Striving for excellence: Kevin Yeung believes in making the most of his time
No two days are ever the same for Kevin Yeung, chairman of Feeding Hong Kong, a charity he co-founded with two partners and which services smaller food charities across Hong Kong by providing a food redistribution network and the logistics that go with it.
"We have a team of six full-time staff and we service 47 food banks," Yeung says. "We run a fleet constantly. Operational excellence is really important to me. What I hate are inefficiencies and one of the joys of Feeding Hong Kong is that it's hyper-efficient."
Yeung - who was born in Hong Kong and attended high school and university in the United States - also invests and plays an active role in start-ups, mentoring a handful of young protégés, including Daniel Cheng who helped Yeung develop the mobile free app FindDoc and who started the mobile application Purpella aimed at university students wanting to find events on and off campus.
The former investment banker and head of the United Nations World Food Programme in Hong Kong is also chairman of Go Go Tech, founded by protégé Steven Lam, and assists in venture capital work for technology companies in Hong Kong and the United States.
"I am particularly fond of [Go Go Tech]," Yeung says. "[Steven] and some friends decided to tackle a problem, how to organise some of the small light vans. Their solution was Go Go Van, which subsequently has 10,000 users, a fleet of 2,000 vans and does over 200 transactions a day. And this is only two months old, so it's very promising and exciting."
But it's not all business for the dedicated family man. "When I married, I decided to stop taking dinner appointments so I could spend time with my wife," Yeung says. "I started replacing those with power breakfasts and power lunches - so every night I am able to come home and have dinner with my wife and now with my son, and of course, my friends sometimes. As I result, I have to push everything upwards and forwards, and make phone calls in blocks of time."
