The List: Australia’s Richest 250 — Yenda Lee keeps it in the family
The success of the Bing Lee business has always been based on no frills, hard work and family.
Lionel Lee has a simple philosophy when it comes to running the family business: “I just have to make Mum happy! Our name’s above the door. There’s no private equity, there’s no shareholders, there’s nothing except Mum’s money.”
Lee is sitting with his mother Yenda Lee in the head office of their Bing Lee electrical retail chain in Guildford in Sydney’s west. There’s nothing particularly fancy about the office, which adjoins a large Bing Lee clearance outlet and warehouse on a busy road.
But the setting encapsulates the Lee family story: no frills, hard work, family. It is a successful story, with Yenda Lee and her family’s value on The List reaching $610 million this year, mostly from the Bing Lee business, which has annual revenue of $330 million and extensive property assets that include Bing Lee stores.
THE LIST: Australia’s Richest 250
Lionel runs the business, Yenda owns it. It was named for Lionel’s grandfather, Bing, and was for decades run by Yenda’s late husband, Ken. Mother and son remain confident about Bing Lee’s future, the country they’ve come to call their own and the family they’ve created, both at home and at work.
They also have a clear and lighthearted affinity for each other, as their banter about their radio ads indicates.
For decades, Ken was the voice of Bing Lee’s 30-second spots on Sydney commercial radio and television. After his passing, Yenda and Lionel provided the backing track and their hilarious sparring over the latest sale items is as distinctive as the story behind their rise to success.
However, some have accused the family of playing up their personalities or even mocking a true Chinese accent. Lionel and Yenda have a swift shutdown for that. “We’re not up to this! This is how she talks to me!” Lionel quips.
“For me, you’re nothing without family,” he goes on. “You can be the wealthiest man in the world or the strongest man in the world, but if you’ve got no one to share it with, who are you doing it for? You can be very wealthy but you can be very lonely as well. What the world judges people on, especially in the western world, is just the wrong thing.”
Family remains the glue that holds the company together. When Bing Lee arrived from north-eastern China at the outbreak of World War II, he tagged along with a group of friends to secure buying opportunities for a new business they had created. He went on to open a greengrocer in the western Sydney suburb of Fairfield. After he was reunited with his family at the end of the war, he added the electronics repair shop next door. That repair shop has evolved into a 64-year-old business dynasty.
“I don’t think he really thought about staying here the rest of his life, but life is definitely better here than in China of course,” Yenda says of Bing, who hailed from the same part of China, the Shandong province, as her family.
Yenda’s family had also moved to Australia from China and she finished her schooling at SCEGGS Darlinghurst school for girls in Sydney’s east.
“There were only four Chinese in the whole school – myself, two twins and one other girl,” Yenda says, recalling her initial experiences as a migrant without a word of English in a strange and not always friendly land. “You just attend school and sit there and try to learn anyway. It was difficult to make friends; I think in those days, racism was everywhere.”
Lionel, in contrast, was born in Sydney and attended the independent Kings school in Parramatta, though there were some similarities with his mother’s experience.
“Even when I was at Kings, there was still... I was the Australian Asian,” he says. “There were a couple of us Aussie Asians and we were what they rudely called ‘the imports’. Their preconceived ideas about Asians back then were not conducive to a whole lot of imports, as opposed to Australian-born Chinese.”
There was never any doubt about Lionel following in his father’s footsteps though, and it’s clear his upbringing in the family business instilled in him a valuable lesson about reality. “A lot of my other mates are taught to be doctors or lawyers or whatever ... I was always told you’ll be going into the family business. Back then, when you’re 12 or 13, selling teles and fridges is not sexy.”
Even now, Lionel says he runs into issues – though his sense of humour can help. Earlier on the day The List interviewed him and his mother, he had travelled to the Sydney CBD for meetings. “I mean, today – I met the HSBC bosses at Barangaroo, not saying anything and people are looking at me because I’m coughing,” he says. “Then I say ‘g’day, how’re you going?’ with the most ocker accent, then I say ‘don’t worry, I haven’t got it!’
“The thing for me is that, being an Australian, I don’t care what colour you are as long as you understand that you’re Australian and that you add value to the country. When I walk down the street and I cough now and people think ‘There’s a big Asian guy with coronavirus’, there is stereotyping from that, but people are ignorant everywhere. It’s not just the Chinese, it’s just ignorance of people.”
Racism and labels notwithstanding, the family doesn’t give a second thought as to how they define their citizenship. “We’re proud of our Chinese heritage,” Lionel says. “But the thing is I live in Australia, I was born in Australia ... I married an Australian girl, my kids are half Chinese, half Aussie. I’ve always considered myself an Australian and Mum has as well.” Yenda nods in agreement.
The family also vocally agree that Ken became a proud Australian. It’s said that he used to quip to the company’s senior staff, “He’s not dinky-di Aussie like me”.
“All I remember from Dad is that he was very customer focused,” Lionel says. “He was everyone’s mate – nothing was too hard for him. He’d put up antennas on people’s roofs late at night. It was always about a fair deal; it was never about anything except if he could create a good customer, he could create a customer for life.”
Ken was so involved that the decision to open new branches came down to driving distance – no branch would open if he couldn’t drive to inspect it. Of the 40 physical stores Bing Lee still operates in Australia, only four are outside NSW and more than half are within metropolitan Sydney.
Yet Lionel and Yenda also believe that the lucky country will only stay that way if people keep contributing to society. While ignorance will always be an issue, Lionel believes people can take up a very simple solution to make up for this shortcoming.
“Everyone’s bloody individual,” he says. “Everyone deserves a go – just go have a conversation with them. Don’t just tar everyone with the same brush. Life is not about a handout, or an entitlement. You create your own opportunities, and if you create it and you do it the right way without burning people, that’s what life’s about.”
