After returning to Korea, Ho-Am spent some years contemplating on what he should commit himself to next. Seeing the urgent need to resurrect the domestic economy, which was still under Japanese rule, he decided to devote himself to starting a business.
He selected Masan, close to his hometown, as the starting point for his first business enterprise. Masan was a cozy little port near Busan that served as a hub for shipping rice to Japan, but the process was often subject to numerous delays. Recognizing an opportunity in the market, Ho-Am partnered with two family friends, Hyon-Yong Jeong and Jeong-Won Park from the town of Hapcheon. With an investment of 10,000 won each, they opened a large-scale rice mill in the spring of 1936.
To succeed in the rice polishing business, it was important to secure a stable supply of rice and continuously operate the rice polishing machine. However, while Ho-Am purchased enough supply of rice, the venture struggled, losing two-thirds of its initial capital in the first year.
Rather than giving up, Ho-Am felt that this failure was part of the learning process and he set about overcoming it. He reasoned that the common pattern of people buying rice as prices rose and selling as prices fell was the cause of the problem, so he did the exact opposite – selling when prices rose and buying when prices fell. This strategy worked and he turned the company around, to recover the losses and made a profit by the next settlement. Riding off the back of this success, Ho-Am expanded into the transport industry. At the time, the lack of a stable transport system caused frequent delays of rice delivery, so he decided to acquire the Masan Ilchul Automobile Company to solve this logistical challenge.
After stabilizing the rice polishing and transport businesses, he turned his attention to purchasing land, eventually buying some 6.6 million square meters after a year of investment with the support of bank loans. However, the Marco Polo Bridge incident and the subsequent breakout of the second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937 caused land values in Korea to collapse. With land prices plummeting, Ho-Am, burdened by the bank loans, eventually had to sell off all the land below market price and even his rice mill and the transport company just to settle his debts. Ho-Am was wise enough to realize, however, that survival in the business world required a keen ability to adapt to global trends and domestic situations. He also learned to reject excessive greed, in favor of rational and realistic assessment of his own capabilities and limitations and to prepare second and third options for contingency plans.