Test Before You Scale: Singapore F&B Success Stories

Discover why Singapore F&B founders test their concepts before scaling. Learn how small experiments can lead to successful, scalable businesses.

**BEFORE YOU SCALE IT, BREAK IT SMALL**

**Why Some Singapore F&B Founders Are Testing Their Businesses Before Building Them**

There is a familiar image of entrepreneurship. You develop the concept, write the business plan, find investors, sign a lease, renovate the premises, hire employees, buy equipment, launch with a big opening and then hope customers come. The problem is that by the time the first customer walks through the door, an uncomfortable amount of money may already have been committed to an idea that has never been properly tested in the real world.

Some Singapore F&B entrepreneurs are trying something different. Instead of building the full business first, they are putting smaller versions of their ideas into the market through incubators, temporary spaces and shorter leases. A recent CNA report highlighted entrepreneurs who have used these arrangements to test concepts before deciding whether to make larger commitments. Some eventually moved into permanent locations, while others changed their concepts along the way. What makes these stories interesting is that the temporary operation was not necessarily a weaker version of the “real” business. In many cases, it was the experiment that helped determine what the real business should eventually become.

**From A Rooftop To A Restaurant**

Chef Peter Smit did not begin Dirty Supper by immediately committing to an expensive restaurant. The idea developed from a supper club on the rooftop of his former home before an opportunity allowed him to test the concept through an F&B incubator. He later operated Dirty Supper under a one-and-a-half-year lease inside Hua Bee Restaurant in Tiong Bahru, where the restaurant has since become a permanent fixture. Smit told CNA that without those lower-risk opportunities, he probably would not have opened the restaurant at all. He estimated that taking a conventional route could have meant going at least half a million dollars into debt before knowing whether the concept would succeed.

His experience changes the usual sequence of entrepreneurship. Instead of investing heavily, building everything and only then discovering whether customers actually want it, the founder gets an opportunity to test, learn and adjust before making the larger commitment. It sounds straightforward, but many businesses still make their most expensive decisions while working with assumptions rather than evidence. A polished business plan may explain what should happen, but a few months of real customers can reveal what actually happens.

**A Short Lease Does Not Mean A Short-Term Business**

Temporary spaces naturally come with disadvantages, and Singapore has recently seen the other side of that arrangement. Businesses at the Punggol East container park have been preparing to leave as the site is returned for redevelopment. For operators that have spent years building a customer base, hiring employees and becoming part of the surrounding community, moving is not simply a matter of packing some equipment into a truck. There are employees, customers, renovation costs and operational disruption to consider.

Yet a temporary location does not automatically mean the business itself has to be temporary. Big Fish Small Fish opened at the Punggol container park in 2017, and co-founder Ong Wei Sheng told CNA that the lower cost allowed the company to test its concept without overcommitting early. The business eventually left when its five-year lease ended in 2022 and has since expanded to four Singapore outlets. The original location therefore did not need to exist forever to create long-term value for the company.

This raises a useful question for businesses outside F&B too. We often treat permanence as security, but there is effectively no “forever lease” in business. Customers move, buildings are redeveloped, competitors arrive, products become obsolete and technology changes how people buy and work. Rather than asking how to eliminate uncertainty completely, management may sometimes be better served by asking how much it should commit before it knows enough.

**Real Customers Are Better Than Imaginary Customers**

A business plan can describe who you think your customers are. A spreadsheet can estimate what you expect them to spend, while market research can tell you what people say they would buy. Then the business opens its doors and customers do something completely different. The dish expected to become the signature item barely moves, while a side dish becomes the bestseller. Customers arrive at a different time than expected, portions turn out to be too large, service takes too long, or a price that looked perfectly acceptable in a survey suddenly feels expensive when somebody actually has to take out a wallet.

That information is one of the most valuable things an experiment can produce. Ghostwriter, an F&B incubator founded by bar and restaurant operator Jay Gray, created an environment where entrepreneurs could experiment with food, drinks, events and operating ideas without immediately carrying all the pressure of a conventional restaurant. Six businesses passed through the incubator, and all six eventually opened permanent outlets, although some emerged under different names.

The fact that some concepts changed is important because testing should not exist merely to prove that the original idea was correct. Sometimes the most valuable result is discovering that it was partly wrong. A menu may need to change, the target customer may be different from the one originally imagined, or the entire positioning may need to move. Finding that out early can be far more valuable than successfully defending the original plan.

