At Timah Partners, its CEO is betting that culture and long-term training, not quick deals, will secure the elusive SME succession

When Dennis Chua speaks about leadership, he does not begin with capital structures or revenue multiples. He starts with National Service (NS), a mandatory conscription for male citizens and Permanent Residents.

“When you’re in NS — and here, Singaporean males would better understand — you look at the 20-year-old second lieutenant, newly minted officer, with a seniority higher than the enciks (warrant officers). There are some second lieutenants that the enciks love, and there are some that the enciks absolutely hate. How do you explain that? It’s followership. I can’t really teach you that.”

Followership. It is the word that threads through his vision for Timah Partners’ CEO Succession Program (CSP), a multi-year apprenticeship designed to cultivate a new generation of SME leaders. Not charisma. Not intellect.

Followership — that unteachable quality that makes others want to follow you, whether you are an extrovert or introvert, seasoned or green, high-IQ or high-EQ.

It is here, in this insistence that culture precedes capital, that Chua has staked the most audacious bet of his career. The bet was born from a problem he witnessed firsthand upon his return to Singapore.

A familiar lament shadowed Chua’s return to Singapore after 15 years in the United States (US). “Before I left Singapore, a lot of my relatives were working in SMEs, and they would always complain. The son takes over, he’s trying to digitalise the website, you know. And then four years later, the dad comes back and says, ‘Hey, I’m so sorry, my son screwed up, I’m back.’ And then there’s another couple of years of tough transition again.”

The problem, as he diagnosed it, was not capital — grants have flowed for decades. “If you talk to the second gens, you’ll realise the issue is not capital, it’s talent. And it’s always been talent.” What Singapore lacked was a reliable mechanism to prepare new leaders for ownership.

In the US, permanent holding companies had begun to solve this gap by pairing capital with long-term apprenticeships. Chua decided to bring that model back, but with the CSP as its beating heart.

Followership, humility, grit

The CSP is selective, deliberate, and slow. Candidates are chosen not for technical mastery but for qualities that can anchor decades of stewardship. “The traits we look for are humility, clarity, and grit. Humility means you listen first and decide later. Clarity is critical — how do you explain complex ideas simply? And grit — the perseverance and passion to take a long-term idea to its crucial end — that is super important, too.”

Chua crystallises this into a simple progression: Honour → Learn → Lift. Honour what is sacred in the company, learn from those who built it, and lift what can be improved without breaking continuity. Apprenticeship, not disruption, becomes the rhythm of change.

It is a philosophy counter to the culture of rapid exits and “growth hacks” that dominates the regional startup psyche. Chua is not building mercenaries. He is building stewards. But stewardship without sanction is powerless — and that sanction must come from those who built what came before.

None of this matters if the outgoing founder refuses to lend his reputation to the next generation. “The difference between a transaction and a succession is that the outgoing owner is willing to lend his reputation to you as the new owner. That is important, and it’s critical for any of these successions.”

Trust, then, is the terrain where CSP candidates must prove themselves. Chua describes first meetings not as due diligence but as gestures of respect: pouring coffee in the pantry rather than waiting to be served. These rituals, small yet charged, reveal whether an heir — literal or chosen — is worthy of following.

He tells of a towkay in fire protection who declared, “If you don’t acquire our business, we will shut down.” Chua cautioned against the loss of negotiating leverage, but understood the urgency. “For him, it really isn’t about making money on the exit — not at all. It’s about making sure that the people he’s brought up with him over the last 40 years, including his customers, are well taken care of.”

The CSP, in this light, is as much about inheriting trust as it is about inheriting operations.

Making SMEs aspirational again

What makes the CSP radical is its cultural ambition: to make SMEs a first-choice career path. “SME succession should not be a concern — it should be a given. But that continuity as a given only happens when SMEs are not a last resort for a career, but a first-choice destination.”

Other regions have already shown this is possible. Conglomerates in Korea and India funnel top graduates into brick-and-mortar units. Private equity in the US attracts business school talent into “unsexy” companies. Chua wants Timah to be the gravitational centre for the same kind of talent gravity here. “If we can attract talent into SMEs, we can save SMEs permanently.”

This is why Timah’s first CSP candidate, Kelvin Ho, matters. He arrives from the upper echelons of professional services, pedigreed, capable, yet choosing SMEs as the arena for his life’s work. His decision signals what Chua hopes will become a cultural cascade: that the best and brightest will see succession not as compromise but as a calling.

For Chua, this mission carries the weight of personal history. He often describes his work as a full circle. “Both my parents didn’t take the traditional university path — they worked at small businesses. My dad even worked for my uncle’s business for a while. So a lot of this feels very much like home in many ways.”

What he has built with Timah Partners is, in truth, less a financial vehicle than a cultural project. By codifying followership, humility, and grit into a programme that produces leaders capable of inheriting trust, he is attempting to rewrite how succession is imagined in the region.

The ambition is quiet but profound: a Southeast Asia filled with SMEs that endure across generations, led by people who see stewardship as prestige rather than penalty. A region where continuity is assumed, where the dignity of the towkay is protected, and where the next generation chooses SMEs not reluctantly, but proudly.

And perhaps that is the cultural wager Chua is really making. That if you shape the people first — through apprenticeships, rituals of trust, and a stubborn belief in followership — the companies will follow. Continuity, then, will no longer need to be rescued. It will simply be lived.