Don’t look at the money first: career lessons from a warehouse, Kenya and a renovation site

Winson Choong’s most repeated advice to the class was to choose the job you will learn most from, not the one that pays most. Here is the career behind that advice, the crises that taught him most, and his map of active and passive income. Part 3 of our notes from his talk.

By the VibeFlow team · 28 October 2026 · 10 min read

“Don’t look at the money first” came up again and again in Winson Choong’s talk, usually just after a story about doing something nobody else wanted to. He called himself “a very old-school guy” — HR managers, he said, tell him young people now want higher pay with fewer duties and less responsibility — and then spent much of three hours making the case for the opposite.

Sales, marketing, business development

He began by placing three jobs that graduates often confuse on one river. Sales is downstream: approaching people and selling them products and ideas. Marketing sits above it: planning the product, price, place and promotion. Business development is upstream: the company hands you money and a mandate to open a new country or a new channel. He has done all three, and calls business development the most valuable experience of his working life.

1. 01

   Sales — downstream

   Approach people and sell them products and ideas, one customer at a time.

2. 02

   Marketing — midstream

   Plan the product, price, place and promotion, and the channels it all flows through.

3. 03

   Business development — upstream

   Open a new country or a new channel for the company: lobby for projects, build the team, start the business from nothing.

The turning point at 27

In his twenties, he said, he worried about being ordinary. As a junior salesman at a small company he watched the seniors punch their cards at eight, drink coffee until ten or eleven, see customers until three, then wait in a coffee shop until five so as not to return to the office early. It looked happy-go-lucky. You learned nothing.

At 27 he searched JobStreet and found a Japanese company hiring a salesman with a job scope that filled a page — storekeeper, pallets, shipping documents, packing, sales — for RM2,000 a month. Nobody else applied. He joined in 2007 with the title of assistant sales manager, and on his first day was sent to Singapore to sort out a storeroom. His first month was wrapping pallets and writing shipping notes.

Five years later he was an experienced international business development manager, hiring juniors of his own — who asked why international salespeople should work in a warehouse. His answer: otherwise how would you know how many cartons fit on a pallet, how to fill in a packing list, or where to find a product inside a stack? Those are the foundations.

Talk to people who run their own businesses, he said, and you will find that as employees they did a great deal without calculating the reward. And bosses notice. The people who dodge work and are too calculative, in his experience, do not go on to big achievements.

Africa: the job nobody wanted

When Probase, the Johor road-building group he then worked for, decided to enter Africa, the Ebola epidemic was spreading in West Africa. The senior project manager asked to lead it resigned; so did the next. The job fell to a junior manager — him. The package was not attractive. He took it because he would be responsible for everything: purchasing, accounting, production, projects, sales and business development.

With no bank account there yet, the company gave him about RM100,000 in US dollars, roughly US$30,000, in a stack he described as thick as a brick, and he carried it in his travel bag. He opened bank accounts, used public transport and later bought a car. On an earlier scouting trip he and his director — Dr Chan’s father, his superior and mentor — had planned to have lunch at Nairobi’s Westgate mall on the day of the 2013 terrorist attack there. A meeting made them cancel.

Most of what he learned there, he learned by being the only one available to do it. Asked to prepare tender documents for a government project when he had only ever lobbied for projects, he read the FIDIC conditions of contract, the international rule book for construction contracts, in a week; prepared 30 contract documents in three days; and once went 36 hours without sleep to finish. When the contract was won, he sat at 35 across from 30 government officers, with his director beside him and two lawyers, to negotiate its terms. Experience like that, he said, is why he can win projects, handle a crisis and deal with the unforeseen in his own business today.

What crises teach

He told four stories of things going wrong: three from Africa, and one from a job in Johor last year. His point was that how you handle the unexpected decides whether people respect you, and that a boss who cannot handle it loses the team.

From one house to a renovation company

In 2020 he resigned from the Japanese company. His father was ill, his wife was pregnant, and things with his superior had become so bad that he was close to depression. His wife told him their savings were enough to look for something new. That, he told the class, is why family savings matter by your thirties and forties: they are what let you stop and re-plan.

In 2021 a friend’s house had foundation problems that none of the contractors his friend interviewed could explain. Winson had been trained in foundation design “like an engineer” on Probase’s internal course, so he redesigned the foundations and acted as project manager. Then COVID pushed up material prices, and many contractors ran off with their customers’ money. This one did too. But because Winson had paid only against progress claims, the way professional construction projects are paid, his friend lost no money — only time. To finish the house, Winson hired workers himself. They stayed. Five years on, the company has 11 workers, out on site while he gives talks like this one.

Active and passive income: his map

He was careful not to say that everyone should start a business. An outstanding manager whose company pays above the market rate is on a good path too. But he drew a sharp line between kinds of income.

Salary trades your time and expertise for money from one employer. Business income serves many customers through a team, and the team is your leverage, so it can pay more, depending on the industry and how big the business can grow. Passive income is what you earn while you sleep — and learning how to build it, he said, is homework everyone should start the day they leave school. A live seminar is active income; the recording, sold again and again, is passive.

He counts nine types of income for himself, across a salary from his own company, the business, the page and its seminars, and investments in property, shares and gold, with property and gold the largest. He did not list all nine one by one; the map above groups the ones he named.

His advice in one paragraph

When you leave university, build your working experience first. Do not choose a well-paid easy job; look for the hard one, and use your first five to ten years to lay foundations. Learn about investing at the same time — properly, because the market is full of people promising to make you rich quickly. Part 4 covers how he reads the economy, and why he thinks that knowledge is the best protection against the traps.

Common questions

Sources

1. Westgate shopping mall attack — Wikipedia
2. Western African Ebola virus epidemic — Wikipedia
3. FIDIC — International Federation of Consulting Engineers — Wikipedia
4. Passive income — Wikipedia