Mr Ryan Ho and Ms Natasha Toh were budding entrepreneurs long before they became husband and wife.

In primary school, Mr Ho made Star Wars X-Wing fighter action figures from ice-cream sticks and sold them to his classmates, while Ms Toh charged her schoolmates 20 cents each to win a bag of marbles through a lucky draw.

Their paths crossed in junior college at age 17, when the sporty duo – Mr Ho was a national youth football player and Ms Toh played competitive netball in secondary school – discovered a common interest in creativity and trying new things.

Fast forward 16 years, they are now married with two children and have channelled their passions for entrepreneurship and outdoor experiences into FunEmpire, an events company that organises innovative activities for corporate team-building, kids’ birthday parties, as well as hen and stag nights.

It all started when the couple watched a social media video of people falling all over one another playing football in large inflatable bubble suits. Eager to try it, Mr Ho and Ms Toh sourced for the bubble suits from overseas suppliers and organised a private game for their friends and family.

“Everyone had a great time and word spread about this ‘crazy’ game called Bubble Bump that we brought to Singapore,” recalls Mr Ho.

“People started reaching out, asking us to organise a game for them. Then, a friend of Natasha’s sister asked us to plan it for her company – they were our first corporate client.”

FunEmpire officially launched in 2015 and has been serving up fun, one-of-a-kind activities to some 50,000 participants on average a year.

The company's other popular activities include SaberFit (a combat saber dueling experience under illuminated lights), Poolball (a pool and football combination played on a life-sized table), an escape room, glow-in-the-dark neon art jamming and terrarium-making.

As the business grew to meet increasing demand, the company has grown from just Mr Ho and Ms Toh to 20 full-time and 30 contract staff today. They now have a dedicated headquarters on Tannery Lane that acts as a warehouse and office space, and organise events all across Singapore at various partner locations such as Futsal pitches and client venues including schools and offices. 

Finding the fun in every situation

FunEmpire has come a long way since its early days, as has Mr Ho and Ms Toh’s relationship.

“It’s been cool, spending time together as we learned about the business. Our common interests have aligned well here,” says Mr Ho.

One of the things the couple learned was how every business inevitably faces challenges. When Covid-19 hit in 2020, FunEmpire had to pivot from all in-person to online activities. The company worked quickly to design virtual games and workshops, moving escape rooms online and kickstarting creative team-building activities. For experiences such as virtual candle-making, the company had to deliver home kits to each participant before the sessions.

FunEmpire survived the pandemic, but faced new challenges. As the demand for in-person activities grew in 2021, the company had to find and negotiate with new partners to replace those that had closed down during the pandemic.

The company started pivoting again from 2022 as it grappled with delayed equipment shipments and increasing business costs due to inflation.

To adapt to these economic factors, Mr Ho has turned his attention to streamlining operations and reducing costs with the help of technology. He is mindful that the "essence" of FunEmpire as a people-centric business is kept intact, if not boosted.

“We're not replacing people to run the events because people need that human connection, but we want to leverage technology to be able to serve more people and also retain that unique concept of bringing people together through group experiences, which is the essence of what we do,” says Mr Ho.

Seamless integrations to increase cost efficiencies and productivity

In its journey to automate more of its processes, FunEmpire picked accounting software Xero in 2017 upon the recommendation of its accounting partner Harvest Accounting.

After onboarding onto Xero, Mr Ho was grateful to move away from manually inputting numbers and emailing Excel spreadsheets back and forth. Mr Ho could now do these tasks quickly through cloud-based accounting software.

He then found features like overview and expenses dashboards useful to track cash flow.

As FunEmpire grew and its business became more sophisticated, Xero came through with regular updates to meet the company's needs. For example, Xero's new integrations with payment platforms have been particularly useful and timely for the company’s needs.

“The user experience makes it easier for us to integrate with payment processors like Stripe and PayPal, which is important now as clients are going digital,” says Mr Ho.

He explains that the seamless integration of accounting and payment platforms into Xero means cutting down the number of steps in the payment workflow involving invoicing as well as payment terms and conditions.

“Once the payment is made the invoice is automatically marked as paid so you don't have to take so many different steps,” Mr Ho explains.

“It also helps to make the payment process more convenient for our customers, thereby increasing the speed in which invoice payments are collected,” adds Ms Toh.

FunEmpire has also been able to leverage Xero's open application programming interfaces (APIs) for its customer relationship management (CRM) needs. The open APIs allow FunEmpire to integrate third-party software into Xero so the company can continue to use one single platform for their CRM instead of switching between different and disconnected applications.

With "some working knowledge" of programming, Mr Ho was able to customise scripts for FunEmpire's CRM to show information such as each client's bookings, invoice and payment status by referring to Xero's Open APIs documentation.

The seamless integrations have produced cost efficiencies for FunEmpire.

“Since Xero works a lot with so many different applications, we save on software subscriptions,” says Mr Ho.

The company has also saved time it previously spent poring over data.

“We are more productive analysing new numbers, generating reports and downloading CSV reports with just a few clicks and we don't spend so much time data mining and cleaning data,” Mr Ho adds.

Freeing up time for innovation

With Xero increasing FunEmpire's cost efficiencies and productivity, Mr Ho and Ms Toh say they have more time to think of fun new experiences to stay ahead of the market.

“One of our key points of differentiation is that we design all our programmes and curricula in-house, which gives us control over the quality of our activities,” says Mr Ho.

Inspired by their experience raising a two and five-year-old, the couple are also considering expanding their portfolio to include group activities and experiences for toddlers.

“We're thinking of an escape room for toddlers and activities incorporating Stem concepts. They will be really simple but very kinesthetic because toddlers and younger children like to touch things,” says Mr Ho.

The ideas are still a work in progress. However, with more  resources freed up thanks to automated processes, the time to market for FunEmpire’s new activities may well be accelerated.

“Through FunEmpire, I hope we can help to dispel the notion that Singapore is a boring place with nothing fun to do,” says Ms Toh.

“Our ultimate goal is to design activities that will bring out that child-like happiness in everyone. It’s easier to do that with children, so my aim is to find more ways to bring that out in adults,” says Mr Ho.

“As long as our activities encourage our participants to let loose and have fun, we know we are on the right track.”

Learn more about how Xero can help your business.