Remembering Daniel Ng.

The only person who I knew and could read the tea leaves and really understood the China market was my friend and client Daniel Ng, the former NASA engineer, someone with a PhD in engineering and somehow ended up opening the first McDonald’s in Hong Kong by owning the McDonald’s franchise in the city.

Despite the naysayers who warned that Chinese people only ate rice and mentioned the Burger King losing its crown and relevance in Hong Kong, Daniel sailed past them guided by amazing self belief.

When he brought me with him to Beijing and Shanghai for the first time, I was Grasshopper and he was a master Shaolin monk who taught me how to make out what wasn’t there.

While he had taken it upon himself to find a manufacturer in China he trusted who could produce the mustard and ketchup sachets needed for McDonald’s and at the right prices, he was also teaching me to listen to what else would be offered as part of the deal.

As always, Daniel read the set narrative correctly and of the 4-5 business people we met, each had an uncle or cousin in high places who had the perfect locations for a McDonald’s outlet with the type of foot traffic needed.

Purchase any of these locations and those sachets for ketchup and mustard would almost be thrown in for free.

He might have laughed like a mad man and refused to wear a tie and conform to being like every other businessman, but this was Daniel, always happy being his quirky self- and disarming, but helluva smart. 

He was a giving man and always kept this giving to himself. He never made a song and dance about giving Hong Kong its first Ronald McDonald House for terminally ill children and nor did he talk about how he got McDonald’s corporation to drop the Quarter Pounder from its menus in Hong Kong.

The reason was that this menu item simply wasn’t selling because of the pricing and was too filling for Hong Kong appetites. So, he made up some cockamamie story for the Americans from Oakbrook about the Quarter Pounder having too many onions which gave Chinese people gas and bad breath much like Burger King’s Whopper did and which Daniel said was the reason for the failure of the competitor in Hong Kong.

As he put it at quite a large McDonald’s marketing conference in Chicago, “If you ate a Whopper, you couldn’t help farting all day!” And then he howled with laughter.

Daniel was certainly persuasive, and having the franchise for most successful McDonald’s in the world per capita, he had the clout to make things happen. The Quarter Pounder disappeared as a menu item in Hong Kong and its marketing dollars went into promoting the far more popular and far less expensive Filet O’Fish.

He was a very good man who despised haughtiness and I loved and respected him and his fabulous American wife Rebecca who always reminded me of Lauren Bacall dearly and I was very sorry when they divorced.

Maybe Daniel knew his journey this time around was going to be a short one and used the time he had to live life like there was no tomorrow because, well, who knows what tomorrow might not bring?

He financially supported the arts, the Hong Kong Youth Orchestra, learned to be a pilot, was one of the first people to fly his own plane into China and also learned to be a musical conductor.

He even funded a music company to house an idea I had to help kids learn to speak English through pop music. We were pipped at the post with that project when our ELT business partners were sold to a bigger publisher whereas someone I thought I could trust with the idea, copied it and the dish ran away with the spoon.

Before he left this world, Daniel was onstage conducting the Boston Symphony. Soon after that, he took his final bow. He left us in 2013 at the age of 76.

Daniel was an incredible human busy being, enjoying life, and certainly didn’t suffer fools.

He was extremely proud or satisfied or whatever you wanted to call it by succeeding in bringing such an all-American product like McDonald’s to very much Chinese Hong Kong and turning over the noodle tables and becoming a very real game changer.

I will always remember attending a breakfast meeting with me and someone else who he knew was trying to get something from him.

Whenever he didn’t make eye contact with someone, I knew that something terse was coming down.

After half listening to what this person was saying, he simply said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about”.

Today’s Hong Kong desperately needs someone with his positivity and street smarts.

It’s needed at a time when I am seeing weak leadership in many companies and organisations replete with smoke and mirrors and subservient toadies to hide the truth.

When I come across these types of people, I think of Daniel and, strangely enough, he’s there next to me, especially at dinners and meetings offering me advice and helping to see people’s strengths and weaknesses and what is hiding behind the game of thrones being played and the designer clothes.

What I learned from him was about always keeping it real. The moment you don’t, you start living a lie and the lies expand into something fatuous and full of wind- kinda like the Quarter Pounder, especially a Quarter Pounder oozing with fat and gooey melted cheese.

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Born in Ceylon, Hans Ebert is an award winning advertising executive whose powerful campaign to gain the Right Of Abode in the United Kingdom for ethnic minorities in Hong Kong won Gold at the London Advertising Awards.

He also helped launch McDonald’s in Hong Kong, created the Happy Wednesday brand for the HKJC, was part of the team to launch STARTV and MTV in Asia plus ran the International divisions of Universal Music and EMI Music in Asia.

As a journalist, he has interviewed every from Billy Joel, legendary music producer Quincy Jones, and actor Peter Sellers to working on music for David Bowie, Robbie Williams and Gorillaz.

He also coined the term Canto Pop when writing for Billboard magazine.

He has a penchant for women who remind him of Diane Keaton.