Open For Business

When award-winning architect Katrine Cheong last appeared on the show in December 2024, the conversation centered around the design mechanics of building Little Precious, a premium confinement centre in KL Eco City. Today, she returns to discuss a drastically different reality: the shifting economic ground beneath the maternity business. Since opening in 2020, her single-site, 20,000-square-foot facility has served over a thousand mothers, operating with 60-plus medical professionals and a strict one-to-two nurse-to-baby ratio. With packages starting north of RM31,000, it is effectively a luxury hotel that carries the exorbitant staffing bill of a private hospital.

Katrine joins us to discuss the hard unit economics of the confinement industry. We unpack the mechanics of occupancy and break-even points, if she will continue to champion a single-site model rather than scaling, and the brutal reality of retaining specialised nurses amidst a national shortage and aggressive poaching from Singapore.

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Ghostbird Coffee started in 2015 out of operational frustration. After transitioning from the IT industry to help found The Owls Café, Thomas Ooi and Tiong Hsien Qing realised they wanted absolute control over their most critical supply chain element: their coffee. What began as a small Seputeh roastery built to supply their own shops has scaled into a massive nationwide B2B operation. Growing from roughly RM1.5 million in 2020 to RM7.07 million in 2024, the fully bootstrapped business currently generates between RM600,000 and RM800,000 monthly, with a clear operational target to consistently clear a million a month.

The business now executes across seven distinct revenue streams—spanning roasting, B2B wholesale, e-commerce, a retail coffee bar, co-roasting, roastery consultation, and running major events like the Malaysia AeroPress Championship. Beyond their operational footprint, the founders are making a massive strategic bet on Malaysian Liberica. Traditionally dismissed as a cheap, sea-level filler crop grown in Johor, Ghostbird is working to elevate the bean into a distinct, high-quality Malaysian coffee identity that can command global respect.

Thomas and Tiong talk to us about the realities of building a multi-million ringgit F&B supply company from the ground up. We discuss why being former café operators serves as their greatest strategic advantage in wholesale, and the difficult process of digitising B2B sales in an industry traditionally run entirely on handshakes and salespeople.

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Ling's Focacceria operated on an incredibly focused business model: one type of dough, transformed into a menu of focaccia loaves and sandwiches featuring Malaysian flavors like otak-otak, and vadai. Built by a former corporate communications and copywriting professional with zero F&B background, the Mutiara Damansara shop survived a brutal first year of poor management and severe debt. By tightly restructuring the business, founder Choy Ee Ling successfully cut payables, grew year-two revenue by 12 percent, and entered her third year completely debt-free. By the time the shop’s lease was up for renewal, the bootstrapped business was generating over six-figures in revenue and sitting firmly in the black.

Then, she shut it down.

Ling joins us to discuss the mechanics of digging a retail shop out of vendor debt, how social media fundamentally changed her customer acquisition, and exactly what happens to a company's sales when a founder announces they are closing a profitable business for good.

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Faramore is a bootstrapped, direct-to-consumer footwear brand solving a highly specific market gap: affordable, handmade shoes designed exclusively for women with wide, chubby, or bunion-prone feet. Operating on a strict pre-order model to maintain clean cash flow and eliminate excess inventory, the brand prices its entire catalogue under RM95. By leveraging organic customer acquisition through founder Farah Che Lamin's personal Threads account, Faramore has rapidly scaled to roughly RM500,000 in revenue within its first year.

This hyper-niche focus is a calculated response to a harsh entrepreneurial reality. Farah previously spent seven years successfully building her first footwear brand, LANIA, only to shut it down after being overwhelmed by aggressive market copycats. With Faramore, she executed a decisive strategic pivot, betting that a product meticulously engineered from the ground up for an underserved demographic provides a structural moat that is fundamentally harder for mass-market manufacturers to replicate.

Farah talks to us about the technical differences between designing for wide feet versus simply scaling up a standard shoe block, the reality of IP theft in the fashion industry, and the challenges of using a personal, highly public social media account as a primary sales channel. 

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How do you turn a Pan Mee restaurant into a scalable FMCG business? For Meet Mee, the answer came when COVID forced the company to rethink how it could reach customers beyond its restaurants.

Co-Founder Chan Foo Chuen shares how the company developed its instant Pan Mee, built a business across e-commerce and retail, and grew annual revenue from under RM1 million in 2020 to more than RM10 million in 2025, while still working towards profitability.

We discuss:

• Why Meet Mee moved from restaurants into packaged food.

• The product development challenges behind instant Pan Mee.

• How the company built its e-commerce and retail business.

• Why growing revenue does not necessarily mean being profitable.

• Meet Mee's plans to increase production and enter the Indonesian market.

