Jonathan Chan

People say wealth doesn't last three generations — but that's just a matter of the times.

The heir who treated his inheritance as a problem #

Chan is the fourth generation to run a coffee business his great-grandfather started on a bicycle. By the logic of a proverb his family knew well — 富不过三代, wealth does not survive three generations — he is the generation that was supposed to lose it. Instead, the 80-year-old factory he inherited is now better known than at any point in its history. That reversal came from a choice few heirs to a comfortable family firm ever make: he treated the inheritance not as a position to defend but as a problem to solve.

The problem was not that the business was failing. It was that it was succeeding at something with no future. Sin Boon Kee had sold one product — Kopi-O — to Penang’s kopitiams for sixty years, profitably and quietly, behind unmarked bags on counters across the city. Chan’s discomfort, and his insight, was that a business can be both alive and finished at the same time. “As a business, it was a very successful business,” he later told a Chinese-language reporter, “but at the same time it was also a failed business.” Acting on that judgment would cost him a year of his health, a public humiliation, and a long negotiation with the three generations standing behind him.

A fisherman, a bicycle, and a father who never borrowed #

The men Chan inherited from were not entrepreneurs in any modern sense. They were survivors. His great-grandfather, Chan Kok Tong (曾国党), came to Penang from Nan’an (南安) in China’s Fujian province in 1940 and sold fish at the market, struggling to move even a handful a day, before discovering that coffee moved faster. From 1944 he roasted it himself and delivered fresh powder house to house by bicycle — the founding image his great-grandson would one day install, bicycle and all, in his first store.

The second generation, his grandfather Chan Hua Chuan (曾华川), turned the bicycle round into a factory and widened the network of kopitiams it supplied. The third, his father Chan They Lin (曾台霖), ran it with a discipline that doubled as a warning. His rule was absolute: one product, and never a borrowed ringgit. “We tended to do business in a more conservative way,” Chan They Lin would say. “Traditionally, we only operated using internal funds.” It was the philosophy that had carried the family safely across three generations and past the proverb’s deadline. It was also, his son came to believe, the reason the business had stopped moving.

Chan went to Help University in Kuala Lumpur, and could have stayed — the modern career, the city, the comfortable distance from the roasting drums. He came home instead, in 2016, and did not immediately try to change anything. For two years he worked every station on the factory floor: the roast, the grind, the books, the delivery route. Only once he understood the business his father had protected did he begin, carefully, to take parts of it apart. It is a detail that says a great deal about him — that before he broke his family’s rules, he made sure he had earned the right to.

Those two years did something else, too. They taught him exactly what was worth keeping. A reformer who arrives from outside tends to throw out the good with the bad, because he cannot tell them apart; Chan had stood at the 300°C drums long enough to know that the roast itself — the margarine, the sugar caramelised onto the bean, the constant hand-stirring — was not an inefficiency to be modernised away but the single thing no competitor could copy. When the time came to change the business, he changed everything except that. The apprenticeship was not deference. It was reconnaissance.

The year of obsession, and seven hundred no’s #

The first real break came in 2018, when Chan rebranded the company SBK Coffee Group and launched its first packaged product in 74 years — a 15-gram sachet of Kopi-O, a small thing, but the first time the family had ever put its name on something a consumer could pick up off a shelf. In January 2019 he became CEO and took the step his father never had: the family’s first bank loan. For a firm whose identity rested on owing no one, this was not really a financial decision. It was a generational one, and everyone in the family understood it as such.

Then came the product he had nearly destroyed his health to make. Through 2018 and into 2019, Chan locked himself in the office and factory and chased a premium blend — Royal Black Coffee, four beans of Nanyang Robusta and Arabica, what he wanted to be “a taste you cannot find on the market.” He roasted and tasted hundreds of kilograms, day after isolated day, until the caffeine made him physically sick. He emerged convinced he had made something extraordinary, and certain it would be the future of the family business.

