Knock Knock - Owner Is on Vacation…

Author: Roger

Knock knock. Nobody’s home.

That was, more or less, how our first encounter with Jagna Rock Resort began. My business partner and I arrived on Day 1 brimming with energy, notebooks ready, questions prepared - only to be greeted by the manager with a mild shrug: the owner was away on vacation. He should have known we were coming. He just…wasn’t there.

“He’ll be back tomorrow afternoon,” the manager said, pleasantly. We nodded, went away, and came back the next afternoon. He wasn’t there. “He’ll be back tonight - shall I text you when he arrives?” We said yes, please. No text came. We returned the following morning, sat in the restaurant for two hours, and finally - finally - the owner walked through the gate.

In Hong Kong, this sequence of events would be almost unimaginable in a professional context. You’d confirm the meeting twice, show up five minutes early, and if something came up, you’d send a message with a precise rescheduled time. Time is treated as a finite, shared resource that you have no right to waste. I realised sitting there, equal parts frustrated and genuinely curious, that I had walked into a completely different set of rules - and that the more interesting question wasn’t why he isn’t here, but why does it matter so much to me that he isn’t?

When we finally met the owner, the frustration dissolved quickly. He was warm, unhurried, and immediately disarming - the kind of person who makes you feel like there’s nowhere else he’d rather be, now that he’s here. As we talked, the full picture of the resort came into view, and it reframed everything.

He didn’t start Jagna Rock Resort as a business. He bought the seaside property because his dream was simply to have a home by the water, to live there with his family. After he posted photos from his wedding on social media, people started reaching out asking if they could visit. That’s how it became a resort - almost accidentally, certainly not strategically. The guest cottages and swimming area were damaged in a typhoon a few years back and haven’t been fully rebuilt. To our Hong Kong eyes, trained to see underutilised potential as an urgent problem to solve, this felt baffling. The location is beautiful. The bones are there. Why leave it like this?

Although there is a constraint on budget, the most important reason, once he explained it, was simple: he still lives there. His family is in that house by the sea. The broken cottages aren’t a failed business — they’re part of a home that’s still doing exactly what he wanted it to do. Rebuilding them would mean more guests, more operations, more complexity, more time away from the life he actually built the place to protect. For him, the cost-benefit calculus runs entirely differently than it would for a growth-minded entrepreneur.

This connects to something Banerjee and Duflo observe in Poor Economics about small business owners in developing economies - that many are not entrepreneurs by aspiration, but out of necessity or circumstance, and their decision-making reflects values and constraints that Western business frameworks often misread as passivity or poor management. The owner of Jagna Rock Resort isn’t a reluctant entrepreneur exactly, but is a man whose business serves his life, rather than his life serving his business. That distinction matters enormously.

Later that evening, he invited us to join him with his staff for drinks. What struck me was the texture of the relationships in that circle. Seven staff members for what is, by any operational standard, a small property - a number that would make a Hong Kong manager nervous about payroll efficiency. But watching them together, it was clear that the headcount was itself part of the point. These weren’t just employees; they were, by all appearances, people he genuinely wanted in his life. The turnover, we were told, wasn’t high. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to optimise anything.

His three young children ran between us, delighted by the company. My partner and I helped looking after them - and something in that simple, unplanned hour felt more vivid than most scheduled activities. There was a kind of richness in the evening that I found difficult to name at first.

I think what I was feeling was the presence of what people sometimes call the other dimensions of wealth - time, health, relationships, a sense of meaning — made unusually visible precisely because the conventional dimension (money, growth, accumulation) was so clearly not the priority. The owner has financial security; he also owns a bar and a gym. He isn’t poor in any conventional sense. But in Hong Kong, financial security is rarely treated as a destination. It’s a waypoint. The doctrine, unspoken but pervasive, is that you should always want more - more efficiency, more income, more credentials, a better apartment, a higher title. I’ve absorbed that doctrine so completely that I’d barely noticed it was a choice.

There’s a version of this blog post where I conclude that the owner has found something we in Hong Kong have lost, and wrap it up neatly with a lesson about slowing down. I don’t think that’s quite right, and it would be a little dishonest. The resort’s half-rebuilt facilities are a real constraint on the guests who visit and the income that could support the community. Ambition and growth aren’t just Western impositions - they can create jobs, opportunity, and resilience against exactly the kind of typhoon damage that set the resort back. The Campos et al. research on entrepreneurial mindset training suggests that a more proactive orientation genuinely improves outcomes for small business owners in developing economies. There is something to that.

But - and this is the part I keep returning to - I’m not sure the owner needs to be optimised. He seems to know exactly what he’s doing, even if it doesn’t look that way from the outside. The question he quietly posed, just by living the way he lives, is whether I know what I’m doing. What is the money for, ultimately? What are the long hours building toward? I have good answers to those questions in the abstract, but spending an evening babysitting someone else’s happy children on a broken-down resort by the sea made the abstractions feel a little thin.

I won’t pretend one evening changed everything. But it cracked something open. I knocked, nobody answered, I waited two hours - and what I eventually found on the other side of that door was a question I’ll be sitting with for a while: not are they poor, but what does it mean to be rich, and am I actually moving toward it?