The poised and well-dressed Leonica Kei might not look it now, but the entrepreneur was quite the rebel growing up. She barely knew English when she moved to Singapore at the age of 5, but never let that stop her from doing her best in school and rolling the dice and heading to London to study hairdressing without her parents' knowledge.

In a world of heady valuations and meteoric rises (and even more epic drops back to Earth), Leonica Kei's eponymous trichology business—Leonica K—is a throwback to an era when doing business was about keeping costs low, recouping your initial investment and bootstrapping your way to profitability. The entrepreneur tells us about her struggles when she was young, how she pushed to keep the business growing while raising children as a single mother, and why she's not yet ready to retire, as she prepares to unleash her newest venture, hair and body products.

These are the lessons she has learnt.

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The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore’s homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.