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Founded in Kota Kinabalu in 2015, Borenos Fried Chicken is an independent fast-food chain that has steadily grown into a highly successful eight-figure enterprise. Over the past twelve months, the company has aggressively scaled from six to eleven outlets,  officially establishing a foothold in the Klang Valley with locations in Puchong, Damansara Uptown, and Bandar Baru Bangi. Along the way, the business has proven its market demand, securing Grab's Crowd's Favourite Western Food award three years running and a BrandLaureate World Halal award.

Despite posting strong per-outlet revenue in its home state, crossing the South China Sea has presented its founders with fresh operational hurdles. And after eleven years building brand equity and community backing in Sabah, Borenos has effectively had to start from zero in West Malaysia - acquiring customers from scratch while competing directly against hundreds of established global franchise outlets. 

In this Malaysia Day special, Co-founder & CEO Janice Yeo talks to us about the decision to build a homegrown brand rather than importing another foreign franchise. We also discuss the absolute limits of relying on the Sabahan diaspora as a primary customer acquisition channel in the Klang Valley, and exactly what structural changes are required for more East Malaysian enterprises to successfully go national.

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As residential floor plans across the Klang Valley continue to shrink, Mocof has built a highly profitable, seven-figure business by addressing the gap in spatial efficiency. Operating under the SPAZE label, the company manufactures premium transformable furniture, such as wall beds that fold into shelving and sofas that convert into beds, engineered with high-end European compressed-air mechanisms. The fully bootstrapped business has maintained steady 8 to 10 percent year-on-year growth for fifteen years, operating premium showrooms in Pavilion KL and Setia City Mall while securing lucrative B2B contracts with ANSA Hotel and Paramount Property.

Despite this established retail and manufacturing success, founder Eric Cha is now betting the company's next aggressive growth phase entirely on software. Mocof is developing a proprietary AI layout tool designed to ingest condominium floor plans and instantly generate optimised, space-saving designs with fully validated upfront costs. 

Eric joins us to discuss the realities of their global supply chain - pairing European mechanisms with Chinese materials and Malaysian assembly, and what genuinely makes a transformable bed structurally safe. We also dissect their new AI software, to explore what the tool actually accomplishes.

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Atlas Collectif is a performance running apparel brand operating out of Kuala Lumpur and Dubai, producing technical kits built on design, performance, and sustainability. 

Within three years of launching, the brand has scaled to over RM3 million in annual revenue, recording 178 percent year-on-year growth. Operating with a lean core team of just six people, the business has successfully established 20 distribution points across five countries and secured major strategic partnerships, including a three-year deal with adidas that will evolve into a full capsule collection in 2027, and a partnership with the KL Half Marathon to outfit roughly 8,000 runners.

Co founder Hugh Koh joins us to discuss building a globally competitive athletic brand from Kuala Lumpur. We also discuss the USD 400,000 seed round to accelerate its physical and international expansion, and how the company utilises community as their primary customer acquisition channel, building highly localised run clubs across five global cities. 

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Linaco is Malaysia's largest coconut ingredient manufacturer, exporting coconut milk, cream, and ready-to-drink coconut water to more than forty countries under brands like Rasaku and Cowa. Operating production facilities across Batu Pahat, Bandar Enstek, and Kalimantan, the company supplies modern retail supermarkets, restaurants, and industrial food manufacturers. Last year, the group successfully crossed half a billion ringgit in annual revenue, achieving this massive scale without taking a single ringgit of outside capital in two decades.

Despite this financial milestone, the business is navigating the most violent period of coconut price volatility in living memory. With global benchmarks nearly tripling due to drought, pests, and international buying surges, Linaco is executing a massive RM400 million vertical integration strategy in Sabah to grow its own supply and protect its margins. Furthermore, after twenty years of strict self-funding, the business is officially preparing to enter an aggressive investment mode.

Executive Director Joe Ling joins us to discuss the global coconut trade, Linaco’s zero-waste manufacturing model, and the impact of ingredient adulteration on the wider category. We also explore the strategic shift toward owning their own plantations and why they are finally considering external capital to fund their next phase of growth.

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YonMing Group is a fully bootstrapped commercial vehicle aftermarket giant operating across Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Hong Kong. The business model spans five distinct revenue streams, including supplying genuine parts for European heavyweights like Volvo, Scania, Mercedes-Benz, and Iveco. Additionally, the company operates dedicated workshops and 24-hour breakdown teams, sells used parts and whole trucks, and serves as the appointed Malaysian distributor for Chinese manufacturer Shacman.

Finance Director Kau Hau Jian joins us to unpack the hidden financial engine of parts distribution and the currency risks involved in a thin-margin industry. We also discuss the strategic impact of Chinese trucks disrupting a market traditionally dominated by European brands, the operational hurdle of digitising an industry built entirely on human relationships via the YM Super App, and how the impending electrification of commercial fleets will alter the economics of the parts business.

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