By Candace Sutton | Daily Mail | Australia |
He was a school dropout who slept in his car while working on a factory conveyor belt after coming to Australia to pursue his dream of starting a business.
Narinder Singh was a migrant kid who had fled, aged 13, with his family from the religious genocide of strife-torn Punjabi India to New Zealand in the late 1980s.
Despite learning English quickly, Narinder never completed secondary school and became a picker in a kiwi fruit orchard, saving money to move to Australia at the age of 19.
He worked as a labourer, in a petrol station, on a South Australian farm and loading the conveyor belt in an electronics factory, all the while sleeping in his Holden Camira to conserve his meagre funds.
He struggled to find any landlord that would trust a teenager with no experience to be able to run a business and pay the rent.
But this week – 20 years later – Narinder has just opened the 11th store in the QE quality food empire he built worth $50 million in annual revenue, with a goal to have 50 shops across Sydney by 2030.
Narinder has built a loyal following of tens of thousands of customers in ten Sydney suburbs, some of whom told Daily Mail Australia they prefer to shop at QE instead of Coles and Woolworths because of the owner’s ‘attitude and habit of stocking items requested’ by them.
He has a code of five values for the operation of his stores and the people he hires.
They are: ‘We hold no grudges, respect for others, we are passionate, we are responsive and fast moving, and we are learners, curious and not afraid to try new things and make mistakes’.
Read the full story, ‘How a humble Sikh kid who couldn’t speak English went from living in his car and dropping out of school to taking on Australia’s supermarket giants – as he reveals five principles that built his $50MILLION empire’ (Daily Mail, 21 Feb 2022), here.
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