Open For Business

KC Purusotman began his career at just 15 years old by throwing parties. Twenty-five years later, he operates one of Malaysia's most diverse and dynamic hospitality companies. Continuum Hospitality Group manages an expansive portfolio that features the Pinkfish Music & Arts Festival alongside prominent nightclubs like Kyo KL. In the culinary space, the group also operates the rapidly expanding Malay fine dining brand Cili Kampung and the Italian restaurant Stefania. Beyond traditional hospitality, KC co-founded Lion Music Group, the label responsible for launching the hit Malaysian girl group Dolla.

The journey to this scale was heavily tested during the pandemic. To survive the lockdowns that severely impacted the F&B industry, KC took out two personal loans and bought out a partner, betting everything that the post-pandemic experience economy would eventually return stronger than ever. That calculated risk paid off. Today, the group is aggressively expanding, pushing Pinkfish into massive arena shows and preparing to take its dining concepts regional.

KC joins us to discuss what it truly takes to build, manage, and scale an operation that spans dining, nightlife, and music. We break down the complex financial realities of running a high-end nightclub, explore why building a music label made strategic business sense for a hospitality operator, and examine his ambitious roadmap to take his homegrown Malaysian brands to an international audience.

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Frontline staff in hospitality and facility management are often treated as the forgotten workforce. Many lack corporate email addresses and are forced to endure long, tedious training sessions through traditional learning management systems. Matthew Spriegel saw this disconnect and founded Atiom, a behavioural technology platform built specifically for service industries. Acting more like TikTok than Netflix, the mobile app delivers bite-sized, daily microlearning modules to build atomic habits without overwhelming the user.

Instead of reading PowerPoint slides, employees use Atiom to practice handling difficult guest scenarios through AI-powered roleplay in a safe environment. The platform also offers peer recognition, real-time feedback, and a gamified points system to keep staff engaged and improve daily performance. Importantly, Matthew insists their AI strategy is strictly designed to augment human potential and support service connections, rather than replace human workers entirely.

This focus on frequency over volume has proven highly successful. Atiom has doubled its revenue for three consecutive years without relying on massive institutional funding rounds. Currently serving major hotel groups like Accor and IHG, the company is now expanding aggressively into the facility management sector to support the hidden workers behind global corporate offices. Matthew joins us to discuss the business of behavioural change and his vision to build the category-defining performance platform for service-first industries.

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In 2016, a faded 1930s Art Deco building in Kuala Lumpur's Chinatown sold for RM29 million. Once the tallest building in the city, its architectural history had been completely obscured by commercial signboards and neglect. Justin Chen and his family's Singapore-based real estate group, Arcc Holdings, acquired the building and spent six years carefully determining its commercial future.

The result is Else, a 49-key boutique hotel that opened in September 2022 to fill a clear gap in the Malaysian hospitality market. Rather than importing foreign concepts, the property champions local creative talent through collaborations with Malaysian designers, chefs, and artists. Three years later, the hotel is operationally profitable, growing at a steady 15 to 20 percent year-on-year, and holds the rare distinction of being the only Malaysian property to earn both a Michelin Key and a spot on the Tatler Asia Top 100 Hotels list.

Justin joins us to discuss the financial realities of heritage hospitality, and what the group plans to build next now that they have successfully proven their concept.

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Every business deal relies on knowing exactly who you are dealing with, but mapping corporate relationships across Asia is an incredibly challenging task. Daryl Neo spent years as a regulator at the Singapore Exchange, manually tracing ownership chains and trying to uncover who was truly behind complex business structures. As corporate networks expanded and data volumes exploded, this painstaking process became entirely unsustainable.

In 2011, Daryl and his co-founder Charles Poon left the SGX to build Handshakes, the tool they always wished they had. Today, it is the largest aggregator of ASEAN and China private market data, visually mapping corporate relationships and hidden connections to reduce due diligence workflows from months to hours. Backed by investors like Nikkei Inc, SPH Media, and S&P Global, the platform has successfully exposed the networks behind cross-border investment scams, penny stock crashes, and major conflict-of-interest cases.

Daryl talks to us about the significance of having global financial giants on their cap table, the introduction of their new AI Map Summariser, and why Malaysian business leaders need to shift their mindset from viewing due diligence as a boring compliance cost to treating it as a valuable intelligence asset.

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Small business owners often look at a declining pipeline and assume they have a sales problem, but what they usually have is a leadership deficit. Lacking the capital to hire a high-quality, full-time sales director, many SMEs resort to one-off, traditional sales training workshops. However, these event-based sessions often fail to produce sustainable results because they do not embed actual behavior changes or apply a data-driven, scientific rigor to the company's daily sales process.  

SalesGeek was founded to bridge this exact gap. Created by Richard Few, the company operates a fractional sales leadership model, providing businesses with part-time sales directors for as little as 5 percent of a full-time executive's salary. Through a rapidly growing franchise system, SalesGeek deploys highly experienced sales professionals to work directly with founders. These directors refine go-to-market strategies, build robust data processes, and actively mentor local teams over an average two-year engagement until they successfully make themselves redundant.  

