Mohan Mulani didn't set out to become a nightlife boss.

Sure, he enjoyed his drink after work. But he was a textile trader by profession.

His entry into the bar business was part circumstance, part stroke of serendipity. As the amiable 47-year-old tells you after a firm handshake, 'it was something that fell into my lap'.

He discovered the first Harry's Bar in Boat Quay, a stone's throw from his office in High Street, when it opened in 1992. It was then owned by an American expat named Jim Gelpi and some friends.

For the record, he says, none of the original owners was called Harry. The bar was also not related to any Harry's bar in London or New York.

Back then, save for a smattering of clubs and sleepy hotel lounges in the city, places offering live music and a chill-out vibe - which Harry's outlets have now become popular for - were few and far between.

He became a regular patron of Harry's, often spending as many as five nights a week there nursing an after-work tipple.

'The jazz, the river, the financial district nearby. It was such a sophisticated place,' he recalls of the appeal of the place.

He persuaded Mr Gelpi to let him buy into the company for $300,000 in 1993, just so he could 'get a piece of the action'.

A year later, the partnership fell apart. The shareholders wanted to go their separate ways. Saddened by the thought of losing his familiar hangout, Mr Mulani bought everyone out and left the bar in the care of a general manager.

It cost him 'not more than $1 million', he says.

Now, as the founder and chief executive officer of Harry's Holdings, he is the man behind the island's biggest chain of bars. The public-listed company runs 27 Harry's bars with another three slated to open by August.

The group also owns five other food and beverage venues, including Harry's Steakhouse at The Esplanade and Rupee Room at Clarke Quay.

But his move into this industry began only in 1997, when the Asian financial crisis struck and his trading business began to suffer and eventually folded.

Wanting to start life anew, the dejected Singaporean moved to San Francisco in mid-2001 with his wife and two daughters. Having studied and worked in California previously, he hoped to find new business opportunities there.

All went well - till Sept 11. As a climate of hatred and fear ensued in the United States, the family decided to return to Singapore a year later.

At the same time, the general manager of Harry's Bar resigned and the position beckoned.

Says Mr Mulani with an almost nonchalant shrug: 'I thought: 'Okay, I don't have anything to do. So let's do this'.'

He means business

Today, Harry's Holdings, which went public in January last year, employs more than 450 staff. The company is targeting $38 million in sales this year, up from the $28 million it achieved last year.

Mr Mulani's wife Rita, 42, is also a director. A businesswoman herself, she owns the master franchise for US playschool Gymboree in Singapore and Malaysia, which is also part of the Harry's Holdings portfolio.

Their elder daughter Drishti, 19, is studying in the US while younger daughter Virti, 15, is in secondary school here.

The second Harry's outlet opened at The Esplanade in January 2003. Since then, an average of five or six venues have popped up under the Harry's banner every year.

No doubt, Mr Mulani's derring-do has left a keen impression on other players in the nightlife scene. One of them, chief executive officer of St James Power Station Dennis Foo, says: 'I admire his enterprise. To have an operation like Harry's grow to over 30 outlets within such a short span of time shows that he has tapped the market very well.'

Mr Foo, who travelled with Mr Mulani to France last year as part of a Heineken-sponsored delegation to watch the Rugby World Cup, adds with a laugh: 'Every morning, the first thing he does is read the Asian Wall Street Journal.'

Indeed, there is something about Mr Mulani that means business.

Wearing a shirt and coat ensemble for this interview at Harry's at Boat Quay, he is hardly the rambunctious pub owner you see downing beers with customers at the usual nightspots. Rather, he is soft-spoken and carries himself with a genteel air.

When he makes his daily rounds of his outlets, he does not drink. 'I'm not there to have a drink,' he says. 'I'm there to meet my staff.'

He readily admits that he adopts a macro view to running Harry's. 'I'm not a hands-on operator,' he says. 'That has been my strength in growing the business.

'It is also my weakness because I wish I could provide a stronger vision, operationally, to my staff. But that's why I hire talent to drive the business for me.'

From the outset, one of his strategies was to make Harry's 'convenient to people' in the way Starbucks and McDonald's are, which explains the brand's rapid expansion over the years.

It was a hard decision to make. Some Harry's patrons were - and still are - against the 'McDonald-isation' of their favourite watering hole.

