Initial Consultation and Official Membership Enrollment (Part 2 of My Journey with Lunch Actually in Singapore)
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This is part 2 of my review series with Lunch Actually, Asia’s premier lunch dating company.
- Part 1: Joining Lunch Actually (Why I Decided to Join a Lunch Dating Agency and My Upcoming Series on Lunch Dating)
- Part 2: Initial Consultation and Official Membership Enrollment
- Part 3: Going Through Image Coaching!
- Part 4: The Date Process!
- Part 5: Experience Date Coaching Through My Eyes!
Hello everyone! 
As promised, here is the next part of my Lunch Actually experience! Today’s post documents my experience during the consultation and enrollment stages. Enjoy! 
By the way, I originally stated that I would be paying for my membership and the post was not sponsored. Lunch Actually has since kindly offered to sponsor my membership as I will be reviewing about my experience with the agency (thank you LA!! ♥); we will also be subsequently discussing on collaboration opportunities further down the road.
Just because my membership is sponsored doesn’t mean the reviews will be any different though; I’ll continue to write about my experiences objectively and transparently and share all my thoughts about the process, as I do for all the articles I write on PE. So, do continue reading this as an objective review series on arranged dating with Lunch Actually. Look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments section!
Stage 1: Initial Consultation (Before Signing Up as Member)
So, after publishing my original post on Monday, I went down to their office for a consultation the next day (Tuesday). I arranged for a 5pm appointment since I had a dinner appointment with my friends at 6:45pm at another location. (I gather one hour would be sufficient for the consultation.)
So upon reaching their office (which is at Park Mall; near Dhoby Ghaut MRT for those in Singapore), I was ushered into one of their comfy meeting rooms by their receptionist. There, I was soon joined by their consultant, Irenes. Turns out that Irene has been with LA since the first day of their inception back in 2004! That means she has been matching singles for over eight years!
Step 1: Understanding the Kind of Guy I’m Looking For
After the exchange of formalities, Irene jumped right into querying me about my background, my past relationship history, and what I’m looking for in my ideal relationship partner! She was pretty detailed in the questioning too, asking me questions like my expectations in terms of the person’s height, physical size, looks, education qualifications, religious background, ethnicity, nationality, martial history, personality, and so on.
I believe that this was a form of screening for the agency, where they first understand the specific criteria of the individual to see if they are able to meet the individual’s expectations. There are people who have unrealistic expectations of the kind of person they are looking for, and in the event that the agency is not confident that they can give them a satisfactory dating experience, they will actually be discouraged from signing up. I think this is good as it manages expectations rather than overpromising only to underdeliver later on. I adopt this approach with how I run Personal Excellence too.
(Read more about what it takes to run a great business in 10 Elements of Great Customer Service and the Successful Businesses Interview Series.)
If you’re wondering about the criteria I gave, I pretty much gave a flexi-anything-goes reply for almost all of the questions, except for personality—it is absolutely pertinent that my partner is someone who is who exudes the qualities of kindness and drive (read: achievement-oriented). I’ve found that these are the qualities that I’m most attracted to.
Other things are not very critical, save for height (should at least be the same height as me or taller; I’m 1.7m), and personal grooming (looks isn’t really a critical factor for me but I would like the guy to put due effort in personal grooming and looking presentable. I don’t think it’s good for a guy to be sloppy and unkempt!).
Step 2: Learning about How the Lunch Actually Service Works
After the initial chat, Irene talked me through what a membership with Lunch Actually would entail. Basically, every person that signs up is put through a personality profiling test and an interview. This helps them to understand the person better as an individual, of which the information would later be used to match him/her with other members in their database. This process takes anywhere from a couple of weeks, up to four weeks.
After the information is processed, they will run the person’s profile against the other members’ profiles in the database. A series of matches is generated, after which the consultant will manually match members one by one, eventually picking the best match for the person (based on the answers shared in the personality test, in the initial interviews, and the consultant’s professional judgment).
From there, the consultant will run the match through each party to see if they are interested to meet each other. If yes, a date will be arranged. Both parties will then meet each other for the first time during the date.
After the date, there will be a feedback form where the individual shares feedback on whether the match met his/her expectations and follow-up comments. This feedback will then be used to fine-tune future matches for the individual.
Step 3: Sharing the History of Lunch Actually (the Company)
Next, Irene talked me through a quick powerpoint presentation of Lunch Actually, including its history, success stories to date (members who hit it off and got hitched thereafter), and other facts.
Here, I got to ask questions and probe further into the facts. Here are the key points which I picked up:
- There are about 4,000 active members in Lunch Actually at the moment. (Members who are available to be matched. Members whose accounts are on hold (either because they have found someone or because they want to take a break from dating) are not considered active members.)
- About 60% of the members are females and 40% are males.
- Members come from all industries, from finance, computing, engineering, accountancy, teaching, and so on. Most are professionals who are too busy to date and hence are using LA to meet new singles. Majority of the members are degree holders and above, with others having diplomas or other education qualifications.
- Lunch Actually was started in 2004 by co-founders Jamie and Violet, who are now happily married today with two kids. (This I already knew, since I’m friends with them!) This means LA has been around for eight years, making it one of the longest standing dating agencies locally.
- In the eight years, LA has arranged over 18,000 first dates, and counting!
- Lunch Actually is pretty much the leading lunch dating agency in Asia Pacific today, with branches in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and most recently, Penang. They are frequently featured in the media. Those of you in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia must have probably read or heard about LA at one point or another.
