Embracing career transitions with courage

In this episode, Ritu welcomes Pei Lin Cho, a pioneer in introducing litigation PR to Singapore. Pei Lin shares her fascinating journey from being a litigation lawyer to venturing into the world of public relations. They discuss the challenges of transitioning between industries, overcoming age-related biases, and the importance of creating visibility. Pei Lin also reflects on the support she received from her family, friends, and colleagues, emphasizing the diverse aspects that contribute to defining success both in business and personal life. Join the conversation as they delve into the dynamic intersection of law, PR, and the pursuit of a purposeful life!

Discussion Topics: Embracing career transitions with courage

• Introducing Pei Lin Cho 
• Defining Litigation PR: the mysteries behind this complex field
• Transitioning from Law to PR 
• The Early Challenges: starting an agency without a hefty budget
• Navigating Challenges: Managing people and adapting to a changing workforce 
• The importance of visibility in the business world 
• The importance of a support system
• What does success look like for Pei Lin Cho?  
• Words of Wisdom: “Go chase the rainbow.”

Transcript: Embracing career transitions with courage

Ritu G. Mehrish: Welcome Pei Lin to the Rewrite The Rules. I’m really excited to have you on our show today, and I’m sure listeners are in for a treat.

Pei Lin Cho: Thank you.

Ritu G. Mehrish: So all that I’m gonna say is Pei Lin is a pioneer in introducing litigation PR to Singapore. Pei Lin. Tell us a little bit about what’s your forte? What is it that you do?

What Does Pei Lin Do?

Pei Lin Cho: I think it’s a really big word, litigation pr, it usually throws people off a little bit. My career is in public relations. And a lot of what I do is in strategic communications work doing some amount of branding, media, lasting work and securing publicity opportunities for my clients.

It’s an industry that’s about a hundred years old. So it’s a very young industry in the world. And although I’ve been in this industry for 20 years, my parents. Who are both educated, continue to ask me, so what exactly do you do for a living?

But essentially what I do in litigation PR is to help people companies or organisations who are in the midst of litigation deal with their reputation. So in other words, whilst their lawyers and their legal team work with them in the court of law, my fight for them is in the court of public opinion. And to try to see if we could persuade people to listen to their story in the middle of a court case whether it’s a criminal prosecution matter. Or a civil suit between two organisations. I would say litigation PR work takes up about 20 to 30% of my work today. The only reason why I’m doing it is that I started my working life as a lawyer, as a litigation lawyer. That sort of provides the background as to why when I moved industries from the practice of law to PR,

Ritu G. Mehrish: Pei Lin. I picked up this interesting thing as you were saying, you made a transition from. Being a lawyer to PR two different industries, two different kinds of work. What made you do that?

Transitioning to PR

Pei Lin Cho: My mother. So when I was in school, my mother decided when I was very young that, oh, you can count very well. You shall be an accountant. You will be an accountant since maths is your strong subject. And when I was choosing a university course I decided I’ll do something.

I’ll do anything except be an accountant. Why law? Because my mother said there’s no way you could get into law. Oh, okay. Do you think so? All the more I’ll just do it.

Studying law although it started out as. Something that I did just to make sure I didn’t become an accountant. I ended up falling in love with it, loving legal practice. And in the first year of my legal practice, I didn’t go home until about 1:00 AM-2:00 AM every single day.

I work seven days a week. So because we had to put billable hours, I billed 364 days, that first year, which means I only stopped working for one day and then my mother said, You, I didn’t send you to school, so I’ll never see you again. In Singapore, in a typical Asian family, we don’t leave the home until we are married.

She felt that I needed life and that working was not alive. I loved my work and then my mom said, we are going on a family holiday at the end of the year. Your younger brother and sisters are graduating. She’s a dramatic Asian mother, right? So she sits for the last time. We’re gonna have a holiday as a family. And if you are not gonna be there, you move out of my house. And I said, oh, wow. And I started counting, oh I earned $3,000. If I pay rent somewhere, I’m not gonna get any cash left. It’s not worth it. Maybe I shouldn’t move out. I should go for the holiday. And so I told my boss probably in August that, oh, I’m resigning, I’m giving you four month’s notice.

I need to go on a family holiday. And I couldn’t take leave because I had two major trials in January, which my boss would require me to be around to prepare for the trials. I knew that it was just wrong to apply for leave. And I left LE Practice,

And that was when I decided to try and do PR with a very good friend that grew up with me. We sat around in cafes. Having coffee and thinking, what are we gonna do with the rest of our lives? And my friend said, let’s be an entrepreneur.

And I said that sounds cool. We thought about opening a cafe, a sushi bar. Actually, we really were. Fixated on wanting an open sushi bar, and then we checked out the cost. It’s a hundred over a thousand rental renovations, getting licences.

