Every strong leader derives their persistence and work ethic from somewhere. Carol Kheng, ChFC, looks back on the five years she spent in a hotel’s sales department and the long hours on her feet constantly trying to fill the rooms — knocking on the doors of corporations and attempting to persuade decision makers to book their overseas guests at the five-star hotel.

“That made me the person I am today in terms of determination and commitment,” said the 26-year MDRT member from Singapore. “I think a lot of advisors who didn’t have the kind of background that I had find rejections a lot more difficult; after making so many calls and knocking on so many doors, I was immune.”

Kheng brings this resilience and strength to many areas of her life, including the new role she assumed on September 1 as MDRT President. The title marks a new step in a financial services career that literally began with a dream.

Making a change

While Kheng appreciated the lessons and relationships built while working at the hotel, there was a large disparity between the constant physical effort that job required and her compensation. After she lost her job when a change in hotel ownership sparked massive layoffs, the setback provided an opportunity for Kheng, then in her 20s, to pursue a career that would put her in charge of her own income.

But selling insurance was a profession she thought no one looked upon with respect and now sees considering whether to become an advisor as one of the hardest decisions of her life. As she weighed what was next for her, Kheng had a dream in which a voice told her to join the financial services world. “Just a dream,” she thought, and shrugged it off. Then she had the same dream every day for that entire week. Kheng took that as a sign, called her own advisor, and said she wanted to join him, focusing on critical illness insurance and income protection.

As with her previous career, Kheng felt driven to do well, a product of being 10 to 17 years younger than her four brothers, who were already successful in the medical, engineering and banking fields. And clients from her hotel work turned into a warm prospecting market for her new career.

“Clients from my hotel days are still my clients today,” Kheng said. “We can sit down, have coffee and laugh about how long we’ve known each other.”

Short-term action, long-term success

While Kheng excels at building long-term relationships, she also thrives by being proactive in the short term. During every third and fourth quarter, she meets with private bankers — her largest referral pool for estate planning work — to stay top of mind with them. She has 1,000 clients, 20% of whom are high-net-worth (HNW) and owners of small- to medium-sized businesses. These proactive meetings enable Kheng to get a jump on next year’s sales cycle, as her cases come with a very long underwriting period. 

Her communication with other clients also prioritizes thinking ahead. To protect small- to medium-sized business owners from unforeseen challenges, Kheng emphasizes a crucial message: Complexity vastly increases if a founding partner dies without a plan in place. 

“We should prepare when it’s blue skies rather than when something happens along the way, and we have to scramble,” she said. “It’s easier to plan in advance rather than trying to respond once something has happened.”

Fittingly, the ability to plant seeds and help them grow over time comes up repeatedly in conversation with Kheng. In 2007, she received a referral from an MDRT member whose client moved from Canada to Singapore. That client became one of Kheng’s biggest and her first entry into estate planning. She began recruiting legal advisors to help one client with assets around the world. Now she receives many referrals from private bankers because this client, the head of a private banking division, has seen Kheng’s success helping HNW clients with estate planning, wills and trusts. 

She also has clients in the food industry thanks to referrals from sibling owners of a butchery business, who are the children of a former hotel colleague. These clients might not have big businesses, but Kheng’s passion lies in helping this market with contingency planning, seeing benefits in both the individual work and the cumulative production. Plus, she enjoys that many of the businesses are based in Singapore. Their experience with challenges can be freely shared with others, unlike some private banking clients and ultra-HNW clients outside the country with situations that are more sensitive.

Kheng — who somehow has only handled one death claim in 30 years — relies on paperless processes to ensure that client documents and data are always organized and at her fingertips. Her nephew, an IT specialist, made her an early adopter of Dropbox in 2008 and exposed her to cloud-based technology such as OneDrive for personal items and Google Drive for photos.

Reimagined routine

Kheng had long prided herself on being able to do everything without the burden of training and managing support staff. Eventually, she realized she needed support to focus more time on client contact and began looking to hire an assistant in the summer of 2021. Kheng’s search process demonstrated her ability to be proactive and practical, idealistic but clearheaded.

For more than two years, Kheng transitioned among three different assistants who had varying degrees of success in meeting her expectations and staying in that role. Then, in fall 2023, Kheng asked Doris, a recently retired office manager who Kheng met 35 years ago during her hotel days and became Kheng’s first advising client, if she wanted to work with her. Doris downloads and electronically files all materials dealing with client policies using a clear process established for the A clients who Kheng contacts and the B and C clients that Doris contacts. The staff addition has been a game changer for Kheng, enabling her to focus on prospecting, communication with clients and value-added advisor tasks.

“It is a great relief that I have somebody else to hold down the fort,” Kheng said.

MDRT priorities

In her role as MDRT President, Kheng is excited about furthering MDRT initiatives focused on engagement and growth. That includes the new MDRT Capability Program, which will help foster long-term success for early and mid-career MDRT members. In addition, Kheng points to how MDRT’s ongoing digital transformation — including a website refresh featuring enhanced personalized experiences for each member — empowers members to find and learn from custom-curated information that will be most useful to them.

MDRT offers those resources and tools in multiple languages to serve its diverse membership around the world. Meanwhile, the MDRT Family of Brands broadens the scope of the MDRT community as the MDRT Academy (now available in five languages) helps turn aspiring MDRT members into MDRT qualifiers, and the MDRT Center for Field Leadership provides resources and best practices for agency leaders. 

Regarding expansion, Kheng also recognizes the importance of continuing to better understand the perspectives and motivations across growing membership in Asia. Within that is a recognition that many of these members are digitally savvy and looking for new ways to grow and distinguish themselves from other advisors.

“We need to hear their needs and wants and what they strive for in the short, medium and long term,” said Kheng, who speaks English, Mandarin and Cantonese, and can understand Japanese.

Doing that, she adds, means engaging with providers, home office representatives and senior management in major membership markets to further enhance how MDRT can add value to its membership base.

Beyond business

Speaking of dedication, Kheng cycles as often as possible (usually five days a week), but she’s been advised not to this year after a distracted driver knocked her off her bike in fall 2023, requiring a procedure on her neck to treat whiplash. But Kheng doesn’t stay down for long. She sees the components of the Whole Person concept like spokes on a bike and performs semiannual check-ins to evaluate how well she is keeping them in harmony. Not only is Kheng eager to get back on the bike — she looks at a time-lapse photo collection of her healing process to further reflect her determination and ability to overcome adversity.

“I can see how day-to-day I got better and have recovered over time,” she said, adding that she also enjoys time-lapse photos of the sun setting and rising. “It’s bright, and then it’s dark, and the next day the light comes back, and the buildings are bright again.”

Volunteering and connecting

Kheng attended her first MDRT Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California, USA, in 2000 and volunteered for the first time the following year after approaching the Program General Arrangements (PGA) booth. During the next two decades, she served as Chair for several committees and was the DVP for the 2019 Global Conference PGA in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Throughout those experiences, Kheng not only enriched her connection to MDRT but with other members she volunteered with and helped serve.

“There are so many members I have journeyed with over the last 20-plus years and built good friendships with,” she said. “They have been such a big and essential part of my MDRT experience.”