He helms a private education company spanning 14 countries and with 130,000 students, but Mr Sunny Varkey does not have a degree to his name. The 56-year-old “went through the university of hard knocks”, venturing into business at the age of 23.

“I think I made a mistake, I should have listened to my parents and I should have done my degree,” he tells TODAY. “I was a pretty good student. Somehow I just didn’t like studies. I think I may be a true entrepreneur?”

Mr Varkey, who stopped attending school after completing his A-Levels, is the Chairman of GEMS Education, one of the largest international school chains in the world. It operates 74 schools educating children from the ages of seven to 18, including one in Singapore that will open in September next year.

His public relations firm bills him as “an extremely humble person” despite being said to have a personal net worth of US$650 million (S$823 million). As we talk over tea at The St Regis Singapore during his visit here for the opening of GEMS’ Information and Enrolment Centre, he comes across as a man of few words, not wont to beating about the bush.

He admits that, on occasion, he regrets “not being properly educated”. “Why? It’s because there are times when you need to express yourself the way you want, and because you are not qualified enough you are not able to express (yourself) … you know what I’m saying?” says the immaculately-groomed son of Kerala, whose first language is Malayalam.

Asked if he sees the irony in his chosen career, he says that is not necessarily the case. “I am passionate about education, in that what I do is that I serve people and I run schools. And while we help transfer knowledge to children, we also create a value system. So it’s not just about academics.”

By this he means that he wants GEMS Education students to graduate as forward-thinking world citizens with universal values and leadership qualities — values he picked up at the Catholic boarding school he attended from age four-and-a-half to 12.

SALAD DAYS

When just a toddler, Mr Varkey was enrolled in a boarding school in India, when his middle-class parents moved to Dubai in 1959 to teach English to local Emiratis there.

He and his elder sister only joined their parents in 1970, when he was 13.

“It’s too young to be in a boarding school ... I guess they could not afford to take me to Dubai in those days,” he shares. “And I think I met my parents altogether (before I left for Dubai) maybe for a few months. In those days it was not about coming home every year … there were no flights every day so it was ships they used.”

Mr Varkey took his O-Levels in Dubai — although not at the Our Own English High School (OOEHS), which his parents set up in 1968. He then moved to England to do his A-Levels. A “good education”, his parents thought, was the best thing they could give their children.

“I did one year and that was it,” says Mr Varkey. “I finished (my A-Levels) in Dubai at the British Council.”

He was not idle though. The youth worked as a general clerk at Standard Chartered Bank, helped his parents run the school, sometimes drove the school bus, and dabbled in a few businesses. In 1980, at 23, he took over the management of the OOEHS — which then had just 350 students — while pursuing his other ventures.

“I’d started a company called Chicago Maintenance and Construction and I was in trading, then I was in (the hotel industry) … I was also in the healthcare business,” he quips. But at about the age of 25, he realised that education was his true passion. “I just dropped all the other businesses.”

GOING GLOBAL, IN BUSINESS AND GIVING

So how did he turn a little school in Bastakiya, a historic district in Dubai, into a multinational operation?

“Literally, the whole world comes to Dubai. We probably have 180 or 200 nationalities in Dubai ... and they don’t have a school system for the expats. There are the local government schools (only for Emiratis).

“So each community started developing their own school,” Mr Varkey says. “So from the Indian programme that we had, we started doing the British programme, the American programme and so on … We made different schools for different communities.”

Later on, Mr Varkey took another leaf out of his father’s book — his dad always gave 10 per cent of his income to charity, even when the family was strictly middle-class — and formed The Varkey GEMS Foundation to “corporatise the givings that we did”.

It was also around the same time that “the world started recognising that every company should do their bit for corporate social responsibility”. Former United States President Bill Clinton was invited to launch the foundation, and he eventually became its Honorary Chairman.

“He liked what we were doing, and we said ... for every one child that comes to a GEMS school, we will impact a hundred poor children in the world,” Mr Varkey explains.

GEMS Education’s current enrolment of 130,000 means the foundation targets to benefit 13 million underprivileged children. This is done, he says, in two ways.

First, the foundation gives a sum of money to UNESCO to train teachers in Kenya, Ghana and India. Second, the foundation will be implementing a programme to train 250,000 teachers at roughly US$300 each.

GEMS Education also does paid consultancy work with governments — such as the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, Ghana, Kenya and the US — where it helps improve the management of public schools and train the teachers as well.

“We do a lot, and we do it genuinely — not for the sake of window dressing,” he stresses with conviction. “We were from a family where, when God has been kind to you, you want to give something back ... Good giving is when it pinches you,” says Mr Varkey, who is a devout Protestant.

THE NEXT GEMS GENERATION

This keenness for social causes seems to have been passed on to his sons Dino, 33, and Jay, 29. Both joined GEMS Education after they got their degrees.

“They’re both very passionate about what they do. They had a choice of doing whatever they want but they decided to be in this profession. I think having their grandparents and their father in the profession ... it’s just natural for them, too.”

Both sons were educated at GEMS, then sent to a preparatory school and universities in the United Kingdom, where one got his master’s and the other his bachelor’s degree.

While the family has long since left behind its middle-class roots and two-room apartment in Kerala — Mr Varkey, an Indian citizen still, is based in Dubai.

His sons “seem to be normal people”. “I don’t think money has gone to their heads — which is important — and they are very grounded,” says the “24/7” workaholic and “health freak” who hits the gym.

“I think, fortunately, apart from the family sort of teaching, the school they went to has been good,” says the proud father.