He dropped out to clean longkangs. Now, his waste management biz makes S$3M a year.

Jetterz Incz services over 500 outlets for brands like Starbucks & KFC

For most 17-year-olds, a first job might mean a weekend shift at a café or retail store. For Shaik Nifael, it meant earning S$23 a day cleaning grease traps—a far cry from an easy first job. While his friends were still in school and spending their evenings playing computer games, Shaik was working long days cleaning the greasy interceptors that catch waste oil before it enters the sewage system.

School was never going to be his path. He failed his O-Level maths and combined science, and dropped out of Millennia Institute after his first year. His father, then a general manager at a waste management company with 40 years in the trade, gave 17-year-old Shaik a choice: go back to school, or come earn his keep at his waste management company. Shaik chose the latter.

I wanted to prove myself to him, so I took up the challenge. I went to my father’s office for the interview the very next day.

Nine years later, in 2015, he struck out on his own and set up Jetters Incz. Today, the 37-year-old’s waste management company services over 500 outlets for brands like Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut, Coffee Bean, Sushi Express, and Shake Shack, pulling in close to S$3 million in revenue a year.

The $200,000 handshake

From cleaning grease traps at 17, Shaik eventually worked his way into management. In 2011, five years later, he joined a company in the same industry, run by a friend of his father’s as a management trainee.

He learned the trade from the ground up: how to read a blockage, open a pipe and clear a choke. But he also proved himself on the business side.

Over the next four years, Shaik helped grow the company and its fleet from three vehicles to 17, eventually working his way up to operations manager.

In late 2014, an acquaintance, Kelvin Neo, who ran landscaping company Ho Eng Huat Construction, casually floated the idea of backing Shaik if he ever decided to strike out on his own. Shaik turned him down at first—he liked his job and saw no reason to leave.

That changed when his father and his friend had a falling out. Within eight or nine months, Shaik was out too, so he called Kelvin back.

But Shaik didn’t dive into the venture blindly.

He walked into Kelvin’s office with a detailed financial breakdown covering everything from vehicles and licences to tanker fabrication, and asked for S$200,000 in funding. Kelvin trusted him enough to barely look at the paperwork before putting the cash on the table.

That handshake marked the start of Jetters Incz in August 2015.

Learning to run a business from zero

Having worked in waste management companies for years, Shaik knew the technical side cold. However, running an actual company was a whole different ballgame entirely.

To save money, he furnished his first office with furniture he found on Carousell—secondhand chairs, desks, whatever he could find. “It was a Frankenstein office,” he said, “cut and paste, enough to get it going.”

His wife, Dania, joined him since the start of the business, handling sales while raising their children. 

In its first year, Jetters made an impressive S$600,000 in sales, carried largely by clients who followed Shaik over from his previous company on trust alone.

Whenever asked about what Jetters does, Shaik is unabashed in sharing what his company is about. 

With its highly specialised equipment, Jetters is typically called in to maintain pipes and fix complicated, stubborn chokes that most plumbers do not have the capacity to clear. It’s a work that most people never see, and even fewer understand.  

Shaik likens a building to a body: its pipes are arteries that need steady blood flow, and Jetters is the doctor who clears the blockages before things escalate into a heart attack—or in drainage terms, a burst pipe.

Same concept. We go in and take a look at the pipe, and once we find the problem, we take the choke out.

A typical day at Jetters

Most of Jetters’ work is scheduled. Teams visit every outlet under contract on a rotation, checking and servicing pipes before anything goes wrong, which Shaik jokes is the “protection money” clients pay for. 

There’s also the emergency side of the business, with calls coming in at any hour for burst pipes, sudden blockages or flooded kitchen lines.

Two or three men go in, assess it on the spot (pricing is done job-by-job through a site survey, since no two blockages are the same), clear it, and leave. It’s not unusual for a team to be on site until 3AM and have another crew out again by morning.

