It’s really easy to see how far down the road we’ve come since we first began. My involvement with Rice Communications started during its conception, from when Sonya was thinking of a name, to when I pieced together a crude form of our logo and created makeshift business cards for all four of us.

There was a period during the 2008/2009 Volvo Ocean Race, where we used the Press Center as our base of operations. That was the most scenic office we had, with the marina just meters away.

We’ve also had meetings held at Starbucks, worked out of the client’s office. Imagine our excitement when we got our very own office – we were so happy to get something of our own after about a month of being nomads.

I couldn’t find my way to 74C Duxton Road initially, and by the time I was done walking around the entire Tanjong Pagar/Chinatown region, everybody was there, waiting for me. As I walked down Duxton Road, it seemed unfamiliar to me, but I had the feeling I would be very familiar to the area in time to come.

And then when I walked around the bare office perimeters, the sheer potential of the space overwhelmed me. I was thinking of a million things we could achieve. This was probably when I realized we were truly creating something, and that we had the ability to shape the company the way we wanted.

We had only 6 sets of desks, drawers and chairs to start off with. Using equipment left over in the premises by the previous tenant, I managed to cobble together the wireless internet to a state where it was functional – in the slightest sense of the word. We had to buy essentials as and when it occurred to us to. Cordless phones, fax machine, extension cables, water dispenser – you name it and there was a scramble to purchase it or get it set up. There was a time not too long ago, when we were buying bottled water and washing our dishes in the small toilet sink.

In this time, we pulled off the Volvo Ocean Race, the first Mobile Marketing Forum in the APAC region, the World Islamic Economic Forum and the New Zealand Season, while providing PR support to our clients. Our client roster was growing and we too had to grow.

There were so many office spaces we looked at that didn’t fit our requirements. There was a ghastly conservation shop house in a back alley that could potentially have been beautiful. First, however, we would have to install lighting and flooring. There was another one with a open yard on the third floor and lots of space – way too much for us. The best unit we could find was just next to our present unit.

We planned our office on the whiteboard, and we would add to or change the layout of the furniture a bit at a time. We got the new office up and running in the shortest time possible, which came as a surprise to me. We definitely settled into our new office comfortably, and before we knew it, 6 months had come and went. We held a party, and the response was overwhelming. Personally, it was only after the party died down that I began to realize that we had actually built a company. Imagine that – All the people we’ve interacted with, through phone and email were standing together in a room.

After looking through everything we’ve done, it’s hard to imagine that we’re only 7 months old. Who knows what the next few months will bring?