I like reading the stories and lives of the young successful entrepreneurs in Malaysia simply because I draw a lot of inspiration from them… to strive to maybe be as successful as some of them are some day.
But after a while if you’ve been actively reading things like that you begin to feel that you keep hearing the same stories over and over possibly because.. well maybe there aren’t that many of those around but I started wondering why… I mean there are 25 million people in Malaysia, there can’t be only like a handful of young successful entrepreneurs.
So I started paying a lot of attention to people around us and this week I’m back in Penang.
I was going for lunch today with some of our Penang Nuffies and we were going to this usual beef noodle stall we always have in Penang. To the locals here it’s known as the “Bomba” beef noodle since it’s right opposite a fire station.
The person behind the beef noodles is this really young and cute looking girl who looks like she’s still in her twenties.
I ordered my food then waited there and started counting the number of bowls she was serving out.
Then I started to do some math to estimate and I really mean estimate how much she makes (I didn’t actually ask her… it’s rude to ask people how much they make.. haha)
Okay her coffee shop was full and she is the only stall there.
I think the coffee shop can sit about 30 people at one go. She has two sizes for the bowl of noodles she sells. The big one costs RM8 and the small one costs RM6.
I always go during lunch hour but I think she’s open in the morning too so lets say for each meal session she has about 3 total table turnovers.
So that’s 3 turnovers in the morning and 3 in the afternoon… 6 a day in total. 30 X 6 = 180 people she serves in a day.
She’s open 6 days a week so that’s about 1,080 people a week and 4,320 people a month. Assuming each person eats only one bowl of beef noodle she sells 4,320 bowls a month.
Now lets say we take the average price of a beef noodle to be RM7 per bowl. That’s RM30,240 a month in revenue and RM362,880 a year.
Assuming that of the RM362,880 she makes a year, 60% is used to pay her rent, her ingredients costs and all other costs. 
She would make about RM145,152 a year or RM12,096 a month just from selling her beef noodles.
Now I don’t know about everyone else but if you’re making that kind of money in your twenties… you’re doing pretty well.
I wonder if I might see her on a magazine cover one day.
Who knows.. perhaps by the time she’s 30 she might have a chain of beef noodle restaurants called
“The Bomba Beef Noodle Shop”
And you’ll be hearing their ads over the radio.
Sometimes I wonder why so many young people want to go into online businesses… heck… it’s brick & mortar or food businesses like these that make the real money!
Like Ming once told me
“It may not be sexy but it makes money”.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space