“It is not failure until you quit,” says Oneteam CEO Kevin Boo

On most mornings in Yishun, a zi char restaurant run by Kevin Boo’s family opens as it has for as long as Kevin Boo has been alive. Growing up, the Oneteam chief executive officer and co-founder spent time watching how the business functioned day to day, noticing the pace, the coordination and the relationships that held it together.

This was his first understanding of work. “I spent my childhood observing how a small business really operated, the pace, the teamwork, the customer dynamics,” he says of the eatery that was in existence even before he was a year old.

“Many of the same staff are still there today. It felt like growing up with a second family.”

What he absorbed there was not theory. It was temperament, a sense that businesses endure because people hold them up, one steady day at a time. That idea sits at the centre of Oneteam, the company Boo co-founded in 2024 to help Singapore’s small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) keep going when their founders retire with no one ready to take over.

At a crossroads

SMEs are the quiet machinery of Singapore. They maintain buildings, run neighbourhood shops, service equipment, deliver meals, keep schedules, and carry histories. Yet, many founders are now approaching retirement without clear succession plans. 

Boo saw just how fragile continuity can be when he and his wife ran two pre-loved clothing stores in Tiong Bahru and Bukit Panjang during the pandemic. The move was a side venture. 

The Covid-19 period, however, turned it into a lesson in vulnerability.

“Coming from structured corporate backgrounds, it was a different world for us,” the former Credit Suisse investment banker relates. “It taught us fast that people management is everything.”

There was a stretch when all the staff were down sick. Boo and his wife stepped in and ran the shops themselves. They handled stock-taking, sales, quality control, and cashiering. The experience showed him how quickly a business can wobble when just one crucial person is missing.

Over time, several SME owners who knew Boo and his co-founder, Matthew Pay, began asking: Would Boo and Pay be open to learning the ropes of their businesses? And eventually take over when the owners retire? “It revealed a recurring theme of founders without successors,” Boo says. For them, the question wasn’t about valuation. It was about what would happen to their people.

Inspired by Teamshares, Boo and his co-founder started refining a version that felt right for Southeast Asia, where loyalty, memory and community ties shape how businesses run. The goal wasn’t to impose new formulas on SMEs, but to extend the lives of companies built on patience and long-term commitment.

That idea became Oneteam. To date, the company has raised about $7 million in a mix of equity and debt to fund acquisitions and build shared headquarters capabilities.

How Oneteam actually works

The company’s structure echoes what Boo learned as a child. Continuity isn’t a document; it’s a handover.

Oneteam typically begins with a founder preparing to step back. Boo often spends extended periods understanding how the company operates. Who holds the key client relationships? How are responsibilities distributed? Where does leadership already exist? Only after that does the acquisition move into its formal three-to-six-month process.

Once the business joins the group, the work turns inward.

Boo’s team studies the staff closely. They look for employees who show initiative and take responsibility early, particularly in how they handle clients and make day-to-day decisions. Those individuals, often overlooked for years, form the backbone of the transition.

With them in mind, Oneteam creates a development path, which includes hands-on coaching, business training, and performance milestones tied not to titles but to responsibility. It lends support in areas that SMEs rarely have the bandwidth for, such as human resources, operations, finance, brand, and business development.

The goal is not to override decisions, but to ensure new leaders are supported, knowing that they won’t be left alone when things get difficult.

Ownership enters the picture only after behaviour shows someone is ready. Boo looks for small changes, including attention to costs, operations, and client relationships. These gestures matter as they signal a mindset shift towards stewardship.

A transition measured in human terms

Oneteam’s second acquisition, a facilities and property services firm, captured the emotional complexity of succession. “For the founders, the transition was bittersweet,” Boo says. Even after the deal closed, they hadn’t told their families. Stepping away from a lifetime of work takes more than signatures.

Employees, too, looked for clarity. They searched Oneteam online to find out who now stood behind their jobs. Boo relates that his team responded with care and tact, handling the transition one person at a time so employees felt “reassured, not overwhelmed”.

“Most people don’t look for bold moves,” he says. “They look for whether you’re consistent, present, and human.”

Details matter in such moments. The outgoing founders had breakfast with their team every Saturday. It was a tradition that had nothing to do with key performance indicators but everything to do with trust. Oneteam kept that going.

That sense of continuity also showed up in how people worked. Illustrating how ownership takes shape, Boo points to the first general manager (GM) to complete their development programme. With training, coaching and milestones, the GM began approaching the role in unmistakable ways.

“He became more cost-conscious. He monitored waste. He started reporting the Profit & Loss (numbers) proactively,” Boo says. The GM even turned down a job with higher immediate pay, choosing instead to build towards something he believed could grow.

“These are the early signs of an ownership mindset,” he adds. “It’s the shift from doing a job to thinking like a steward.”

For Boo, stewardship is not abstract. It comes from the people he has encountered along the way, especially those who chose to stay and see things through.

The towkay who started again

Among the founders Boo has met, one story continues to steady him. A man discovered while overseas that his business partner had emptied the accounts and vanished. With suppliers waiting, he returned home and started calling them one by one, negotiating terms and picking up the pieces.

Today, he is one of Oneteam’s mentors. “His story reminds me that problems often feel big, but very few are truly existential,” Boo says. “It is not failure until you quit.”

Boo sees Oneteam as a continuation of the world that shaped him — a place where work is reliable, relationships last, and responsibility is shared. He hopes that founders can step back without worry, and that long-serving employees gain the chance to lead the businesses they have held together for years.

“There is so much potential in people who have been quietly doing the work for years.”