iFly Singapore, an indoor skydiving simulator, is big business

For Singaporean Lawrence Koh (photo, right), no dream is so big that it can’t be achieved. Consider this: As the founder and managing director of iFly Singapore, he started the largest indoor skydiving facility in the world — at five meters wide and five storeys in height. It’s also the first in Singapore.

His business is the fulfillment of his dream to gift the experience of flight to everyone, and while it’s arguable that commercial flight has achieved that, nothing beats the thrill of jumping off an airplane.

But the cost of skydiving is still prohibitive — it can run up to $400 per jump. So Lawrence did the next best thing: Set up a towering, state-of-the-art wind tunnel in Sentosa. iFly Singapore officially launched in May 2011 to much media fanfare.

SGE visited the facility on a weekday afternoon, which was anything but quiet. Already, tourists and families in jumpsuits are waiting for their turn to enter the hulking wind tunnel. Later on, an instructor put on a dazzling show for an appreciative audience, performing somersaults, flips, and twirls. An air ballet.

“Some of these instructors have developed quite a fanbase,” said Lawrence as we watched the show in his office, which was visible through a glass panel.

“We should consider setting up Facebook pages for them,” he joked.

Pictures of skydivers adorn the wall behind his desk. He has already performed countless dives, and is a qualified instructor from his days in the military.

“I’ve lost count after the 800th dive,” he said. But this man is more than a skydiver. He is a legitimate entrepreneur with a gift for meticulous execution.

Three adjectives sum up what iFly Singapore is: Big, bold, and beautiful. To start something like this anywhere requires a lot of money and expertise. But Lawrence was undeterred.

He secured S$25M (US$19M) in funding from two investors (one private, one institutional) to start his business — a massive sum for any rookie entrepreneur. His ability to convince the investors boiled down to extensive planning and preparation — something he knows how to do very well.

“I’ve always come up with ten-year plans for my life. I chose to devote the first 30 years of my life — I know this sounds lame — to serving the nation. But after that, I knew I would move on to start a business.”

As the officer in charge of a parachuting training school in the Army, he visited a wind tunnel in the US and met the founder of SkyVenture, the inventor of the technology that is used in iFly facilities around the world. Years later, Lawrence received a call from him with an idea: Why not start iFly Singapore?

After thinking about it, Lawrence resigned from the Army, and armed with patent rights given to him for free, started the company.