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How The Projector's founder went from having cushy bank job to running indie cinema
The Projector's founder Karen Tan shares the challenges of running an indie cinema in Singapore, including the "mythical" work-life balance.
SINGAPORE — While working in a real estate investment bank in London in 2010, founder of indie cinema The Projector Karen Tan was looking to do something more meaningful and balanced.
Some 13 years later, what the 42-year-old found instead was personal sacrifice and instability, but also an adventure that's "worth it".
In November 2023, The Projector soft-launched its new venue at the heart of Singapore's central region in collaboration with established cinema operator Golden Village. Dubbed Golden Village x The Projector at Cineleisure, the collaboration will see the cinema offering a mix of mainstream and indie films.
For the indie cinema, it was an opportunity to work alongside a bigger player in the industry in addition to finding a new home for its operations after an uncertain period.
Breathing life into old spaces
Interestingly, given its eclectic choice of indie and arthouse film screenings, The Projector's creators did not come from an art or film background, nor did they have aspirations to run a movie theatre. The cinema was birthed as a result of Tan and her co-founder Blaise Trigg-Smith's earlier work in Pocket Projects, an architectural and design consultancy firm that specialises in the regeneration and adaptive reuse of old heritage buildings.
"We fell into it," Tan told Yahoo Finance Singapore.
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Tan and Trigg-Smith had met as colleagues at a bank in London. Wanting to do "something more tangible with our lives rather than putting in millions of dollars in spreadsheets and calculating these massive financial models", they left their jobs and cushy banking salaries in search of something more fulfilling. Tan returned to Singapore in 2010 to start Pocket Projects, with Trigg-Smith joining the company as a partner not long after moving to Jakarta, Indonesia.
"This was all through the lens of a late 20-something-year-old who hasn't got a clue and hasn't done the entrepreneurship thing yet. Because on hindsight, I'm working as hard, and the mythical work-life balance hasn't actually materialised," Tan laughed.
Show time
After completing projects in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, Pocket Projects came across an old abandoned theatre in the Golden Mile Tower. Since the theatre was intact, with its original seats, the idea to turn it into an operational one was born. Tan also roped in her younger sister, Sharon, who has a background in urban planning, to join the group. They started with a lean team of less than 10, kept overhead costs low through an adaptive reuse approach, and were soon in business.
"From the start, we had decided that it's not just going to be about film, but an exploration as to what an independent cinematic space could hold... we wanted a place for social discourse, discussion and engagement. We wanted people to come and be surprised," Tan explained.
It's key to know what you're good at and accept what you're not good at, find great people to fill those gaps, and give them the space to do their jobs.Karen Tan
From running experimental films and screening documentaries to hosting art exhibitions and punk gigs at the space, the ambitious team didn't shy away from ideas that most commercial cinema operators may have shunned.
It's not easy to run an indie cinema
Nearly a decade later, The Projector continues to grow. As with most businesses, it wasn't without its fair share of problems and challenges. These included some regulatory issues, given the nature of its edgy film selections. The team has had to engage in many discussions with the authorities to justify some of the films they chose to screen but ultimately, they adhered to the rules.
But the biggest challenge in operating an indie cinema by far, according to Tan, was rental. While she did not want to divulge numbers – "Too sensitive," she said – Tan remarked, "Singapore rentals are high... it doesn't allow for smaller, independent businesses to get a foothold into easily accessible locations – which is what they need at the start to get traction. They end up getting locked out."
She added that it was especially challenging for a cinema given that the real estate requirements can be quite large.
"If you take that and look at the per square foot yield that you can get off it, it's not as easy to get it to yield as highly as you would say, an F&B restaurant. And we're not talking about just the floor area but also the sheer volume of it because you need certain minimum heights if you want to have the right proportions to set up the screening space," said Tan.
...on hindsight, I'm working as hard, and the mythical work-life balance hasn't actually materialised.Karen Tan
Tan also recalled how the COVID-19 pandemic nearly shut down the business for good. According to her, at the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, the company had just experienced its "best month ever" in terms of revenue in January that year. But any optimism was quickly dashed when the islandwide lockdowns began over two months later.
"At the start, before all the subsidies and support kicked in, the first thing we did was to pull out all the numbers and look. Thank God the last two or three years were good. We had built up some cash reserves, and it was a matter of how long we were going to be around for," said Tan, who said then that the company had a runway of about six months.
In the end, Tan said that the pandemic was a "blessing in disguise" for The Projector. This was because it led to some innovative ideas from the team, such as the pop-up cinemas they organised during the period, as well as leading them to find additional space for their cinema.
A company is only as good as its team
When asked what her biggest takeaway was from her entrepreneurial journey, Tan said that a company is only as good as its team and that she was fortunate enough to have a "great" one.
"A founder might have had the original idea, but one can't go it alone. It's key to know what you're good at and accept what you're not good at, find great people to fill those gaps, and give them the space to do their jobs. The Projector's got an A-team, and The Projector would be nowhere without its people.
"It's important that everyone feels a sense of pride and ownership in the brand and spaces that we create, driven by our underlying ethos of making a difference to arts and culture in Singapore," said Tan.
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