Running a 46-Year Family Business, One Smile at a Time

Jing spends half her working life running one of Thailand's oldest exhibition companies and the other half fundraising for free cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries. On this episode of Students Incorporated, the Union Pan Exhibitions board director and longtime Operation Smile Thailand ambassador told co-hosts Esther and Pun why she doesn't treat those as two competing jobs.

It's a fitting pairing for the way the episode opened. Host Mr. Jason introduced the conversation with a line from Winston Churchill: "we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give," and said it matched their guest's story before she'd said a word.

Forty-six years, three generations

Union Pan Exhibitions has been part of Thailand's exhibition industry for more than four decades, and this year the company turns 46, "nearly half a century," as Jing put it. She's the third generation to help lead it, a role she describes as "both an honor and a responsibility": respecting the foundations the previous generations built while bringing in new ideas to keep the company growing.

Jing's seat at the top of a family company isn't an outlier in Thailand's business landscape; it's closer to the norm. International surveys of executive leadership consistently rank Thailand among the world's strongest countries for women in senior business roles: roughly 24 percent of Thai CEOs and managing directors are women, well above both the global average and the wider Asia-Pacific figure, and nearly 90 percent of Thai businesses report having at least one woman in senior management. Thailand has also posted the highest share of female CFOs of any country surveyed. A third-generation woman steering a decades-old exhibition company isn't an exception to how Thai boardrooms typically look; it's a fairly accurate reflection of them.

The career moment she's proudest of isn't a single event or client win. It's structural. As Union Pan approached its 46th year, she led a refresh of the brand and the internal organization, modernizing systems and repositioning the company for a digital era while keeping the trust of clients who'd been with the company for decades. "Seeing the company evolve while maintaining the trust of long-term clients has been very meaningful to me," she said. Her own approach to that work traces back to her studies in local economic development at the London School of Economics and Political Science, which she said taught her to think about exhibitions as more than a balance sheet: "They also create opportunity for entrepreneurs, small business, and local industry."

That framing holds up against the industry's own research on itself. Economists who study exhibitions describe a multiplier effect: money spent by attendees on hotels, transport, and food circulates back through a host city's economy as it gets re-spent by the businesses that first receive it. One widely cited estimate puts the return at roughly $1.60 in broader economic benefit for every dollar spent directly at a face-to-face event, and globally, the exhibition sector is estimated to support 1.4 million direct jobs and generate tens of billions of dollars in direct GDP each year, a footprint researchers compare to a mid-sized national economy. It's the kind of indirect, spread-out impact that's easy to miss looking only at a single hall of booths, and exactly the case Jing's LSE coursework trained her to make.

Giving a child a new smile in 45 minutes

For more than ten years, Jing has also served as a Smile Ambassador for Operation Smile Thailand, the foundation that provides free surgery to repair cleft lip and cleft palate along with post-operative care like speech therapy and orthodontics. Her role is mostly fundraising and awareness, helping make sure, in her words, that "more children can receive life-changing treatment."

A PSA segment later in the episode filled in the scale of the problem: a child is born somewhere in the world with a cleft lip or cleft palate every three minutes, and in Thailand alone, around 2,000 babies are born with the condition each year. Left untreated, it can turn breathing, eating, and speaking into a daily struggle. Treated, a single surgery (sometimes as short as 45 minutes) can change the rest of a child's life.

The organization Jing volunteers for traces back to a single trip in 1982, when plastic surgeon Bill Magee and his wife, social worker and nurse Kathy Magee, joined a cleft-repair medical mission in the Philippines. Roughly 300 families showed up seeking help; the team could only treat 40 children before running out of time and supplies. The Magees promised to come back, and Operation Smile grew out of that promise. It now works with a global network of more than 6,000 medical volunteers across dozens of countries and has provided more than 350,000 free surgeries since its founding, a scale that took decades to reach: the organization treated only a few hundred children in its first years and didn't cross several thousand annual surgeries until well into the 2000s. Jing's decade-plus as a fundraising ambassador sits inside that longer arc of an organization that grew from one unmet promise into one of the largest cleft-care networks in the world.

Exhibitions are becoming experiences, not just product floors

Asked where her industry is headed, Jing predicted exhibitions will keep mattering to Thailand's economy, but the format underneath them is shifting: "They will evolve to become more experience-driven and digitally integrated." Visitors aren't only showing up for the products anymore, she said. They want networking and inspiration, which means organizers now have to blend physical events with digital platforms to hold people's attention.

The numbers back up her read on where the industry is headed. Thailand's convention and exhibition bureau has set a 10 percent growth target for the country's meetings-and-events sector in 2026, aiming for roughly 29.4 million MICE travelers over the year, and market researchers put the broader Thai exhibition and mega-event market on track to roughly double in value by the end of the decade. Thailand is also set to host the IMF-World Bank Group Annual Meetings in 2026, an event expected to draw more than 50,000 participants and generate over 20 billion baht in economic impact, exactly the kind of experience-driven, high-visibility gathering Jing says the industry is now built around rather than a straightforward product expo.

The same episode's headline segment made that shift concrete with Bangkok's own 2026 calendar: Money Expo Bangkok (banks, insurers, and fintech, running May 7-10 at the Impact Exhibition Convention Center), Thaifex Anuga Asia (billed as Asia's food-and-beverage powerhouse, May 26-30 at Impact Arena), and a joint Thailand Franchise and Business Opportunities / Asian Retail show at BITEC from June 4-7.

"Success should also include giving back"

Running both roles at once works, Jing said, because they're not actually competing for the same thing. Union Pan's exhibitions support business and economic growth; Operation Smile lets her contribute to society directly.

Balancing two reminds me that success should also include giving back to the community.

That balance carries into her family life too. Jing is a mother of two daughters, ages seven and three, and said prioritizing her time and staying present in whatever role she's in, at work or at home, is "always a learning process," made easier by a supportive family that reminds her professional achievement isn't the only measure of a meaningful life. Day to day, she said the same three things guide how she works with colleagues, partners, and the community: integrity, responsibility, and empathy.

Her advice for the next generation

Asked what she'd tell young people hoping to start or grow a business, Jing's answer had four parts: stay curious and never stop learning, because "the business world is constantly changing"; build strong values; surround yourself with good people (mentors, partners, a positive team); and be patient, because "building something meaningful takes time." "With dedication and resilience," she added, "it is definitely possible."

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