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Drive is necessary. It is not sufficient. Here is the other half
Everybody who opens a place cares about it. That is the baseline, not the differentiator.
Owners in this trade routinely work fourteen to sixteen hour days. Long hours alone do not decide who is still trading in year five.
Belief is not in short supply in this industry. Everybody who signs a lease believes in themselves. Accounts of Singapore operators describe fourteen to sixteen hour days, rising costs, endless regulation and daily manpower problems, and those are the accounts from people who are still open.
Drive is common to everyone who starts, including every founder in the closure statistics.
What separates outcomes is learnable: knowing your break-even before you sign, being able to say what one cover costs to serve, understanding when a booking platform is renting you demand you already had, and having modelled the quiet month with a cash position that survives it.
The World Economic Forum puts resilience, flexibility and agility second only to analytical thinking among the skills that matter to 2030. The two work together: resilience carries a business through hard months, and analysis tells it what to change.
If you plan to build something in this trade, the useful test is whether you can write down the number at which your idea stops losing money. That is a trainable skill, and it is the specific gap this programme was built to close.
Sources
- Reuters, via Malay Mail, on Singapore F&B operators
- World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025
- The Urban List Singapore, why restaurants are closing
Figures are quoted from the organisations named above and were current at the time of writing. Cairnhill Institute is not the source of this data and does not present it as a forecast of any individual outcome.