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Think & Grow Expands to Singapore

Co-Founder, Ant Sochan, shares all you need to know about our Singapore expansion.

The news is out! Think & Grow is expanding to Singapore in 2023. It’s been an exciting expansion target for a long time and a location that’s always appealed to us as co-founders. So, over the past few months, we have been discreetly assembling an expert team on the ground there to embark on developing our existing network and creating opportunities. 

Our advice to founders looking to expand is to consider the location carefully rather than just going for somewhere you like. With that in mind, I’m sharing the variables and elements that helped us to decide that Singapore was the right expansion choice for us. 

Goals as a business 

As part of your expansion strategy, you will need to know what your long-term business goals are. This will help you to ask the question of whether that particular market and location will contribute to those goals or not. Think & Grow’s goals included:

  • Continue what we’ve done in Australia; build a high-quality team of people who are experts in what they do, that are sensitive to the needs of our customers, and that is culturally a good fit for our organisation. 
  • Assist fast-growth tech companies in achieving their goals. We will replicate the success we’ve had in Australia in deploying the services that we provide to a similar calibre of clients in the new market. 
  • We want to be seen as the growth partner for tech start-ups or scale-ups in emerging regions. 

5 ways that Singapore will help us achieve those goals and objectives

  1. As a market and culture: Singapore is a destination and market with wonderful characteristics geographically, economically, culturally, as well as from a tech viewpoint. Southeast Asia is an emerging hotbed for entrepreneurship. Developing economies combined with an education system that places a strong emphasis on problem-solving and mathematics in the classroom creates an opportunity for great engineers and others to build the next generation of tech companies in the region. 
  2. With close government support: Singapore’s government engages closely with the technology community to support investment and growth in innovation. Some of the early venture capital funds received government backing on a $1-for-$1 basis that could then be cashed out by the investors in that fund. This enlarged the pool of capital available to tech companies and sent a strong signal that the government supports and invests in their growth and future. 
  3. Using promising sectors as a base: Singapore has very interesting sectors that are doing well right now, such as medtech and fintech. We felt this presented us with an opportunity as an advantageous foundation as we work with clients in these industries, as well as many others. 
  4. It’s where our target audience is and wants to be: When international tech companies are looking to expand into the southern hemisphere (excluding South America and Africa), Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong are the typical landing points. Nowadays, the discussion tends to be between Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne. As we’ve had such great success across Sydney and Melbourne, it makes sense to offer that expansion to the other top destination for tech companies entering APAC. 
  5. With a mature market fit for our services: Our services are a blend of recruitment, executive search, management consulting, and growth advisory to assist businesses across multiple touches with various challenges. For us to effectively deploy our services into a market, it requires a level of market maturity that we know the Singapore market is now ready for.

The types of businesses we work with 

The key ingredient in the businesses and founders we work with is the desire to change in terms of how they work, in their practices and the continual steps they are willing to take in order to achieve growth. 

Typically, the majority of those businesses are at series A or later, but we are certainly not limited to those stages. Historically speaking, the sectors we’ve worked with have been quite diverse. The type of funding matters a lot less since we work with private equity, publicly listed, VC-backed, and more. 


If you’re interested in working with our Singapore team, connect with Phil or De’Angello. For all our business services, click here.


ARTICLE by Anthony Sochan, Co-Founder, 29 March 2024

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