Hi Guys,

Remember last year when we had the competition among departments in our office to see who had the best Christmas Decorations? Well this year we did the same and boy did the teams up the ante.

I’ve posted some pictures on my Dayre but here are the rest of them. This is the front door.

There was a little sign board for Candyland and Techland. Candyland is the design team’s theme.

 

This is what Candyland looks like.

 

Candyland has a big rainbow too.

On to the rest of the office. Here’s the admin and sales teams.

The ChurpChurp team decided to dedicate their decorations to the popular memes of 2013. One of them being the Wrecking Ball. So they put in a Wrecking Ball and had all our faces hanging on the ball. I had Fighter on my back.

This is a reindeer made out of our water jugs.

This is a home made Christmas tree. Made with 1,600 little strings put together. Goodness it’s beautiful.

 

Look at the right side of this picture, you’ll see the golden Wrecking Ball.

The Tech Team here made reindeers out of LCD monitors and had a Santa’s sledge on it.

 

What was really awesome about the Tech Team is that when we visited them they did a bit of a flashmob. Started with one guy singing a Christmas song then everyone joined in.

 

 

 

The decorations were really really awesome.

I love my team and the effort they put in for things like this. Our office is the most Chrismas-sy place to me this year

This is the second edition of my friend’s success stories thanks to Malaysiaresume.com

From left: Me, Bryan and Pierre and a conference in Jakarta this year.

Before I actually met Bryan I had actually heard of him many times. He was this upcoming entrepreneur who was making waves and doing really well. He was constantly in the media. So one day out of interest I decided to follow him on Instagram and see what his life was like. The impression I got was that this guy really knew how to live life.

It was only months after I had followed him on Instagram that I had first met him. We were at a conference in Jakarta called Taipan, that invited entrepreneurs to learn business-building skills. We had heard of each other before so I guess it wasn’t hard hitting it off. I was impressed at how down to Earth Bryan was and learned later he came from really humble roots.

Bryan Loo grew up in Perlis, the smallest state in Malaysia. His first entrepreneurial venture was at the tender age of 7. He was good at drawing comic books and found friends who were willing to pay to read his comics. So to get a bit more pocket money he would sell his comic books at RM0.50 each to his friends. This comic book venture went really well until his parents found out and decided to raise his pocket money. Having enough pocket money he then stopped selling his comics (or we might have ended up with our own Malaysian Stan Lee).

Bryan likes to say he grew up in a business environment. His parents owned an air-conditioning business that operated out of a shop lot and they lived right on the top floor of that shop lot. One thing Bryan didn’t like doing though was studying. He ended with less than impressive grades after he finished secondary school and his pre-university year. Grades that he said were so bad he couldn’t even get into Sunway Monash.

Eventually though Bryan found that the academic requirements for Monash University in Melbourne was a lot lower and he managed to get in. He graduated with a biotech degree and initially stayed in Australia to work. His first job was a sales one in Melbourne. He had to approach pregnant ladies to sell them stem cell and umbilical cord storage, a concept that was still quite new at that point in time. Sales… as Bryan would find, wasn’t his kind of thing. Nevertheless he stayed in that job for two years before he finally quit.

When Bryan quit, he returned to Malaysia and told his father that he wanted to start a business. He was done being an employee. His father was supportive and took him overseas to 5-6 different trade shows to see the kind of businesses that they could start together. At the end of their circuit of trade shows, Bryan decided that he wanted to do something in F&B because he felt it was more recession proof that other businesses. More specifically, he saw an opportunity in beverages. Up until then, Malaysians were focused on drinking coffee but the market for tea was still very underdeveloped.

With that in mind, Bryan flew to Taiwan to look for a tea franchise to bring to Malaysia. Taiwan, he felt, is the world capital of milk tea. The island has 10,000 milk tea outlets island wide and 180 different brands. Bryan started by approaching all the top brands of milk tea in Taiwan but was subsequently rejected one by one. They were all not interested in expanding to Malaysia.