And I went home and I said, Mom, do you have a hundred thousand for me? I wanted to start a business. This was 20 years ago. Mom said, no way. Not a single cent for you. You could do whatever you want without money from me. And I said, okay. And that’s how we ended up with PR. My friend said, Hey, PR is like, you don’t need money to start. I’m like, oh, really? Let’s do it then. Whatever it means.

Ritu G. Mehrish: We were just too young ladies thinking we could conquer the world when we had nothing and yeah, what a journey it has been. I can only imagine in that youth and being so naive in, in a way, led you to do that because if you’d overthought it, I don’t think so. You would have this agency today, right?

Pei Lin Cho: if I had the knowledge and the hindsight today, I wouldn’t have done that really. I wouldn’t have done that and it’s just insanity.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Yeah. And so now you’ve been doing this for 20 years, you said, right?

Pei Lin Cho: That’s right.

Ritu G. Mehrish: I’m sure there were many moments which redefined you and the work, but if you were to look back, there were few. Incidents, few milestones that you know of his centre in those 20 years Talk. Tell us a few of them.

Moments that Redefined Her Work

Pei Lin Cho: PR as a skill set. I think it was not so difficult learning it when we really put our minds to it and wanted to do it. My business partner had a degree in PR and she had work experience in PR. As for me I just bought a lot of textbooks, brought them from the libraries and just.

Learned what it was about, and I realised it wasn’t that difficult. Or that is different from legal practice. Like I said, it’s really about convincing people. In legal practice, it was about convincing the judge, there is no jury system in Singapore, so it was only one guy, the judge, and in, in pr it’s really about convincing the target audience or the public of their opinion.

To that extent, I think it’s advocacy. In a different way. But in terms of the challenges like, like you mentioned, right? Along the way, one key part of it was that we were very young bosses, and in the initial stage, Being very young, we thought, hey, we are paying you a salary.

You should do anything we want you to do and if you don’t do it well, we are gonna scream and shout at you until it’s done. And then about a year in, we met a client, who really kept talking about investing in people that worked with him. After several conversations, we heard him tell the story to the media.

When we arranged media interviews, we got intrigued and we really sat him down and said, teach us. Teach us and tell us how you do. Train people with such an open heart and not worry that they will leave and resign and take all your secrets and all whatever you’ve taught them away.

And that was the first guy that told us, whilst this person is working for you and earning a salary from you for one month, this person is a team member. And if you don’t train him enough and allow him to contribute to his maximum capacity. He may not be the best player in your team, and therefore you’re doing yourself a disservice, so in, running the business over the years, HR, managing people, and learning how to be a servant leader to some extent it’s it’s.

It’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned and challenges and I think it continues to be a challenge as we deal with a changing demographic of the workforce that joins us.

Ritu G. Mehrish: That’s right. I’m tempted to ask this because you said you were, these two young ladies started this agency. Did you have any challenges initially to get clients or people taking you seriously?

How Did the Clients Take Her Seriously?

Pei Lin Cho: The first three years I remember, I didn’t wear anything but full suits to meetings. Because we had people, I had a client who asked me and my business partner, Julie, and we were across the table from him. We presented our idea to launch an MP3 player. Okay? Back then, MP3 players were the latest.

We pitched for the project. We had great ideas and this man. The client sat across from us and said, I have a few questions for you. And we were gonna answer questions related to the project. And he said, how old are you? And we were like, we, I remember we were 25, 26 and we went, we were almost 30. And then he said, how old is your company? And we talked about almost two years when we were actually barely in the first year. And then he said, how big is your company? How many people are there? And I, there were two of us. And then, but we said yeah, a few more.

and then he says, okay, I love the ideas. I loved your energy. I think we coded him maybe $12,000 to do it 20 years ago, and he said, I’ll pay you $2000. It’s you. An honour to do my brand launch. And once you have that in your credentials it’s to your advantage.

You should be paying me to do my work, so I’ll pay you 2000 to cover your expenses and you do it. So I think we were. Looking back, I think we were definitely bullied to some extent, right? And I think from a business point of view, people may say that’s what business is all about. Finding the opportunity to, to, and the best. It’s a willing, buyer, willing seller kind of idea. We did take the job, by the way,

And but yeah we felt like we needed to be older all the time until we hit our forties and then we wanted to be younger.

I remember even when I was like 42, 43, and if I walked into. With really senior leadership teams, and they would ask, I would always say, yeah, when you’re in your late forties, or I would always exaggerate my age, whereas all my friends were like, are you serious?

Ritu G. Mehrish: And actually that’s really cool because women know more than to hide their age. We can wear it on our sleeve, and exaggerate if we need to. So it’s perfect.

