Meet Alex Chan, Founder of OMNI Digital
Alex Chan is the founder of OMNI Digital, a Singapore digital marketing agency specialising in performance-driven campaigns across paid media, creative strategy and customer acquisition.
Today, Alex has managed more than eight figures in Facebook and Google ad spend, worked with businesses across education, eCommerce, retail and B2B, and built OMNI around a simple philosophy: marketing should ultimately generate measurable business results.
His path into digital marketing, however, was far from straightforward.
Before starting OMNI Digital, Alex spent seven years in private banking. He started a tuition centre while working full-time, paid US$10,000 for an affiliate marketing programme that failed, left banking to become a dropshipper, spent more than $1 million on Facebook ads, launched businesses in pest control and F&B, sold products through Amazon, and eventually found himself running several businesses at the same time.
Then COVID-19 arrived.
One of those businesses began losing S20,000toS30,000 a month. Outlets closed, partnerships changed and Alex was forced to reconsider what he actually wanted to spend his career doing.
That period eventually led him back to something that had been present throughout almost every business he had built: marketing.
This is the story of how Alex Chan went from private banking to entrepreneurship, through several successes and failures, before finding his Ikigai and building OMNI Digital.
2010 to 2014: Starting His Career in Private Banking
Alex graduated from Nanyang Technological University in 2010 with a degree in Accountancy. After graduation, he joined Credit Suisse Private Banking as an analyst and later continued his career at HSBC Private Banking.
He also became a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).
On paper, Alex had built a strong career. Private banking offered a stable income, a respected profession and a clear route forward. However, after several years in the industry, he increasingly felt that it was not what he wanted to do for the rest of his working life.
He was unhappy and felt stuck. The working week became something to get through, with Fridays and holidays giving him something to look forward to before the cycle started again.
At the same time, Alex was beginning to explore entrepreneurship.
In December 2014, he started Bright Culture, a tuition centre, with a friend.
That business would become his first real introduction to digital marketing.
2014: Starting Bright Culture and Discovering Google Ads
Like many new tuition centres, Bright Culture needed students.
Alex initially tried traditional forms of advertising. He handed out flyers, placed advertisements in newspapers and hung physical banners in public areas to promote the centre. One of those banners even resulted in a warning from Singapore’s National Environment Agency.
Despite all that effort, Bright Culture’s first two customers did not come from a flyer, newspaper advertisement or banner.
They came from Google Ads.
That result caught Alex’s attention.
Google allowed Bright Culture to appear when a parent was already searching for tuition. Instead of hoping that somebody happened to see a banner, Alex could reach people who were actively looking for the service his business provided.
He began teaching himself WordPress, Google Ads and SEO so that he could improve Bright Culture’s marketing.
At this stage, digital marketing was not yet Alex’s career. It was something he needed to learn because he was a business owner with classrooms to fill.
However, it quickly became an area he wanted to understand more deeply.
Why did certain advertisements work better than others? Why did one message generate enquiries while another failed? How much could a business afford to spend to acquire a customer?
These were questions Alex would continue exploring for the next decade.
2015 to 2017: Learning Through His First Major Failure
Alex joined HSBC Private Banking in March 2015 while continuing to explore opportunities outside banking.
In December 2015, he paid US$10,000 to learn affiliate marketing.
The venture failed.
It was an expensive lesson, but it did not stop Alex from experimenting with online businesses. Instead, his next major opportunity arrived in March 2017, when a friend introduced him to dropshipping just one week before his wedding.
Alex built a Shopify store, sourced products through AliExpress and used Facebook advertising to reach customers in the United States.
Unlike his affiliate marketing attempt, dropshipping began producing results.
One month later, in April 2017, Alex left HSBC and became a full-time entrepreneur.
It was a significant decision. He had spent approximately seven years building his banking career and had only recently married. His parents questioned why he would leave a secure profession for something as uncertain as eCommerce.
Alex did not know exactly where the decision would lead.
He simply knew that he did not want to spend the rest of his career doing work that left him feeling stuck.
2017 to 2018: Becoming a Full-Time eCommerce Entrepreneur
For a period, dropshipping gave Alex the lifestyle he had been looking for.
He could travel while running his business online, test new products and use Facebook advertising to sell to customers outside Singapore.
He initially believed the easy money could continue.
