Yahoo Finance 
GetGo CEO on why starting a business when you're older is a good idea
CEO and co-founder Toh Ting Feng launched car-sharing platform GetGo during the COVID-19 pandemic.
SINGAPORE — In today's world of young, maverick startup founders, car-sharing platform CEO Toh Ting Feng could have been considered a late bloomer in his late-30s, when he started the company. Toh was then also a young father to very young children.
But compared to a younger entrepreneur, Toh, now in his 40s, said that starting a business later in life afforded him some flexibility where he didn't necessarily have to work 18 hours a day on the startup.
"It helps to start a company in your late 30s and 40s because you know a lot of people," Toh told Yahoo Finance Singapore. "It wasn't like I was fresh out of university with no income or savings. That was the fortunate part about starting a business later; you have had a career, you have your own savings, and you are quite clear about what you need to do to get the business going."
"So, it wasn't as uncertain or as big of a risk or sacrifice because you go into it with a bit more of a plan, experience and stability," said Toh, adding that he had made sure to save up and planned financially after 15 years of working so as not to compromise the income for his young family.
Car-sharing service launched during COVID-19 pandemic
Launched at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2021, GetGo has since grown its user base from 10,000 at the initial launch to nearly 300,000 users as of March 2023. The startup currently employs 180 people and manages a fleet size of more than 2,400 cars which are available across 1,400 locations.
In February 2023, GetGo successfully raised S$20 million from investors, enabling them to further accelerate the growth of its fleet and invest in technology to strengthen operations. The company wants to deploy a fully electric and hybrid car-sharing fleet of 10,000 vehicles by 2030.
Toh said that the company was already profitable within the first year of operations and attributed this to adopting a strategy of "not spending more than we earn" and staying away from "subsidising aggressively to grow the business".
Taking the longer route
While GetGo's rise was swift, running a car-sharing business wasn't something that Toh had envisioned before – despite being raised by an entrepreneur father. For Toh, starting GetGo meant that his career had come full circle after several stints in various sectors.
In the early 1980s, Toh's father, a high school dropout, started a used car trading business. The younger Toh, however, was unimpressed when the time came for him to decide on his future and found other career paths more appealing. Instead of joining the family business, he decided to take up a scholarship and enlist in the military after being selected as a trainee at the Officer Cadet School.
"I felt that having the opportunity to be a professional military officer at the start of my career offered a lot of growth opportunities because being in the military is a lot about leadership, so you get to learn what it takes to lead a group of people," said Toh.
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After 11 years in the military, including four years of studying, Toh was eager to learn more about commerce and business, such as analysing profit and loss statements and understanding investments – an experience that the military could not offer him. He then decided to join the private sector.
In the private sector, Toh took up a general management role at local real-estate developer CapitaLand before leaving to join ridesharing platform Grab – a market underdog who was competing with Uber at the time. As part of its strategy team, Toh was tasked with growing Grab's Singapore market.
While working at Grab, Toh's father became ill. The younger Toh then left his job to look after his dad, who had retired by then from his car trading business and was dabbling in investing.
"The biggest thing that came out of that phase of my career was towards the end of 2018. There was an opportunity to acquire a company called Lion City Rentals – which is a large rental car company – with a contemporary of my father. We came together and basically acquired this company, and I ran it as the CEO for a year in 2019," said Toh.
Coming full circle
It was during this time that Toh met eventual GetGo co-founder Johnson Lim, who was the son of his business partner that bought Lion City Rentals. Lim had just returned from Germany and was also helping out at the newly acquired company.
However, it would be another year before inspiration struck Toh, for after stepping down as CEO of Lion City Rentals, Toh admitted to being lost and unsure of what to do next. He considered going back to work in the corporate sector and investing in more startups.
But when the pandemic hit in 2020, he immediately saw an opportunity to capitalise on rental cars that were sitting idle, coupled with the growing demand for private hire cars, given Singapore's high cost of owning a car.
"I'm not a big car guy, you know? Because I always thought of cars as a utility, which is actually very in line with GetGo," said Toh.
"By building GetGo, we could not only serve our users with access to cars, but we were actually solving a problem for existing rental car companies as well. Because we were helping them, we could convince them and have their trust to put the cars on our platform," said Toh.
Armed with a wealth of experience, industry contacts and "a couple of hundred thousand dollars" that was pooled together between Toh, Lim, and three other co-founding investors, GetGo was born. It took "six to eight months" of research and planning before they were off to the races.
Looking back on his career, Toh said that his biggest takeaway was to think of it as a journey.
"As cliche as it sounds, it is a journey. No matter where you end up at any one point in time, I think the important thing is to just make the best of it and take away the best lessons you can. You meet people on the journey, and you never know when you can get together and do something meaningful down the line.
"That's why it's a journey, right? You never know what life brings," said Toh.
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