Pei Lin Cho: In these 20 years as you look back, were there a few challenges? Were there some obstacles that you faced and what were they, but also more importantly, how did you overcome them?

Overcoming Obstacles

Ritu G. Mehrish: I think one of the biggest challenges was like I said, managing people. And I think it continues to be a challenge learning how to be a good manager and then a good mentor, right? And being able to see past the fact that people. May not be working with you forever, but it is worth investing in them when they are with you.

Pei Lin Cho: And of course now with as we at least in recent years are dealing with a Younger workforce coming into the company fresh out of Covid, they spend their entire university in, throughout, in a lockdown, for example. They are less likely to want to work from a physical office permanently.

They are more likely to look for purpose, they say, and then it’s the challenge of looking inward, right? And saying, look, as a company, Do we have a corporate purpose? And what is that corporate purpose? I think these are the types of challenges that we continue to deal with on a regular basis.

And then there is also the part, as I said about creating visibility. There are a lot of them. Humility is being taught in our Asian culture. If you are doing a good job, you wait for someone else to tell you’re doing a good job. You don’t go out and say I’m a great successful person in litigation PR, for example.

I feel embarrassed when you say that I still do. And that is why we exist actually, funnily, because clients engage us to do that for them. And so what we have done, like you said, how do you overcome this challenge? One of the things we did internally now that we are big enough was to have a group of people look at each other’s PR visibility and marketing.

So instead of us trying to go to people and say, I’m really good, have me on your show redo. I think, oh, you’re writing a book. You should interview me. So you see what happened instead was that a colleague of mine went to you and said, Hey, writing a book, you should interview my colleague. And then we’re doing that for each other and being each other’s cheerleaders. No, I think that’s such a good point because creating visibility, as you rightly said, I run women’s leadership programs, and one of the things we talk a lot about is how you create visibility.

Ritu G. Mehrish: And one of the things we talk about is this, how do you have a network who can then speak to you? So don’t necessarily speak for yourself, but create a network that can then speak for you. And I’m happy that you mentioned that you know how you are, how you all are supporting each other in talking about the other person. So that’s still done. The visibility is created, but through another person which also actually makes it even more credible when you do it through somebody else, right?

What were some pockets, some people who really supported you in this journey? When you look back, you say, without them probably, I wouldn’t have gotten here. What does that support look like as you look back and even now maybe to continue?

Pei Lin’s Support System

Pei Lin Cho: I started off talking about my mother. I have to start again. Saying that my mother, my father, and my parents, have been supportive in their way. They’re Asian parents. So of course they have along the way stopped me and said, so what exactly are you doing? Do you have enough money?

So I, I think whilst, whilst they had that kind of traditional conversations with me regularly, on the other hand, they have always been very proud of what I do. And. And they’re only very supportive of allowing me to do all these. And I would say that that is very important in that journey that I took.

Of course, the other area of it is that I had a lot of support from friends and people in the industry and people that Were like my chosen family, I say, so that’s my family and that’s people that I chose to be my family. But this is partners, for example, and many clients who’ve supported us over the years.

Of course. Now I better say my husband too. I love to be very much involved in a lot of community projects, community committees and organisations, and charities, and I continue to be very active in that circle.

Even though I loved practice, I was prepared to give it up because of two things. One, I didn’t have enough time for my family at all. And number two, I didn’t have time at all to be part of any organisations outside of work, and I didn’t like that.

Ritu G. Mehrish: yeah.

Pei Lin Cho: Today I sit on about eight different charity boards and committees. And I love the work that I do there. So I think I am grateful. I met a man who accepted that and said, okay, you’re gonna be very busy at work, but you are also going to be involved in all these committees and charities and stuff that don’t make money, but that’s okay. If you like it. So I’m grateful for all that support.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Nice. So many things you said. Makes so much sense. Like you said, it starts with our parents supporting us, but also having a bunch of people around us. And that’s again, one of the things I tell women leaders is that don’t just get sucked a hundred per cent in your work.

Try and get a community, even outside work, whether it’s your friend, it could be your colleagues, but develop that network because I think, it’s important for men too, but men inherently probably are better at networking. Women have to just make that little bit more effort. But once they do that, those are the people who become their biggest cheerleader. So I’m glad you mentioned all of this and especially the point about doing things even outside work which kind of leads me to a little bit more serious quest conversation or question. How do you define success?

Defining Success

Pei Lin Cho: I think success in different areas of our life looks different. Success at work primarily has to be having a good profit or revenue than profit, right? I think that’s still very critical about running a business. But that cannot be the only definition or outcome of what success looks like for running a business. Having people who say this. Are part of that business. They are team players. They see it as their career. I think that is important, being able to.