**The Cost Of Being Wrong**

Businesses naturally dislike failure, but not all failures cost the same amount. Discovering after three weeks that customers dislike a menu item is very different from discovering after signing a five-year lease, completing an expensive renovation and hiring a full team that the entire concept does not work. The first problem can potentially be corrected with a new menu. The second may threaten the business itself.

This logic extends far beyond restaurants. A manufacturer can pilot a new production process on one line before changing the whole factory. A distributor can test a delivery model in one territory before rolling it out nationwide. A company can trial a workflow with one department before forcing every employee to adopt it, while a B2B company can introduce a new service to a handful of customers before building an entire division around it. The experiment does not eliminate risk; it reduces the amount of capital, time and organisational disruption exposed to that risk while management is still learning.

Companies sometimes spend enormous amounts of time trying to make a plan certain when certainty is impossible. Forecasts, presentations and meetings can reduce some uncertainty, but eventually the idea has to encounter reality. At that point, a surprisingly useful management question is not simply, “How do we make sure this works?” It is **“What is the cheapest way to find out whether we are wrong?”**

**Testing Does Not Mean Being Unprepared**

There is a danger, however, in romanticising the “just try it” approach. Temporary locations and small experiments still involve real money and real people. Some operators affected by the Punggol East container park closure have employees and significant business operations tied to the location. One operator interviewed by CNA had nine full-time employees to consider, while another business owner with 12 employees described the pressure of urgently searching for a new location.

A good experiment therefore still needs boundaries. Management should know how much capital it is prepared to lose, how much inventory should be committed, what happens to employees if the test ends and which equipment can be moved elsewhere. It should also decide what success looks like before the results arrive. If sales fail to reach a certain level after a reasonable period, continuing to inject money into the project can turn a controlled experiment into exactly the large uncontrolled risk it was supposed to avoid.

Testing small is not the same as thinking small. In fact, disciplined experimentation requires management to be unusually clear about what it wants to learn. The purpose is not simply to “give it a try” and hope for the best. It is to gather enough real-world information to make the next decision better.

**The Moment A Test Becomes A Business**

There is another problem that successful experiments eventually encounter. A tiny operation can run surprisingly well through memory, WhatsApp messages, spreadsheets and the founder's ability to be everywhere at once. When there is one location, a handful of products and a small team, the owner may personally know what has been ordered, what is running low and which customer complained yesterday.

Then the experiment succeeds. One location becomes two, ten products become fifty, purchasing becomes more complicated and stock begins moving between locations. Customer orders may arrive through multiple channels, more employees become involved and the founder who once knew almost everything happening in the business can no longer keep the entire operation inside one head. The challenge is no longer proving that the idea works; it is making sure that what worked once can work repeatedly without depending on one person remembering everything.

This is where systems such as Multiable **aiM18 ERP** can support the next stage of growth by connecting purchasing, inventory, sales, finance and operational information. Mobile WMS can provide better visibility over warehouse movements, while QEBI can help management analyse what is happening across the business as operations become more complex. The purpose of introducing structure should not be to kill the flexibility that helped the experiment succeed. It should be to make the successful parts of that experiment repeatable.

**Build Evidence Before You Build The Empire**

Singapore already has several models built around this idea of testing before committing. Chef X, for example, allows participants to operate a fully equipped 24-seat restaurant for four or eight weeks. CNA reported that 14 chefs had participated and five subsequently opened their own outlets. Meanwhile, the National Environment Agency's Incubation Stall Programme offers eligible aspiring hawkers pre-fitted stalls and subsidised rent for 15 months. As of June 30, 109 stalls had been allocated, with roughly half of participants later becoming full-fledged hawkers.

None of these programmes can guarantee that a business will succeed, nor should that be their purpose. Their value is that they create an environment where uncertainty can be confronted while the stakes are still manageable. Entrepreneurs can discover whether customers want the product, whether the economics make sense and whether they themselves actually want to run that type of business before committing to something much larger.

The smartest business plan may therefore not always be the one that predicts everything correctly. Sometimes it is the one that makes being wrong affordable. Test the idea while the problem is small, listen to what real customers and real operations reveal, and change what needs to change before investing more heavily.

Then, when the evidence says the idea deserves to grow, the business can move from experimentation to expansion with considerably more than optimism behind it.

**Before you scale it, break it small. Find out what fails while failure is still affordable, then build bigger around what actually works.**

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