Speco CEO: 2020 Wrap Up Message

Dear friends of Speco,

14 September 2019. This was the day I made the call to steer Spic & Span towards a new chapter of Speco. We rang in the new decade knowing 2020 would be uncertain and scary as we had no idea how the market will receive Speco. It was an all-in for us.

This year is certainly a year to remember. Running a business has always presented surprises and challenges and we have had to adapt our company and lives to navigate it all.

As a company, we tightened our ranks and went full execution mode. The year end is time to hit pause to regroup and reflect over what we wanted to achieve as a Certified B Corporation. I wanted to share our 20 milestones for 2020 that we are proud to achieve based on a triple bottom line of People, Planet and Profits.

People

1.      Our initial plan was to upskill our Cleaners into Specialists over a period of 3 years. We were able to complete transitioning 100% of our workforce this year – bringing the company to the next level.

2.      Our company mission is to be able to provide good jobs to marginalized Singaporeans. We delivered on our promise to deliver success to our staff.

3.      Our Speco team expanded and we built in management infrastructure with 2 senior hires. We welcomed Ms Ashlee Lee, our Head of Business Planning. She joins us with almost a decade of experience coming from UOB. We also welcomed Mr Eric Tan, our Head of Sales & Marketing. He joins us with more than 2 decades of experience from blue-chip companies including Singtel and SPH.

4.      As we moved to the next playing field, we faced questions over brand identity and company culture. We focused on our key values of being a caring company and successfully reorganized the company and reworked our branding.

From our kids-friendly version

To an enterprise focusing on innovation and sustainability

5.      We made the call to care for the most vulnerable around us. Even when our team was tired, we pressed on and provided pro bono Speco coating to the elderly. We protected more than 64,000 elderlies across Singapore.

6.      We are proud to be recognized by the President’s Office for our efforts during the pandemic.

7.      We placed our fellow SMEs in our hearts and we committed $250,000 to help businesses stay open with our Speco Pay it Forward programme.

8.      We are privileged to have won 3 awards this year. We would like to thank our fellow B corp Genashtim for nominating us for the Brands for Good 2020. We were one of the 17 Honourees. We would also like to thank our fellow partner at IP Value Labs for nominating us for the IPOS Innovation for Humanity Award. We were among the 7 recipients for working together to fight the pandemic. We were also awarded the Champions of Good by the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre (NVPC). This is the 3rd Champions award we received and it reinforced our commitment to continue being a business for good.

9.      Most importantly in this segment; our people. Being in the frontlines during the pandemic is no easy feat. We have successfully maintained the safety of our frontline workers.

Planet

10.  We became the latest member of the B Corp family. After an extensive due diligence process, we are now a Certified B Corporation that has met the highest standards of verified social and environment performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.  

11.  We relooked at our factory operations and decided to implement Zero-waste initiatives especially on plastic bottling of Speco.

12.  We can sleep well at night knowing that Speco has protected our Planet as an eco-friendly solution while other competitors have resulted in doing more harm just for commercial gains.

13.  We are proud of our lab results against COVID-19 even under ISO 22196 standards and yet still maintain our Food grade safety levels that protects humans, safety and environment.

14.  It would have been much easier to add toxic active ingredients into our formulation. However, we continued to stayed true to our mantra to maintain truly non-toxic even on our new R&D projects (and we managed to get a scientific breakthrough of a log6.79 reduction Contact Kill in October 2020)

Profits

15.  We are pleased to submit our financial reports to our impact investors (such as raiSE Singapore Centre for Social Enterprise). In 2020, we achieved an outstanding 4x revenue year-on-year.

16.  We were only able to build infrastructure quickly because of the resources pulled in by key strategic partners. We are grateful to the Singapore government and Enterprise Singapore for all their support, both financial and non-financial.

17.  We are thankful for the support of our stakeholders who believed in not just our commercial offerings but also our social mission. Among others, we would like to specially thank CPG, Temasek Foundation, Singapore Airlines and DBS. Many of our corporate friends have believed in us even before the pandemic started.

18.  We are able to commit more resources into R&D over the year and now have a full SKU of 8 products for different customer needs.

19.  We have managed to hit economies of scale in production. As a tech for good, we want Speco to be essential and economical to all. (Stay tune for 1Q2021, the clue is hidden within)

20.  We have brought the company to the next level as Speco is now a regional brand. We are available in Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines and aim to be in 10 countries in 2021.

In Conclusion

We started the year feeling uncertain and scary but yet we ended the year with similar emotions. I read that the psychology of fear and excitement are the same and it is how we make critical decisions that will change the results. 2021 will bring its own set of challenges and I believe we have matured better to deal with them. Thank you for being part of our journey and for being the good company that surrounded us!

Happy new year!

Inspired,

Benjamin Chua

CEO| Speco