Disappointed, Bryan flew back to Malaysia. Two weeks later, he met up with a Taiwanese friend of his who showed him pictures of Taiwan on his camera. One particular picture was of a milk tea brand called Chatime. A brand that believed in global expansion and a brand that Bryan had actually never approached before. Motivated again, Bryan Googled for the phone number of Chatime’s HQ and eventually got put to the CEO. Bryan pitched the prospects of the Malaysian market and the next day Chatime’s CEO took the next flight down to Malaysia to see him.

Two months later, Bryan opened his first Chatime in Pavilion. It was the 10th of August 2010 and while Chatime would prove to be a big hit, it would take him 6 months to learn the ropes of the business before he opened his second outlet. In that 6 months he sent out a total of 90 proposals to listing departments all over Malaysia and before he knew it they had all come back with opportunities.

Bryan was certain of one thing though. He didn’t believe in franchising aggressively. He believed that for a franchise to do well and to do the brand justice, it has to be controlled by only one owner because “nobody can treasure your brand as much as you do”. With the limited resources he had though, Bryan had no choice but to franchise out some outlets. He came up with a rule that for every 2 franchises he sold he would open 1 of his own outlets. Eventually when he hit 5-7 outlets of his own, he had enough cash flow to stop giving out franchises and open more of his own outlets.

Today Chatime has 105 outlets all over Malaysia. They are manned by over 830 staff and all his ground staff are below the age of 25. The oldest he jokes is his sister, at the age of 32.
In just 3 years Chatime Malaysia has grown from one outlet to 100, making it one of the fastest growing F&B brands in Malaysian history. When I asked Bryan what’s next? He said “petrol stations”. In the next 2 years he has plans to roll out Chatime in 100 petrol stations nationwide pushing Chatime to 200 outlets nationwide. Chatime is set to grow even more aggressively in the coming years.

Check out Malaysiaresume.com for more stories on successful Malaysians.

I recently discovered a site called Malaysiaresume.com that  has a collection of successful Malaysian entrepreneurs and their stories. I thought it would be a great opportunity to contribute a couple of stories as I have a number of really successful friends who are entrepreneurs.

I have so far lined up two stories. One who built his business from scratch and another who took over his family business and is making it even bigger. I’m going to start with the latter first, because as most of you know, Pierre’s like a buddy of mine that I see all the time. I first met Pierre through work. He was a marketing manager for Mister Potato and a big believer in blog advertising. He wanted to run a campaign on Nuffnang and on my blog because I had found out, he was a loyal reader of my blog.

The place we first met? He called me for a breakfast meeting at the KL Hilton. I remember breakfast that day costing just the both of us RM70 per person or something. We somehow hit it off though. While we started with that first meeting mostly talking about work we ended up meeting up for many more meals and eventually became really good friends. Then we started sharing the same hobbies, one of them today being golf and became even closer.

Today I look back and I once said to him “You know ah the first time we met I was wondering to myself  ‘Wah this Mamee fella so high class… breakfast also want to eat at the Hilton’. I had never before had breakfast at the Hilton. He laughed about it… and we now meet often over Roti Canai or Nasi Lemak.

It is through this friendship that Pierre has found the opportunity to tell me his stories over time. I think he has an interesting story that I will share here.

Pierre’s family business is Mamee Double-Decker, the largest Malaysian snacks company to date, with over RM600 million in annual revenue.

Mamee was born in small town Malacca in the 70s as a partnership between Pierre’s Father (Datuk Wira Pang Tee Chew) and Grandfather (Datuk Pang Chin Hin). Pierre’s grandfather who was introduced to the instant noodle business by his friend sent his son (Pierre’s father) to Japan to learn the trade. When Pierre’s father returned they started their instant noodle business under the brand “Lucky”. That however failed largely due to their inexperience.
The Pangs however persisted and with the lessons they learned from Lucky, they then started Mamee. Pierre’s grandfather decided on the name because “mommy” was the first word most of us learned to say. In the early days, Mamee did moderately well.