However, the dropshipping market became increasingly competitive. There was little barrier to entry, more entrepreneurs started using the same model and Facebook advertising costs increased.
The business also depended heavily on finding winning products. A successful product could generate strong revenue, but another month could be loss-making if the next products failed.
By October 2018, Alex had realised how unpredictable the model could be.
During this period, however, he accumulated a substantial amount of practical paid advertising experience. Across his eCommerce journey, Alex spent more than $1 million on Facebook ads.
He was learning with his own money.
Every campaign forced him to understand creative, targeting, customer acquisition cost, offers, landing pages and conversion rates. These experiences would later influence how OMNI approaches ecommerce marketing for its clients.
Alex continued investing heavily in his own education as well. In 2018, he paid another US$10,000 to attend a five-day eCommerce mastermind with Steve and Evan Tan.
Meanwhile, OMNI Digital’s journey had also started around 2017. At this point, however, Alex had not yet made the agency his sole focus.
He was about to become involved in even more businesses.
2019: Running Multiple Businesses at the Same Time
In March 2019, Alex’s wife introduced him to a friend who had previously operated a pest-control company.
Alex saw an opportunity in an industry many entrepreneurs might avoid. Pest control and mould treatment were not glamorous businesses, but that was precisely what interested him. He believed an undesirable industry could potentially attract less competition.
This led to Zenith Lab, a business providing mould-treatment and pest-control services.
Two months later, another opportunity came along.
A friend who operated a bubble-tea chain approached Alex about bringing a Taiwanese braised-pork-rice franchise to Singapore.
Alex agreed to participate.
The business raised almost S500,000frominvestors,withAlexpersonallyinvestingS125,000 in cash.
By this point, he was involved in Bright Culture, dropshipping, Zenith Lab and the F&B venture.
In September 2019, he added another business activity by launching pet products on Amazon FBA.
Then, in November 2019, the first Jiak outlet opened at AMK Hub. Additional outlets at Clementi and Northpoint City followed around March 2020.
Within roughly three years of leaving banking, Alex had gone from one corporate career to being involved in businesses across education, eCommerce, pest control, Amazon and F&B.
He had achieved the entrepreneurial freedom he once wanted.
However, he was also stretched across too many businesses.
Then COVID-19 changed everything.
2020: COVID-19, Business Losses and a Major Reset
The COVID-19 pandemic created problems across several of Alex’s businesses at the same time.
Bright Culture was affected by disruptions to the education sector. Amazon FBA faced challenges. Jiak was exposed to the severe impact that restrictions and reduced foot traffic had on Singapore’s F&B industry.
Zenith Lab had also come to an end for Alex after his business partner decided he wanted to operate it himself.
Jiak became the most financially painful problem.
By August 2020, the F&B business was losing approximately S20,000toS30,000 every month.
Alex had personally invested S125,000intotheventure,whilethewiderbusinesshadraisedclosetoS500,000 from investors.
Eventually, continuing to operate the outlets no longer made financial sense.
The AMK outlet was wound down in October 2020. In December, Alex made the decision to wind down the Northpoint City outlet as well.
Around the same period, another change was happening at Bright Culture. Alex bought over his partner’s stake after realising that they no longer shared the same vision for the business.
By the end of 2020, several of the ventures Alex had spent the previous few years building had either ended or changed significantly.
It became a turning point.
Discovering His Ikigai
During COVID-19, Alex began reconsidering what he actually wanted to focus on.
His internal account of his entrepreneurial journey describes this period as “Discovering my Ikigai”.
Ikigai is a Japanese concept commonly associated with finding purpose through the intersection of what you enjoy, what you are good at, what provides value to others and what can support you professionally.
Looking back across the previous six years, Alex could see one skill appearing repeatedly.
Marketing.
Bright Culture had forced him to learn Google Ads and SEO.
Dropshipping had taught him Facebook advertising and eCommerce customer acquisition.
Amazon required him to understand online consumer behaviour.
Every business he had operated depended, in one form or another, on finding customers and converting attention into revenue.
The industries kept changing, but marketing remained constant.
Instead of starting another unrelated business, Alex decided to concentrate on the capability he had already spent years developing.
That meant focusing on OMNI Digital.
2020 Onwards: Building OMNI Digital
OMNI Digital traces its beginnings to 2017, although OMNI Digital Pte. Ltd. was formally incorporated in Singapore on 1 January 2022.
