Singapore, 16 July 2025 — Timah Partners was recently invited to speak at the NUS Enterprise Summer Programme in Entrepreneurship, where CEO and founder Dennis Chua addressed a room of over 300 students and aspiring entrepreneurs from more than 30 countries.
Dennis delivered a talk and participated in a fireside chat on Timah Partners’ permanent holding company model, the growing SME succession gap in Southeast Asia, and how Timah is using the former to solve the latter while offering aspiring entrepreneurs an attractive alternative to traditional pathways to entrepreneurship.
In particular, he shared how Timah’s CEO Succession Program (CSP) is creating a new path for operator-entrepreneurs to take the helm of successful SMEs—companies that are profitable, essential to the economy, and often lacking a succession plan.
The CSP, the first of its kind in Southeast Asia, offers exceptional operator-entrepreneurs a direct pathway to SME ownership through a structured program starting with M&A work at the corporate level, followed by operational apprenticeship under a seasoned CEO, and culminating in full operational leadership. Dennis also touched on the underlying issue that Timah was designed to address: that SME succession is not a capital issue, but a leadership one, and solving for that requires long-term alignment, not short-term exit pressure.
The audience, comprising business undergraduates, young entrepreneurs, and faculty members, engaged with Dennis in a lively Q&A around the realities of SME acquisition, the nuances of the permanent capital model, and how ETA (Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition) can be a credible and compelling alternative to conventional entrepreneurship—especially in an economy where the next generation of business leaders will need to think differently.
As Dennis put it during the session: “Entrepreneurship doesn’t always have to mean being a founder. What if I told you that there’s another path—stepping into a high-ownership CEO role in a business that already has strong fundamentals, real impact, and room to grow. You’re still building, just not from zero.”
