Womenpreneur Asia

Titaporn Tuchinda is this week's guest and she is an executive coach, entrepreneur and investor in Thailand with more than one business!

She is the Managing Director of The Growth and Change Co., Ltd, Thailand and founder and board member of Brighton College International School just outside of Bangkok.

She has also conceptualised and set up two boutique hotels in Chiangmai from scratch!

Titaporn is also an executive coach with Aberkyn.

These businesses seem unrelated on the surface but as we went deeper into the conversation, we realized that each of these businesses taps into Titaporn’s love for learning and education.

A mother of three teenagers, Titaporn came into the business after 12 years in the corporate world of McKinsey. As a management consultant, she had no idea what she was going to do when she quit her job except that she wanted to go into business. 

In this episode, she spoke about:

• Why having 3 scenarios for a business is crucial
• What she is no longer afraid of, having learnt this lesson during this covid pandemic
• A pivotal time of her life - one that changed her life completely
• Her big regret until today (and it has nothing to do with her businesses) 
• The crucial 24 months in the startup phase of any business 
• How decisions are no longer escalated up to her 
• Where she intends to go into the next phase of her entrepreneurial life 
• Setting herself a crazy goal each year 
• The secret sauce enabling her to manage all her businesses as well as her family without losing her head 
• Why you don’t need to go to university to learn about business 

For other interesting nuggets about Titaporn, visit womenpreneurasia.com

Jayce Tham co-founded CreativesAtWork with her sister, Fanny, in 2012 and the two sisters couldn’t be more different!

Jayce spent years in the corporate world while Fanny was in the creative industry. 

The two Singaporean sisters created a pool and network of freelancers in Singapore and across the region to help corporate companies with everything media-related and creative-related such as photography to graphic design, from advertisements to short films.

Unlike other platforms which offer freelancer matchmaking, CreativesAtWork's value is in the project management so that the creatives can be at their creative best!

Jayce and Fanny saw that the market was ripe for a new generation of freelancers. Freelancing was becoming a more viable option for many especially the millennials.

In this episode, Jayce and I speak about how she started and the challenges of running a media agency. She spoke about growing beyond offering project management as their business matures.

We spoke about:

• What she wished she had known 9 years ago when she first started her media agency 
• How she and her sister navigate that tricky, slippery slope of being siblings who are in business together
• The importance of working for others if your dream is to become your own boss eventually 
• How she looked at clients’ work in the early years versus how she looks at the work now
• Her most important piece of advice for herself (and for you) and she said she wished she learnt this sooner and saved herself all the pain and frustration 
• The unpopular, contrarian opinion of dealing with difficult clients 

For show notes and more, visit womenpreneurasia.com

This week I speak to Vietnamese startup founder, Laura Phan, the founder & CEO of iZi Community.

iZi Community is an online gamification and AI-based education platform made for learners who need snack-sized learning.

Interestingly, Laura is a non-tech founder where she leads her team of programmers in connecting learners and content creators in Vietnam. 

But this is not her first business. She started her first business at 21 with a team of 30 people because she wanted to prove a point.

In this episode, Laura talks about:

• How she defines success and its counterpart, failure 
• How she started her business at 21 and what she learned from that first venture of hers
• What she learnt from her failure in the early days of her business
• How she decided to get back into the business when she saw an opportunity open up during the pandemic lockdown
• Her own feelings about education prompted her to rethink education 
• How she didn’t focus on the money when she started and why this is important
• What’s important to know for non-tech women startup founders like her 
• How she validated her edu-tech idea (and what we can learn from this process)
• The habits that she practices daily to ensure she is always on the path she wants for herself 

More details and show notes at womenpreneurasia.com

Following your dream.

After working for a few years in London, Helen came home to Penang, Malaysia to work in the family business.

Yet, her heart was always in the arts. She described how she would visit museums and art galleries in London and found that she was always joyful in these places.

And that was how she realised she had to pursue her love for the arts and started her design firm, Blanc Designs.

