From The Straits Times    |

Karen Tok’s unassuming demeanour belies the spunk of someone who dropped out of university in her third year and ventured into unchartered business waters. Today, the 35-year-old heads Singapore’s bioscience revolution. Her executive search firm, ScienTec Search, set up in 2002, is one of the few HR companies here specialising in the bioscience and biotech industries.

 
Germ of an idea
In 2001, she was retrenched from two start-ups. “When I was retrenched the second time, I felt I wasn’t good enough to be retained,” she recalls. But with mental pen and paper, she listed down her ability to socialize, and the niches in the business landscape waiting to be filled. At age 30, she started ScienTec, a headhunting firm that specialises in the budding bioscience industry. Within a year, ScienTec broke even. Now, it has an annual revenue of “above $1 million”, and counts in its database more than 50 corporate clients and up to 40,000 life science and technology candidates worldwide.
 
 
 
 

 
Venturing into the unknown
ScienTec’s first year was the hardest. To get the one-woman show off the ground, Karen had to do everything on her own. She’d be cold-calling candidates and companies in the day and doing research at night. She also had to build up a new network of business associates from scratch. When night fell, she’d hit the sack for three hours before the next day of her seven-day week began again.
 
One of the hardest things about entering into business alone was the need for self-discipline, she explains. Despite the odds stacked against her, her hard work paid off. She snagged her first client within two months, and was soon able to fill up to 50 vacancies each month. With the industry picking up fast, ScienTec developed the know-how for the global sourcing of bioscience workers, a service not every HR search firm provided.
 
A life less typical
Karen’s success is probably due in part to not having taken the usual Singaporean education route. Her taxi driver father and housewife mother sent her to a private secondary school, then to the former South East Asia Union College. “I didn’t have a typical Singaporean education. But it has turned out to be a blessing,” she says. An unconventional education extends to how she quit her business administration course in her early 20s to find a job in advertising sales.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
An independent mind and determination to succeed are still characteristic of Karen today. Paul Chapman, a renowned neuroscientist who heads GlaxoSmithKline’s Cognition and Neurodegeneration Centre at Biopolis, also has nothing but professional praise for Karen: “I was struck by her self-confidence and her ability to connect quickly with people. Karen’s dedication to her clients is easy to see.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 When new skills are needed
Karen now runs an office with room enough for everyone in her six-man team. While she has plans to turn her start-up into a larger company, that new strategy has its own special challenges. She muses: “The skills needed to grow a start-up business and for an expanding company are different. What used to work for me may not work anymore, and it’s a question of whether I have the skills necessary to take ScienTec to the next step. If I don’t, then I need to hire a person with these skills.”
 
Her admission notwithstanding, she has come a long way from digging herself out of the trenches of retrenchment. Karen adds: “You just need to pick up the right opportunity at the right time. Just like a half-open door, most times we can’t fully see what’s behind it till we’ve opened it.”