Now establishing Malaysia as their Southeast Asian hub, Richard joins us to unpack the unit economics of a global, completely investor-free franchise. We discuss the severe limitations of traditional corporate sales roles that drive top talent toward franchise ownership, the financial structure distinguishing their "solo" and "scale-up" models, and why Malaysia's high concentration of SMEs makes it the perfect market for their expansion.

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Operating a restaurant in Singapore is exceptionally challenging. With world-leading commercial rents, strict labour laws, and volatile food costs, traditional F&B margins are razor-thin. Joseph Ryan spent years navigating this system, opening major outlets like Five Guys for the Zouk Group in Malaysia. Seeing these structural flaws worsen after the pandemic, he realised the industry needed a completely new approach.

His answer is Freshpod. Founded in 2021 with an ex-Goldman Sachs banker, this autonomous food kiosk bypasses traditional restaurant leases entirely. Operating without a chef or cashier, the fully refrigerated machines assemble fresh, customisable meal bowls in under 90 seconds. Following three years of R&D, they are now deployed in high-footfall locations like Gleneagles Hospital and Grab's headquarters, and are replenished daily.

With over 60 locations locked in for expansion, Joseph joins us to discuss the business of automated food delivery. We explore the complex engineering required to keep machine-dispensed food fresh and safe, how the kiosk financial model compares to a traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant, and their possible expansion into Malaysia.

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When Choy Peng Yew last appeared on the show in early 2023, Pet World was on a massive growth trajectory. As Malaysia's largest homegrown pet food manufacturer behind household brands like ProDiet, ProBalance, and Delizios, the company was scaling at an impressive 27% CAGR. At the time, financial headlines were buzzing about a potential US$100M public listing in Singapore. However, the IPO never materialised. Instead, the company shifted its mandate from public markets toward strategic partnerships and private expansion.

Amidst this corporate restructuring, Pet World quietly accomplished something entirely unexpected. Producing over 100,000 tonnes of pet food annually, the company partnered with SPCA Selangor and Singapore-based Nutrition Technologies to formulate Malaysia's first dog food using Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL) protein. This leap into sustainable, insect-based nutrition signals a major shift in the company's product direction and their approach to the evolving global pet wellness market.

Choy Peng Yew returns to the studio to unpack what the last two years have actually looked like from the inside. We discuss the strategic decision to pursue regional partnerships over a public listing, the science and commercial viability behind sustainable insect protein, and the company's aggressive expansion strategy across Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, and the Middle East as they navigate the pet food market in 2026.

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Fresh off an $8 million Series A funding round co-led personally by the CEO of Bybit, David Low, Co-Founder and CEO of Hata, unpacks what’s next for this young crypto exchange. 

We discuss how the platform accumulated over 225,000 users and passed RM100 million in assets under custody, the heavy capital requirements needed to incentivise professional market makers for deep order-book liquidity, and how they cleaned up their cap table to streamline corporate execution.

David also shares how Hata is actively de-risking its business from market volatility by shifting away from purely activity-based trading fees toward institutional custody solutions, staking products, and hands-on corporate B2B onboarding. 

Finally, we explore the Securities Commission's newly updated regulatory guidelines, explaining why faster coin-listing paths coupled with higher capital requirements are a net positive for maturing Malaysia's Web3 ecosystem.

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Red Communications has been running since 1999 — 26 years of producing television, film, branded content, and digital programming for audiences that the industry had largely ignored: women, young people, families. The 3R show ran for 15 years and was funded entirely by sponsors. Gol & Gincu became a film and a TV series. Kami did the same. Oh My English ran for six years on Astro. Club Mickey Mouse ran for five years on Disney. The company has produced 14 films. The 15th, Khadam, opens in cinemas on 11 June 2026.

Between the first film and the 15th: a breast cancer diagnosis in 2012, a six-month treatment hiatus during which RM1 million in reserves disappeared and RM1 million in debt appeared, a pandemic that nearly took the company, and a decision to sell a stake to Astro just to stay afloat.

Founder and Executive Producer of Red Communications Lina Tan talks to us about what the business of creativity actually looks like — the budgets, the red tape, the streaming disruption, the influencer competition, and the specific madness of trying to get a Malaysian film made and seen.

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In Japan and South Korea, parking a car is entirely automated. You drive into a bay, turn off your engine, and walk away while a robotic system lifts and stores your vehicle in a multi-level tower. There are no ramps, no circling for spots, and no wasted space. Yet in Malaysia, this highly efficient infrastructure remains virtually unseen.

Ir. Yow Kai Yong has spent the last 14 years trying to change that. A consultant engineer with two decades of experience in Malaysia's property development sector, he started Parktech Solutions in 2011 with four other co-founders. As co-founders eventually left due to a sluggish market, he became the last person standing, officially taking over the company in 2021. Today, that persistence is paying off in a massive way. Parktech Solutions is now preparing to install one of the largest automated car parking systems in ASEAN at Milla Residence in Wangsa Maju. Built in partnership with Beverly Group and South Korea's Samjung Tech, the project features 2,358 bays and 21 car lifts, pushing the company's order book to a RM100 million.

Kai Yong joins us to discuss the business and mechanics of automated car parking systems. We cover what it takes to survive for over a decade pushing a product the local market wasn't ready for, the sudden shift driving their eight-figure revenue projections for 2026, and why robotic parking is no longer just a luxury convenience, but a critical sustainability and urban density play that Malaysian developers can no longer ignore.

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