Then something happened one day that would change the future of Mamee. Pierre’s father was out making deliveries when he saw some kids eating raw instant noodles right out of the packet. He thought if kids were already eating raw instant noodles out of a pack, why don’t make a noodle snack just for the kids.

 

My friend Pierre is among the new generation of the Pang family to take over the management of Mamee. Pierre grew up in Malacca while watching on the sidelines as his father grew Mamee. He then went on to get his degree in Information Systems from the University of Melbourne. The unwritten rule among the Pangs was that before any family members could come back to work in Mamee they must first spend a minimum of three years earning working experience from the outside world.

This suited Pierre just fine. His passion was always in advertising so when he returned from Australia, he found a job at Ogilvy. He spent two years in Ogilvy learning the ropes of advertising, handling key accounts like Lenovo, IBM and HSBC. Always an entrepreneur at heart, Pierre left Ogilvy to start his own creative and digital signage agency 8dge, which he explains was one of the best times of his life. Three years into growing 8dge though, his Father told him that it was time for him to come back and work on the family business.

Five years after graduation, Pierre finally joined Mamee. He didn’t start at a top level position but rather as a brand manager of Mister Potato to earn his salt. Prove himself he did. When he took over as Mister Potato’s brand manager, Mister Potato was merely at half the market share of their main competitor Pringles. Three years under Pierre’s leadership, he had grown Mister Potato’s market share to double that of Pringles.

Part of Pierre’s strategy to grow Mister Potato as a brand was to become the Global Snacks Sponsor for Manchester United. The sponsorship deal which had Manchester United players endorse Mister Potato put Mister Potato in the eyes of 4.7 billion people who watch the Barclays Premier League.

Confident with Pierre’s abilities after Mister Potato’s success, Pierre’s father put him in his current role: General Manager of Sales and Marketing  to work his magic on the rest of Mamee’s brands. One of his key projects, to save the very first product that Mamee started with: Mamee Instant Noodles.

Mamee instant noodles had always been number 2 in market share in Malaysia. In recent years however, intense competition from aggressive Indonesian players threatened to dethrone them. The Indonesian brands had more money and were not afraid to spend it to “buy” market share in Malaysia. Mamee’s instant noodles division faced two choices: Continue to lose market share or cut its own price leading to a potential loss.

Like all entrepreneurs, Pierre decided to do something different. He traveled around Asia to China, Taiwan, and Japan to find inspiration on what to do with Mamee instant noodles. When he returned, an idea had taken hold in his head. While the instant noodles market in Malaysia was a big and growing one, it was also very backward when it came to innovation. Rather than compete head to head with all its rivals, he decided to pivot Mamee and rebrand it as a more premium instant noodles called Mamee Chef.

Mamee Chef was a very differentiated product. Its noodles were made with a new machine that he convinced Mamee to spend RM60 million on, creating better texture and a premium quality feel to it. It contained condiments like dehydrated prawns to accompany its different flavours, making the consumer feel that this wasn’t just instant noodles. You were eating a proper meal. Last but not least, he worked with Dato Chef Ismail, a celebrity chef in Malaysia to create the flavours of the soup to make sure it was something Malaysians would love.

Mamee Chef proved to be an overnight success. In the first few months, it was flying off the shelves faster than Mamee could restock it. While the instant noodle industry grew 2% annually, Mamee Chef was growing at ten times that.

I chose to write a story about my friend Pierre because of his inspiring story. I have many friends who have been blessed enough to be able to inherit a family business but he not just inherited it, he helped grow it. That’s what entrepreneurs do right? We take whatever we have and we make something better out of it. That’s why Pierre inspires me and I hope his story inspires you and anyone else who has a family business no matter how big or small.

 

Check out Malaysiaresume.com for more Malaysian success stories.