When Mr Mulani was pondering the idea of a second outlet at The Esplanade five years ago, die-hard customers were pressing him to call the new bar The Green Room - a reference to the area in which theatre performers take a break while off stage - rather than Harry's.

He says: 'People were saying I was going to kill the brand by diluting it. But I was worried that if we did not expand, we would end up marginalising the brand instead.'

There has been no turning back since. He adds: 'The numbers show we did the right thing. Now, we just have to make sure we don't cannibalise our own outlets.'

Mum, Dad, I want a restaurant

The signs that he would one day delve into the F&B business were, perhaps, already present in his childhood.

He was born into a Sindhi family in India, in the Sindh province which became part of Pakistan after the two countries were partitioned in 1947.

His father, a textile merchant, arrived in Singapore to work in 1952. Nine years later, he brought his wife and children over. Mr Mulani is the second of three children, and has two sisters.

The family lived comfortably in a Sindhi kampung off Haig Road called Fair Drive, in houses that were former British military barracks.

He recalls: 'Every Sunday, I would force my parents to take us out to a restaurant. I remember the Batik Inn at the old Singapura Forum hotel, Omar Khayyam in Hill Street opposite the US Embassy.

'My parents still tell me: 'You didn't want toys, you just wanted restaurants'.'

He attended Haig Boys' School, Tanjong Katong Technical (Secondary 1 and 2), Broadrick Secondary (Sec 3 and 4) and Temasek Junior College.

He was horrible at mathematics. 'If you look at my O-level certificate, you'll see an 'XX' next to maths, because I did not even bother to go for the exam,' he says.

Business, he insists, is not about mathematics. 'It's about understanding the figures, not crunching them,' he says.

Instead, he loved American history, and spent hours at the library at the old American consulate in Hill Street, poring over books about US presidents such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

'I made America out to be the land of milk and honey,' he says.

So after he completed his A levels, which he fared poorly in, he begged his parents to send him to the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) where he majored in history and political science.

'I wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. I said I would beg, borrow or steal to go,' he says sheepishly. 'It wasn't easy for my parents but I really wanted to do it.'

After graduating, he worked for a year as a management trainee at IBM before deciding he wanted to strike out on his own back home.

With his father, he formed an investment and textile trading company named Transco Holdings, which grew to hire up to 30 people with yearly turnovers of about $30 million.

He also invested in property and stocks, and for a time even owned Ming Village in Pandan Road, a factory making handcrafted porcelain wares.

At 26, he said yes to an arranged marriage to Rita, whose Indonesian Sindhi family did business with his. Of this he says: 'I knew her, we went out, we liked each other and so we did what our parents wanted us to do. But our marriage is excellent.'

The same can't be said for Transco, the ill-fated venture that simply 'evaporated' during the financial crisis.

Looking back, he says: 'We made one major mistake of not being focused. I was trying to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. When all hell broke loose, I had no strength.'

Problems started arising when clients did not pay their debts. In the end, he lost 'millions and millions' of dollars.

'I thought I did not have much of a future here,' he says of his short-lived move to San Francisco. 'But 9/11 bothered me a lot. It was a horrible thing to happen to any nation but the reaction to it was also overly jingoistic, offensive and patriotic.

'The feeling in the air was not very pleasant. I didn't want to be part of it. I belonged to a country that was happy to take me back.'

The setbacks were humbling, and he confesses it shattered his confidence.

But he got back on his feet with Harry's. 'It's like being stuck in a lift or being in a near air crash. You think you'll never get into a lift or plane again but you just have to do it,' he adds.

Focus and passion

The sum of his experiences makes him the shrewd businessman he is today.

'One thing I learnt,' he says, 'is that you pick one business and you stay really focused on it.'

Now, as he considers taking Harry's overseas, he is understandably cautious about the move. 'We are still scouring for locations in Singapore. If we can get an extra pound of flesh from our home market first, I'd rather concentrate on that,' he says.

He has, however, proposed to his shareholders to build a four-star Harry's hotel, hopefully in the Central Business District, to appeal to business travellers seeking Harry's-style bars and restaurants under one roof.

There are also plans for Harry's to go into the catering business.

Not too bad for someone who sort of stumbled into the industry, you say.

He smiles and says: 'Well, success is a by-product of passion. And I guess you could say I'm very, very passionate about this business.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Apr 28, 2008.