The outcomes that our clients want. That is definitely a success. Clients coming back to us and I have clients who are about 20 years old with us, so that is a success, right? They may not be our highest billing client today.

But we are proud that we’ve made them happy and we’ve fulfilled whatever they want to pay us for, and so well that they come back to us year after year. That is a success. So I think on the business front, that’s what success looks like. I think for, in my personal life, success is about having and being able to continue to create shared memories with my family.

Being there and being present is very important. Whether they are for the younger generation, or the ageing parents and grandparents type, it’s about being there. It’s really about being there, and having a lot of shared memories, laughter and meals together. For my family at least, eating is a big thing. So just being able to eat together is so important.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Oh, nice. If you look back, what would you tell your younger self, what actionable or very tactical advice would you have for your younger self?

Advice to Younger Self

Pei Lin Cho: Wow. Don’t be so hard to get old. There’s nothing good about going old yet. I would say go ahead. Enjoy yourself. You’re Doing a great job.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Great. Are there any other thoughts or insights you have that you think would benefit me the listeners or anybody else?

Pei Lin Cho: I give talks regularly to young people. The schools invited me and I did that with all the young people who joined our company. I always do a talk with them within the first month of them joining. I’ll try the exercise on you too.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Sure.

Pei Lin Cho: For college, how many subjects did you take?

Ritu G. Mehrish: Six. Okay. 

Pei Lin Cho: Tell me your favourite subject. Quick one. Just one name. 

Ritu G. Mehrish:  Economics.

Pei Lin Cho: What is your score for economics?

Ritu G. Mehrish: Oh God. I got a 72 or something. Yeah.

Pei Lin Cho: Is that an A?

Ritu G. Mehrish: I don’t know. I think that’s an A.

Pei Lin Cho: So essentially I’ve tried this exercise on a lot of people and nobody ever gave me a favourite subject that they felt.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Yeah.

Pei Lin Cho: Or even score A, B, or C. Most of the time, 80% of the time, they score an A. Otherwise, sometimes they score a B, but nobody ever gave me a favourite subject where they scored a C.

So when young people ask me this, wow, Pei Lin, how do you know you’re supposed to do law and not pr? And I tell them, I didn’t know I’m supposed to do law and not pr. You hear my story, it was like accidentally. I got into doing pr, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy law. It also didn’t mean that I didn’t do well in law.

And I think if tomorrow I become a grab driver, I would be an excellent grab driver. I love driving and I’m a conversational person, so I will talk to people, and I’ll get the Grab driver of the year award within two years I’m sure. So at the end of the day when beyond people say, how do you know?

How do I know what I’m supposed to do in life? My answer to them is very simple. Go look for something that you do well in. Not something you enjoy because just because you enjoy it. And what do I enjoy? They say, what’s your passion? I said, my passion is sleeping, eating, and watching TV. Do you think I get out of bed every morning wanting to come to work?

No way. I would rather watch Netflix all day long. So passion has to be something that. It’s more of an attitude than the thing that you wanna do. And if you can see it from that angle, then bring passion to everything you do. Bring passion to your work. Bring passion to your family. When you are planning a family outing, a holiday, or a friend’s birthday, bring passion in. Passion is something you can put in your pocket and bring along with you everywhere you go. Be passionate.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Oh my God. How I love that.

That is gold. Thank you so much, Pei Lin. I, like I said, took away so much. If I were to summarise the top three learnings I had in this one, I started with the thing that you said about how focusing on people is so important. And actually, this is very relevant for even first-time managers that you know, the minute you become a manager, now you have responsibility for people so make sure right at the start of your career, if you’re managing people, you’re taking care of them, you’re investing in them, and you are, you’re working with them.

The other part was creating visibility. How we all are reluctant to create visibility for ourselves, but if we have a strong network, a strong ecosystem, those people can actually help create visibility for us, and that’s a fantastic way to do that. And something, again, very doable. The third piece, of course, I have to say is this whole, don’t just do something you enjoy, but do something that you’re good at.

I mean that, that was brilliant for me. So thank you so much, pal. I really enjoyed our conversation and I’m sure our listeners are going to do too. And thank you so much for your time. Last words, anything else from you?

Pei Lin Cho: go chase the rainbow.

Ritu G. Mehrish: Great. Go chase the rainbow. Thank you so much once again.

Pei Lin Cho: Thank you. Thank you.

Our Guests: CHO Pei Lin

CHO Pei Lin, Managing Director of APRW, is a pioneer in introducing Litigation PR to Singapore and her forte includes providing strategic PR consultancy in public affairs and public education campaign communications, corporate, litigation and crisis communications, government relations, real estate and insurance work. Her strong acumen for developing creative and effective communication strategies has seen her sought after by clients ranging from government agencies to global listed companies and non-profit organizations.