He took it to the people whose judgment he trusted most: the 800 kopitiam owners his family had supplied for decades. More than 700 said no. At RM40 a kilogram against the RM15 they were used to, the coffee made no sense on their counters, and they told him so plainly. The rejection landed on far more than a product. Chan had staked his credibility, a year of his health, and the family’s first debt on this blend — and he had done it while his grandfather’s generation was still present and watching. The question underneath was not commercial but personal: was he, the educated heir with the modern ideas, simply wrong about everything?

It would have been the easiest moment of his life to climb down. The wholesale model still worked; the kopitiams would have kept buying the cheap Kopi-O they always had; the family had survived three generations precisely by not taking risks like this one. Retreating would have cost nothing but the new product and a little pride, and it would have proved his father’s caution right. The pressure to do exactly that — to file the failure away and return to the business that had never needed reinventing — was the real test, and it was entirely internal. No one was forcing him forward.

What kept him from retreating was a distinction he forced himself to draw in the wreckage. The market had not rejected the coffee, he decided — it had rejected the channel. Kopitiams could not sell a premium cup to customers who came for a cheap one; the coffee needed different customers, which meant SBK needed an entirely different way to reach them. In February 2020, weeks before the country shut down, he opened the company’s first concept store beside the factory and poured the rejected blend himself, at RM5.90 a cup.

Negotiating with three generations #

A month after the store opened, COVID-19 closed it. Chan, who had just bet the family’s reputation on a single storefront, responded by shipping home-brewing kits and writing a brewing method simple enough that no skilled barista was required. The store reopened and kept growing; the Jelutong location alone now counts more than 5,000 loyalty members. But the pandemic was never the hardest part. The family was.

Changing a multi-generational business means changing things your elders built, while they are still in the room. Chan’s grandfather’s generation remained active; his father, by his own description, was a conservative man. The diplomacy this demanded is something he discusses as openly as he discusses coffee. “You must communicate more wisely,” he has said. “Even if you separate business from personal matters, in the end you’re still one family.” He was not overruling his elders so much as persuading them, one decision at a time, that the very rules that had saved the business were now the thing endangering it — a far harder argument to win than any with the market.

There is a particular loneliness in that position. A founder who fails answers only to himself; an heir who fails answers to the people who handed him something that worked. Every change Chan made carried an implicit criticism of the men who had made the prior choices, and those men were his father and grandfather, not a board he could outvote. He could not simply be right; he had to be right in a way that did not humiliate the people he loved. That he managed both — the reinvention and the relationships — is as much a part of his achievement as the coffee, and the part least visible from the outside.

In the end, his father gave him the highest compliment a conservative man can give. He called his son “very adventurous,” and pointed to the broken rule as the proof. “After my son took over,” Chan They Lin said, “we started getting working capital from banks to grow the business further.” The man who had never borrowed a ringgit had come, in his own quiet way, to defend his son’s borrowing. For a family business, that sentence is worth more than any record book.

What the fourth generation knows #

The records came afterward — the two Malaysia Book of Records entries, the world’s-first Nitro Nanyang cold brew, the fifth store, the franchise, the talk of fifty outlets and export markets. Those belong to the brand’s story. Chan’s own story is smaller and more durable, and he tells it without much sentiment. “People say wealth doesn’t last three generations,” he says, “but that’s just a matter of the times. If you still use the business model of your great-grandfather’s or grandfather’s era today, you cannot make money.”

It is an unusually clear-eyed thing for an heir to say about his own inheritance — that reverence, past a point, is just another name for decline. Most family-business stories that survive into a fourth generation do so by accident or inertia; Chan’s survived on a deliberate refusal to let the past dictate the future. His achievement is not that he honoured the family business. It is that he refused to let honouring it mean preserving it in amber. He kept the roast his great-grandfather invented at over 300°C in rotating drums, and threw out almost everything around it: the single product, the single channel, the rule against debt, the long comfort of being invisible. The fisherman’s descendant broke the three-generation curse the only way it can be broken — by being willing to be the one who changed it.

Last updated: June 4, 2026