Open For Business

Once a practising lawyer and now a hotelier and restaurant owner with 27 properties under his brand, Unlisted Collection, Loh Lik Peng has always bent the rules around the “hotel experience” - by taking old buildings from a bygone era and turning them into quirky boutique hotels. We speak to Loh about the art of redesigning the past, how he chooses his properties, and how he’s competing with “hipster” trends as well as alternative accommodation.

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It is the last month of the 2017 and in a few more weeks, a raft of personal resolutions will be made. Shankar of EQTD Consulting finds it a useful time to reflect on things from his personal successes and failures to his aspirations for the future. But why do so many resolutions end up in the “to-attempt-again-next-year” folder of our lives? Shankar shares his thoughts about building a new mindset for resolutions to work.

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Most people visit popular tourist spots when traveling, but to really get a feel of a country, you need to travel its backstreets and do what the locals do. We speak to Jamon Mok, founder of Backstreet Academy, a community-based travel startup that lets tourists learn a new skill or two from locals, giving them an authentic travel experience in the process.

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Getting into a new sport is always daunting. But getting into a new, seasonal, relatively expensive sport is something that people can usually only dream about. Enter First Traxx, Malaysia’s first indoor ski and snowboard training centre. Izhan Hassan, operations director, and Rob Forbes, head instructor, talk all about hitting the slopes in the tropics.

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We begin by asking ourselves one of the universe’s most sought-after yet most complicated questions - What is happiness? Is it simply that positive, elusive state we’re in when we achieve something? Is it a choice we make when we wake up in the morning, or a feeling that fills us autonomously? In this Motivational Monday session, bestselling author, international speaker, cartoonist and happiness expert, Andrew Matthews shines some light onto the grey areas of happiness.

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Some people are just born with an entrepreneurial spirit. At the tender age of thirteen, Henry Patterson speaks about his foundation, Young & Mighty, as well as his previous endeavours and how he intends on expanding even further in his business pursuits.

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‘Rome 2 Rio’ is a global trip planner and search engine that displays a bevy of travel options for users to get from point A - B, with time and fare estimates included. We speak to founder Rod Cuthbert about the process of developing the app, the growth of the company, and the way travel is changing thanks to technology.

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It’s the first Monday of the month and Jeevan Sahadevan from Leverage Lab shares how these 12 questions can be used to do a personal review or a business review of 2017 as we plan and prepare for 2018.

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There are moments running a company where you might run into some issues - problems like negligent hiring and fraudulent business transactions can often be the line between success and failure. But there is no better cure than prevention, and Mark Leow, founder of Verity Intelligence tells us more about the business of background screening.

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How will emerging technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) reshape the next generation of marketing communications? Can developments in new technology ever replace human creativity? How can companies incorporate the use of these new tech into their business strategies? We speak to Nigel Gwilliam and Khairudin Rahim about the advertising and marcom race to capitalise on the rise of technology.

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