The period following COVID marked a more focused chapter in Alex’s relationship with the agency.
His previous experience as a business owner strongly influenced how he approached client marketing.
Alex had personally experienced what happened when customer acquisition failed. He had paid rent, managed operating costs, invested his own capital and spent significant amounts on advertising.
As a result, OMNI was built around the idea that marketing performance should be connected to business performance.
Generating a large number of leads, for example, means little if those leads never become customers. This is why OMNI’s approach to cheap leads considers lead quality and eventual sales rather than simply trying to produce the lowest possible cost per enquiry.
The same principle applies to paid search. Looking only at Google Ads cost does not show whether a campaign is profitable. A more expensive click can still produce a better commercial outcome if the person behind that click is substantially more likely to become a customer.
This focus on business outcomes became an important part of OMNI’s approach to performance marketing.
Returning to Education With the Enrolment Engine
Alex’s experience with Bright Culture also became valuable when OMNI began working with other education businesses.
He understood the sector as an operator, not only as a marketer.
He knew that a tuition centre could generate plenty of enquiries and still struggle with enrolment. Parents might submit a form but never respond. Others might enquire about price without serious intent. Some might book a consultation and never appear.
Over years of testing, these experiences contributed to what OMNI calls the Enrolment Engine, a marketing system focused on generating and converting student enquiries more predictably.
Bright Culture itself became one example of this approach. Changes to campaign objectives, landing pages, advertising creatives and copy reduced acquisition costs and improved campaign performance.
OMNI subsequently applied its marketing expertise across other sectors as well, including eCommerce, retail, B2B and home services. Examples of this work can be found in the agency’s case studies.
The Philosophy Behind OMNI Digital
As OMNI grew, Alex also had to move from being an individual marketer to building a marketing team.
The company’s stated mission is to become a team of world-class marketers.
Four values underpin that ambition: obsessive pursuit of excellence, elite teamwork, long-term vision and incremental growth.
The pursuit of excellence reflects Alex’s belief that marketing expertise requires constant practice. Advertising platforms change, creative formats evolve and customer behaviour shifts. A strategy that worked several years ago cannot simply be repeated indefinitely.
Elite teamwork reflects how modern campaigns are built. Media buying, copywriting, design, video production, strategy and account management affect one another. Strong performance therefore depends on the entire team rather than a single specialist.
Long-term vision represents another lesson from Alex’s entrepreneurial journey. His dropshipping years were often centred around finding the next winning product. Building OMNI required a different mindset based on developing people, systems, capabilities and client relationships over time.
Finally, incremental growth is based on improving continuously rather than waiting for one breakthrough. Better creative testing, stronger reporting, clearer processes and improved communication may each appear small individually, but they compound.
These principles now shape how OMNI approaches digital marketing for its clients.
Alex Chan Today
Today, Alex Chan is the founder of OMNI Digital and has managed more than eight figures in Facebook and Google advertising spend.
He has also worked as an eCommerce coach and built experience across education, eCommerce, retail, B2B and other industries. OMNI’s corporate materials state that its campaigns have generated more than S$85 million in revenue and that the agency has served more than 50 local businesses.
The numbers tell one part of the story.
The more important part is how Alex arrived there.
He began his career in private banking in 2010. Four years later, a tuition centre introduced him to digital marketing. He spent US$10,000 on affiliate marketing and failed. He left banking in 2017 to pursue dropshipping, spent more than US$1 million learning Facebook advertising through real ca1millionlearningFacebookadvertisingthroughrealcampaigns,enteredseveralotherindustriesandeventuallyinvestedS125,000 of his own money into an F&B venture.
Then COVID-19 arrived, and that business began losing S20,000toS30,000 a month.
The resulting reset helped Alex identify his Ikigai and recognise that marketing was the common thread running through nearly every business he had built.
OMNI Digital became the place where those experiences came together.
Today, the digital marketing agency is built around a perspective Alex developed from being both the marketer spending the advertising budget and the entrepreneur whose own money depended on the results.
That distinction still influences how he thinks about marketing.
Clicks matter. Leads matter. Advertising costs matter.
But ultimately, businesses need customers and revenue.
For Alex Chan, understanding that did not come from one course, one campaign or one successful company. It came from more than a decade of trying, failing, investing, testing and learning what actually moves a business forward.