So when he tore out standard-size cabinets in a Jersey City kitchen recently, he replaced them with a custom-built double set: The top cabinets were maple, and they stretched clear to the ceiling. Beneath them hung aluminum-framed pop-up cabinets with sand-blasted glass windows. As a final touch, Cheu shifted the sink from the kitchen's center to a corner, creating space for dazzling new granite countertops.
"It was so much more beautiful than I thought it would be!" says the kitchen's owner, Danielle Hughes, who hired Cheu as her designer.
FAST-TRACKER. Few who knew Cheu during the past decade would expect to find him working in a kitchen. After all, just two years ago he piloted VitaminShoppe.com successfully through the turbulent dot-com years as head of strategic planning. Cheu had been on the fast track in his climb up the corporate ladder since his 1992 graduation from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, acquiring more responsibilities as he made his way through a series of finance and corporate strategy positions.
To some degree, he enjoyed the ride. But by the time he reached VitaminShoppe.com, he felt out of touch with the customers he served, and he was at a loss for the larger meaning behind his daily work. When VitaminShoppe.com restructured, moving its corporate headquarters to New Jersey, Cheu took a severance package and a time-out to contemplate what he really wanted to do with his life. "It's frightening to step off that ladder," he says, alluding to internal and external pressures to shoot for ever higher salaries and titles.
Cheu had a good deal to think through during his hiatus. When he arrived at Kellogg with a background in architecture and an interest in real estate, he said he didn't even know what an investment bank was. In one of his favorite classes, he formulated a business plan in which he used computer software, much of it still in its nascent phase, to showcase high-end furniture. The benefit: Salespeople could show the furniture in 3D on their computer screens without stocking large amounts in warehouses. They could then order the furniture to meet buyers' demands.
A FLING IN FINANCE. However, faced with dismal post-MBA job prospects in either real estate or architecture, Cheu chose to explore a new topic: finance. He spent a summer working for the City of New York to use funds provided by bond deals to provide affordable housing.
Following graduation, Cheu plunged right into the world of finance, where he felt more certain of finding a job. He worked in public financial management, served time on the buy side of a Japanese investment bank, and by 1997, turned his mind to business strategy at Children's Television Workshop before landing at VitaminShoppe.com. It had just gone public, and over time, Cheu took on more operations, overseeing everything from business development to the art and sales departments and even production.
The corporate life wore on Cheu. He missed interacting with customers, and he still felt the tug of his original architecture background. So when VitaminShoppe.com relocated its offices and went private again in 2001 to cut costs as venture capital dried up, Cheu jumped ship.
He drew from his savings to travel to Paris, where he studied cooking for a couple of months. He spent his time away from the job market muddling over the perfect synthesis for his multifaceted set of passions: He loved to cook, he loved design, and he loved the service elements of business.
BEYOND A PAYCHECK. When Cheu returned to Manhattan, he was immediately caught in the tension between jumping back into the corporate world and abandoning it altogether for more creative pursuits. "You have a certain title and salary, and there's a lot of pressure externally and internally to maintain a corporate trajectory," he says.
A Fortune 500 company approached him about a possible job opportunity, and he reached the final round of negotiation before turning it down. "My motivation was the paycheck, and that's not what I wanted my career to be about," he says.
After several weeks of high anxiety, Cheu described a "eureka moment" in which he sat up in bed with the idea for a kitchen-design firm. In a city like New York -- where few kitchens contained right angles, small was a consistent theme, and an ever-transient population moved through the city with thousands of dollars of disposable income they could invest in kitchen design -- demand had to be there. And he had already ascertained, by doing bond deals reaching into the millions, that he had the business knowhow.
Cheu's idea was new, but his business plan wasn't. To put his idea into action, he went back to the model he had developed in B-school. Instead of creating 3D displays of furniture, however, he began to create full-scale kitchens for his clients using advanced graphics systems. He could meet his clients anywhere -- their house, a cafe, even the local dog park -- with colorful prints of elaborate designs. Once the clients agreed to a design, Cheu oversaw contractors from the beginning of the project to the final countertop and window pane.
PICKING UP STEAM. Like many entrepreneurs, Cheu ventured into his field conservatively. He didn't invest in materials -- such as his proprietary software -- until he had two projects under his belt. He personalized his services by visiting clients in their homes instead of ushering them through showrooms, thus saving on overhead at the same time. He doesn't advertise formally, relying instead on word of mouth.
A year after he started his design firm, Cool Kitchens, business is booming. Cheu has finished six kitchens, with a new one in progress and two on order. And he's designing six more.
By venturing out on his own, Cheu has clarified his ideas of satisfaction and success. "Many MBAs ask: Can you go public? Can you multiply it?" Cheu says of his business plan. But it's not money he's after. Although he might invest in a few projects related to his main practice, his focus isn't solely on growth. After all, he finally has his direct-client relationship, and he's making use of his architecture background. Best of all, he spends his days in the kitchen.
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2000-2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