Around the clock, Shaik and his wife Dania take turns manning the hotline for emergency requests, day and night, so Jetters can deploy a team the moment something comes in.

Currently, the business runs on a lean team of 12 with seven vehicles made up of tankers, high-pressure water jetting trucks, lorries and vans.

Key pivots that reinforced Jetters’ relevance 

Most small operators in Shaik’s industry lost ground during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, Jetters grew further. 

Just before Singapore’s lockdown hit, Shaik moved his foreign workers out of dormitory housing, a decision that let Jetters keep operating and take on additional work while competitors, whose workers were confined to dorms under quarantine, simply couldn’t. 

Jetters also became an early adopter of digitalisation in an industry Shaik describes as otherwise almost untouched by new technology in decades.

Moreover, in its early business years, Jetters used to compete for building maintenance tenders like everyone else in the industry, a market that, Shaik found, rewards the cheapest bid over the best service. As a new player up against operators with over 15 years of reputation, he realised he couldn’t win on price alone.

So he pivoted towards offering his services to chain outlets instead—brands with multiple locations that needed consistent, standards-driven maintenance rather than the lowest quote. 

Today, Jetters maintains drainage for all 164 Starbucks outlets, 72 KFCs, and 56-and-growing Pizza Huts in Singapore, alongside Coffee Bean, Sushi Express, and a whole roster of international names, even in the hospitality scene.

“When you can maintain chain outlets well, they stay with you without even doubting you,” he says, “that’s the epitome of your service quality.”

The risk nobody warns you about in a business like Jetters

Running a service business on a minimum of 60 days’ payment terms (sometimes stretching to as long as 200 days) poses a huge risk to a company like Jetters. 

When a client collapses, the money doesn’t just get delayed, and there is a high chance it disappears. 

There were instances when Jetters lost outstanding payments from large names, including US fast-food chain Fatburger and Sentosa Beach Club Tipsy Unicorn, which folded in 2023 and 2026, respectively. 

Shaik shared that payments for services done for these companies still have yet to be recovered after years of rendering his services.

Moreover, taking into account that the running cost of his businesses comes to around S$200,000 a month.

Another concerning cost is diesel. Due to the recent Middle East Conflict, tanker fuel costs have roughly doubled or tripled in recent years, and Shaik says Jetters mostly absorbs the increase rather than passing it on to long-term clients because Shaik values relationships with clients more than the rising costs.

Then there’s the cost of hiring that Shaik shared puts a significant strain on local businesses. Foreign worker levies run S$600 to S$950 a month per worker, in an industry that struggles to attract local hires for physically demanding, unglamorous work. 

“Who really wants to clean longkang?” Shaik said bluntly.

Building industry knowledge himself

Since Mar this year, Shaik has been teaching himself to build an internal AI tool named Shika.

Shaik aims to capture the decades of undocumented knowledge and practices for various situations held by ageing veterans in Singapore’s urban drainage industry, a sector he said has essentially zero centralised databases, and the only ones with such knowledge are those who have physically worked in the job.

Shaik has been talking to industry veterans directly to document their know-how by hand, feeding it into the AI himself. 

Over the years, the entrepreneur also shared that he had turned down repeated approaches from venture capitalists, private equity firms, and even an offer to relocate the business to the US, preferring to keep the company Singaporean and independent. 

Beyond his own AI database, Shaik is currently in early conversations with institutional partners, including GIC, about scaling Jetters’ technology arm and turning Jetters into a holistic technology-driven company, rather than a traditional waste management company.

Where Jetters is headed

In 2025, Jetters came in just under its S$3 million revenue target. 

Shaik joked that he “aimed for the moon and landed on the stars.” 

The entrepreneur is optimistic about 2026’s revenue beating that S$3 million figure. 

His advice to anyone eyeing a similarly unglamorous trade is the same lesson his own experience taught him: the work nobody wants to do is often the work nobody else can do either—and that, more than any diploma, is what actually built the business.

• Find out more about Jetters Incz here.
• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Jetters Incz