Step 4: Picking an Appropriate Dating Package
At the end of the consultation session, Irene shared with me the available packages. There are three packages: the 3-Date Package, 5-Date Package, and 10-Date Package. Each package includes standard registration fee. If the member is to renew his/her package later on, he/she will pay the renewal fee (the package fee, minus the registration fee).
I’m not too sure if they are okay with me revealing the prices, so I’ll just say that the packages cost about $1.2k and up (Sing dollars). The larger package you take, the more value for money it is (i.e., the average cost per matched date will be lower).
For those of you who want to learn more about their service, you can book a consultation at the Lunch Actually website (tell them that Celes sent you!). The consultation is free anyway and they don’t force you to sign up if you don’t want to (which is something that I like), so just give it a go and hear what they have to say. You get to have all your enquiries answered in person by a trained consultant, and if you don’t like what you hear, you don’t like what they have to offer or you think it’s too expensive for you, simply say no! It’s that simple. No loss on your end at all. (Except maybe one hour of your time, but that’s not really time lost because you get to learn more about the service and decide if you want to sign up or not, so… yeah!)
Violet recommended that I go along with the 5-Date package. She said there shouldn’t be any issues finding me compatible matches on a 5-Date Package, though height might be a challenge since I’m quite tall and the local guys are usually not that tall. (YOOO YOU TALL GUYS, WHERE ARE YOU!?!? COME OUT HERE RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!) So 5-Date package it is, and we’ll see how it goes before deciding how to best proceed later on! 
I think five dates will be sufficient to give me a good taste of what the LA service is like and whether it is a good match for my needs, before I decide whether to continue with it for the longer term. As I’ve already said in my initial post, I’m really joining LA to open myself up to meeting new, compatible people, and giving the service a try, since I’ve never used it before. I’m not expecting the people I meet right away to be immediate romantic interests; rather I think it is simply a good platform to build long-term relationships (friendship or otherwise)!
Step 2: Membership Enrollment (After Signing Up)
After the initial consultation (which took about an hour), I learned that I had to do a personality questionnaire and an interview for the official membership enrollment. Since I had to boot for a belated birthday celebration with my friends, I arranged to meet Irene again later in the week, on Friday, 1pm.
Firstly, Personality Questionnaire
So Friday came, and I arrived at the office. Irene walked me through personality questionnaire (online), then left me in the room to do it. It took about 15 to 20 minutes to complete. Easy breezy! It was kind of fun to do the questionnaire too, because it got me thinking about what were the more important vs. the less important attributes to me in a romantic partner.
Some of the questions are typical ones you would find on any dating site, I think. Like would you prefer your partner to be introverted or extroverted? Traditional or worldly? And so on. Then, you select the top three criteria that you are looking for in your ideal partner.
You also get to select your first preference in terms of height, age, race, religion, education qualification, past martial status, and so on, followed by your second preference. I thought this was useful because it helped me clarify on how flexible I was willing to be for these factors.
There were a couple of parts of the questionnaire which I felt slightly restricted, in that I wanted to pick certain options but they were not available. In these cases, I simply went for the next best option.
Next: In-Person Interview
After I was done with the questionnaire, Irene conducted an in-person interview with me, asking several pertinent questions about myself and what I’m looking for in my desired relationship partner. I thought this interview was extremely useful in filling in the blanks about a person that a questionnaire wouldn’t be able to pin down!
The interview took about 30 minutes or so. Like the questionnaire, I found this very fun. Some of the questions are things that I usually think a lot about in my own self-development! The questions that I found interesting included ones like: “What are the five things you cannot live without in life?”, “What are the biggest turn-offs for you about a guy? (or girl, if you’re male)”, “What are the most important things you look for in a guy? (or girl, if you’re male)”, “How important is your career to you, on a scale of 1-10?”, “Are you more tidy/organized or spontaneous?”, among others. Some great food for thought here.
At the end of the interview, Irene took a picture and a short video of me. She told me that these will only be used for their internal matching and will never be shared with any external party or any of the matches. I suppose that they need a video to get a sense of the energy and the vibe of a person. I’ve found that creating the web lectures and Celes Show videos have allowed me to connect with readers in ways that I wouldn’t be able to with just the medium of writing.
What’s Going To Happen Next!
So what’s going to happen now is that the agency will process my answers, input them into their database, and start running my information against other members in it. This process will take anywhere from one to two weeks.
After that, they are doing to do the manual side-by-side comparison with short-listed candidates, before narrowing it down to the one best match. This will take another one to two weeks. When that happens, they will contact me to get my feedback (and the match’s feedback as well) and arrange for the first date.
All in all, another two weeks to a month before there will be any major updates. I’ll update you guys when that happens!
So, let me know if you guys have any questions or thoughts to share regarding my Lunch Actually experience! I’ll be happy to share what I know and keep a watchout for answers to questions I don’t have answers to!
This is part 2 of my review series with Lunch Actually, Asia’s premier lunch dating company.
- Part 1: Joining Lunch Actually (Why I Decided to Join a Lunch Dating Agency and My Upcoming Series on Lunch Dating)
- Part 2: Initial Consultation and Official Membership Enrollment
- Part 3: Going Through Image Coaching!
- Part 4: The Date Process!
- Part 5: Experience Date Coaching Through My Eyes!
Image: Shutterstock
Tags: dating, lunch actually, singlehood
