Theresa Shan

I’m fundamentally curious about business.

 

Whenever I come across a great business, I find myself trying to work out why it works. How does it make money? What is their marketing strategy? What makes the model sustainable? How does it affect the customers and people inside it?

 

That curiosity has taken me down a fairly unconventional career path.

 

I started out in production at Lucasfilm, left to become a yoga teacher, built my own businesses, and somehow ended up running and turning around multimillion-dollar businesses across Singapore and Hong Kong.

 

Along the way, I’ve experienced business from almost every angle: frontline employee, founder, marketer, sales, operator and executive, and across almost every stage of the business lifecycle.

 

I’ve built businesses from scratch, helped build and scale a business in a new market from 1 to 6 locations within 5 years, led a major financial turnaround from a S$7M annual loss to operational breakeven, and brought greater structure, accountability and direction to a scale-up business.

 

One experience I’m particularly proud of was leading a business through COVID and keeping it profitable. Overnight, the way we operated disappeared. We had to think and act quickly, launching online streaming, renting out our equipment and even turning a nightclub into a spin studio.

There wasn’t a playbook. We experimented, made decisions with incomplete information and moved quickly.

 

I’ve discovered that I’m at my best when things are changing.

But what interests me most isn’t only the numbers themselves. It’s understanding what makes a business work and what makes people want to be part of it.

 

That’s led to a growing interest in the relationship between commercial performance and human behaviour. I believe you can create accountability and high performance without losing empathy, and build commercially ambitious businesses that are also good places for people to work.

 

It’s partly why I have both an MBA and a Master’s in Counselling & Psychotherapy. One helps me understand businesses more deeply. The other the people inside them.

 

My first book, SOFT Leadership, launches in Oct 2026 and explores many of these ideas through my experience of building businesses and leading teams.

 

For the first time in a long time, I’m deliberately not rushing into the next thing, but on the look out for a meaningful project I can sink my teeth into. In the meantime I’m advising Catalyst Performance, a PT business I’ve invested in, preparing for my book launch, open to speaking engagements and exploring a move back to Europe.

 

I’m always happy to talk business, exchange ideas and make new connections. Feel free to reach out.