was fun. We did everything blind, learnt everything the hard way and followed what business books said we should do. We'd turn up at go-kart tracks in suits because we wanted to create a good impression but people were laughing at us."
But the experience taught him a lot, made him a lot of friends and got him a wide network of business contacts. It also laid the groundwork for Global Racing Schools which he set up six years ago.
One of his customers asked him if he knew where his child could get training to be a professional racer. It set him thinking.
"The idea was to link up people who wanted to be race drivers to racing schools overseas," he says, adding that he negotiated with these foreign schools for a commission each time he sent clients their way.
"My first client was a Singaporean. He was going to be in Germany on a business trip so we assigned him a racing driver and a car at the Nurburgring," he recalls.
The business took quite a while to take off.
"We'd get maybe one enquiry a month, and a client once every three or four months," he says. "We didn't make money for three years. Fortunately, we had no overheads."
National service made things more complicated. Made a technician, he had no access to the Internet during the day so he brought in a partner to help him run the company.
He would spend nights answering e-mail and doing night classes for a marketing degree from Curtin University in Australia.
His cousin, Mr Gan, 26, says: "He basically survived on four hours of sleep every day. I remember him going to the pasar malam to buy four alarm clocks so that he could wake up in the morning. But it also shows how determined and dedicated he was."
Mr Charles focused all his energies on building Global Racing Schools after completing his national service.
Along the way, he went through some pretty bad patches.
His partner pulled out, one of the cars he had arranged for a client got damaged and cost him $120,000 in repairs, a company in the United States sued him for copying its business concept, some suppliers did not want to pay him his commission.
"It was a low period. I was in over my head," he says with a sigh.
But he refused to throw in the towel.
"You just press on. I was willing to do anything to make sure that the business survived. Anyway, I've always believed there's a thin line between genius and insanity."
Mr Gan, who has just completed his mechanical engineering degree at Nanyang Technological University, says of his cousin: "We all have doubts but Daniel has an uncanny ability to see past the doubts. He had a very clear vision of where he wanted the company to go."
The turning point came when Mr Charles started to tailor programmes instead of using those offered by schools.
"Very few do what we do. We can offer clients endless possibilities," he says.
Corporate clients started knocking on his door, and helped to get the company into the black two years ago.
Today, Global's clients fall into two categories: corporations and individuals looking for unique driving experiences; and aspiring professional racers looking for training and management advice.
Mr Charles has staff in seven countries including Australia, Belgium, France, the US and Vietnam servicing between 30 and 50 clients a month. Programmes start from $99 for three laps in a Ferrari around a race track to $3,000 for a Formula One driving experience. And if you want to stay in a presidential suite and take a few spins around the EuroSpeedway Lausitz in eastern Germany in a supercar - as a Swedish tycoon recently did - Mr Charles and his team can arrange that too. Just be prepared to pay $20,000 a day.
The young entrepreneur reckons his experiences have made him a lot more prudent and careful.
He has also become a lot more savvy, getting in professionals to teach him how he should control and invest his money.
He wants to scale greater heights.
"We're just scratching the surface with the business. People are willing to spend a lot of money doing this. My dream is to have an office in every major city," says Mr Charles, who lives with his mother, stepfather, younger brother and stepsister in a Yio Chu Kang condominium and gallivants around town in a Ssangyong Musso.
Meanwhile, he has long given up that dream of building a go-kart track.
"It's just not profitable at all."
kimhoh@sph.com.sg
My Value Investing Blog: http://sgmusicwhiz.blogspot.com/