40 Under 40 2021: Min Ng, TSLA

Min Ng

General manager
The Secret Little Agency
Singapore

When Min Ng joined university, she was unaware of the diversity of roles and skill sets available at real-world agencies and gravitated toward account servicing. She learned the ropes at BBDO before moving on to Ogilvy & Mather to become one of the agency’s youngest associate account directors—at just 25. She then hit the motherlode upon joining The Secret Little Agency (TSLA) in 2015 as business director. And she’s been honing her craft at the creative agency since then.

Ng’s craft is rich and plenty. For major client POSB, she has been instrumental in leading brand and strategic comms since 2018 and helped pivot the brand into one for parents, families and the underserved. This not only led to TSLA retaining the bank's account for four years, it also contributed to the agency winning the bank’s social media remit in 2020, growing total revenue by 38%. And for KFC Singapore, an account she helped score in 2020, she led the team to create several culturally impactful pieces of work in less than 10 months into the partnership. This led to an exceptionally high partner-evaluation score from the client.

We could go on about Ng’s many client-related accolades, but one way her team manages to perform so well against creative giants in pitches is her pitch-optimisation strategy. Ng led the writing, designing, socialising, and training of TSLA's new business approach—an end-to-end approach of how the agency evaluates, engages and closes new businesses. This helped to not only equip staff with more varied skills but has improved pitch success rate by 35% from 2019 to 2020. In fact, 2020 was the agency’s most successful new business year, with a whopping 90% pitch win rate.

As head of talent, Ng also took on the challenge of rethinking the way TSLA casts and resources talent as the agency grew to take on bigger and more long-term clients. So she reengineered the agency’s centralised process into a system that was more inclusive and personalised. This meant that employees had the authority to choose their involvement in each business based on their strengths and passions. This led to a decrease in the number of iterations or revisions to get client approvals—by an average of 35%—and 2021's H1 biannual employee engagement survey saw a 42% increase in employee sentiment around having a greater sense of purpose in the work they do. It’s remarkable how one person can so significantly change the outcome of a company, and yet Ng has.