By Stuart Alan Becker
Monday, 14 May 2012
Phnom Penh Post
Din Somethearith, co-founder and executive director of Frangipani Villa Hotels, holds up a copy of Unfair Advantage,
one of many self-help books on alternative methods of financial
development and thinking by his favourite author, Robert Kiyosaki.
Photograph: Stuart Alan Becker
One of Cambodia’s true rags-to-riches success stories is that of Din
Somethearith, co-founder and executive director of Frangipani Villa
Hotels.
Frangipani, named for the blossoming tree, is a chain of
boutique hotels, one of which is located just off Street 178 at number
43, down a narrow lane which opens into an outdoor garden and dining
area with adjacent hotel reception.
A student of alternative
financial thinking and an avid reader of self-help author and financial
literacy activist Robert Kiyosaki, Din believes in 10-year rental
agreements, focusing on the people, a stand against sex tourism and
distinguishing between “good assets” and “bad assets”.
“Cambodia
was poor so I want to make my country better. I don’t want my country to
be remembered as poor and for the Khmer Rouge. I want it to be
prosperous with smiling faces,” he said.
“We work with orphanages
and we give bicycles. We have charity box where our guests and donate
and we give another two thirds after that. If the guests give one
dollar, we add double with two.”
While Din and his two partners
are enjoying steady income from four villa hotels today, they started
out far less fortunate, borrowing what they could from relatives and
friends, building their way forward step-by-step.
Born in Phnom
Penh in 1974, Din was ten months old when the Khmer Rouge took over. Now
he’s 38 years old, with a Thai wife and a son.
With a mother
from Kampong Cham and a father from Prey Veng, young Din was forced with
his family to move to his father’s town in Prey Veng. His father had
worked for the government, so he was sent away for “re-education” and
was never seen again.
“I knew him only through photos.”
Din and his one elder sister survived as small children through the Khmer Rouge period.
“My mother worked very hard, 10 hours per day on the farm and it was very tough to survive because we were city people.”
When
Din’s mother was asked to go to another province where the soil was
fertile and the living was easier, she recognized one of the Khmer Rouge
soldiers was wearing a shirt that belonged to one of the people she’d
seen earlier who had left on a similar trip to Pursat or Battambang to a
“prosperous land” and a “better life”.
She made a cover story that the kids had diarrhea and saved the family.
“My mother was very smart. She recognised the shirt that had belong to someone they killed.”
Finally,
after liberation in 1979, the family with 4-year-old Din came back to
see their old house in Tuol Kork, which was abandoned, but the area was a
kind of Vietnamese army camp.
“They allowed us to come into our
house but we could not live there because it was like a military camp. A
few months later during the early the place had settled down. Din and
his family lived at street 188 in Boeung Keng Kang 1.
“During that time there was no water supply, no electricity. We got our water from the river,” he said.
Few people had shoes to wear in those days but gradually the Phnom Penh markets started to carry them.
“My mother bought some shoes for me, but they got stolen the next day at school because none of the other kids had shoes.”
“We
were not clear if the Khmer Rouge would come back or not, and we didn’t
trust the Vietnamese either. We stayed with my uncle and my mom in a
shop house until 1989.”
Din enrolled in Sisowath High School,
graduating in 1992. He remembered that when the United Nations arrived,
Cambodia really changed.
“People rented out villas to the UN
staff and some people got money very quickly. Demand for housing was
very high and land prices increase dramatically at that time.”
Din
won a competition to learn architecture on a scholarship at the
Institute of Khmer Habitat. He worked closely with Danish-trained
architects and designed a lot of social projects including health
centers.
Following his graduation in 1999, Din went to work full
time for UN habitat, working as a technical officer on a lot of
different projects before winning a scholarship to the Asian Institute
of Technology in Bangkok where he earned a master’s degree in Urban
Environment Management.
During his two years in Bangkok he met
the lady who would become his wife, Saranya, who is a landscape
architect and teacher at Thailand’s prestigious Chulalongkorn
University. The couple have one son, Supicha, age 7.
After his
schooling in Thailand, Din returned to Cambodia and worked for the Asian
Development Bank, the World Bank and JICA all as a consultant in urban
development. The Cambodian government offered him jobs, but he refused.
In 2007, Din became country manager for UN Habitat.
“The work was very tough, dealing with city issues, evictions, and my life was difficult dealing with officials.”
Able
to save a few thousand dollars, Din began thinking about building a
small boutique hotel. They found a villa dating back to 1960 along
Street 252, which happened to be owned by one of his friends’ mothers.
Because of not much money between Din and his partners, it took eight
months to complete the renovations.
Within six months the rooms
were mostly full of foreigners, from Europe, America and Australia. From
the very beginning, they insisted on good behaviour in the hotels: no
smoking and strictly no sex tourism.
All Frangipani Villa hotels have solar heating systems as well.
The second property Din and his partners acquired was on Street 71 near the World Vision office.
“We
made 15 rooms, took more loans from the banks, and borrowed some money
from relatives. I and my partners kept working during that time.”
In
2009 Din and his partners found an opportunity in Siem Reap at a time
when a lot of guest houses there were closing and materials were cheap.
Today,
the Frangipani Villa Hotels group has five properties, totaling 140
rooms, all of which are leased for a term of 10 years. Din and his
partners intend to buy the properties when the leases are up.
Din
is influenced heavily by the work of Robert T. Kiyosaki, a
Japanese-American from Hawaii who promotes alternative thinking in
finance.
“He teaches us to start out small and use leverage. He
said if you want to be rich, you have to serve a lot of people, and you
have to be able to solve many problems. You have to know how to use debt
and distinguish between good debt and bad debt.”
According to
Din, good debt is that which somebody pays for you -- like servicing a
loan with rent payments -- and bad debt as that which you have to pay
yourself.
“Our customers pay our debt.”
Din agrees with
Kiyosaki against investing for capital gain like a gambler, encouraging
instead a business that creates money by using information.
All
of the Frangipani Villa Hotels are finished in tasteful architecture,
environment friendly, with solar hot water systems throughout.
“We
run the business to solve people’s problems. Foreigners who come want
to have a clean environment with social responsibility. We don’t run the
business for money. We want to build jobs for my people.”
Din is
proud to be Cambodian and encourages others who are poor to have ideas,
invent new businesses, use leverage and realise their dreams.
“The
power of financial education is that you realise you don’t need to own
it. You don’t need a 30-year lease. That’s a lot of your life. Ten years
is enough. To run a business, it is not about money; it is how you use
your idea. You don’t require that your parents are big business people. I
keep telling people that I came from poor family with no father and no
shoes to wear. “
To contact the reporter on this story: Stuart Alan Becker at stuart.becker@gmail.com
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