Helen loves to incorporate art as 3D forms for homes and offices rather than have art within a frame and within the confines of the museum or gallery.

She tests and tries unconventional ways of displaying and appreciating art while creating pieces that are functional. To her, art is life and life is art. 

For more information about Helen, visit womenpreneurasia.com

Welcome to Season 3! We kick off our third season with Yuka Imanishi who is the founder and CEO of CURIO Japan Inc. 

Yuka's business started as a B2C business and soon after, became also a B2B business and now she even has a third business due to the pandemic!

Due to her innate curiosity for the world at large, her business is all about fostering intercultural relations between international students with the local Japanese.

It started with a simple premise - tutoring services. Later, she also saw a need to help international students who graduated and wanted to stay in Japan to look for work. This became another business.

Because of the pandemic, her first two businesses almost came to a standstill and she had to quickly find a way to still keep her Japanese customers connected to her international students.

Thus began the online intercultural sessions, tapping again into the resources she had built up over the years!

For more about Yuka (and her background before she became an entrepreneur), get the full article at womenpreneurasia.com

If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave me a rating and review!

For the final episode of Season 2, I spoke to Amita Nandy, CEO and Founder of Tact World, Malaysia. Her story has a twist at the end.

TACT World began in 1991 when she had to leave full-time work to take care of her family and for 31 years, Amita has been training, coaching and facilitating.

She still works with corporate clients but she also now focuses her energy on women. Amita has a passion for working with women using women circles and retreats, incorporating storytelling and coaching and group therapy to help women overcome self-limiting beliefs.

In this episode, Amita talks about:

• The first book she authored had nothing to do with training or development surprisingly 
• Why Mrs Gandhi’s assassination in India also affected her and changed her path in life 
• Why she is more willing to embrace that which is uncommon right now in her life
• Being a one-woman business when she started although her passion was only in designing training curriculum
• Why she checked herself when her son said that he didn’t want to go to college and more

I hope you have enjoyed Season 2. I will be back with an even more stellar line-up of women CEOs and women founders in Season 3. Catch my personal message at the end of this episode. I'll see you in Season 3 which launches on 1 October.

More details: womenpreneurasia.com

This episode is about a Singaporean mumpreneur, Eve Phua who is the founder of Believe Beauty Academy, a beauty and wellness business where she helps women look their best - using products by Mary Kay. 

She was top in her personal sales for the Mary Kay Singapore Sales Director Category last year despite it being a challenging year due to the pandemic. She also leads her own team of beauty consultants. 

But more than that, she spoke about how she saw herself transforming from a timid person to someone who now uses live videos to educate her customers.

She also talks about using personality tests and tools to help her manage her team of beauty consultants and she also debunks some of the myths associated with direct selling. 

She also admitted that running a business helped her become a better mother instead of always hovering around her children like a helicopter mum. She has given them the space to be themselves and to be independent. 

More at womenpreneurasia.com

In this episode, I spoke to Michelle Yeo who is the Co-Founder and General Manager of Dandy Modern Food in Penang, Malaysia.

She has two outlets in Penang with a third planned for Kuala Lumpur.

Dandy is an all-day casual eatery, bakery and café serving a massive 150 items on their menu. These contemporary Mediterranean dishes include pastries and desserts. 

Michelle who is from Kuching, Sarawak and her husband Jamal who is from Lebanon were already running a security systems business when they had the idea to start a food business despite no experience in F&B.

Michelle says it was her late father, who ran a textile business in Kuching, that encouraged her in business. Her mum was worried though.

From learning how to make the perfect cup of caramel macchiato to ensuring customers keep coming back, Michelle has never stopped learning about becoming a better restauranteur.

She shares a lot more gems in this episode so listen to find out more.

For more, visit womenpreneurasia.com

In today’s episode, I spoke to Boonsiri Somchit Ong who is the co-founder and chief conceptualist of Xtrategize Technologies Sdn Bhd based in Penang, Malaysia. 

Boonsiri is of Malaysian Thai-Chinese descent and is well known in the multinational corporation circle where she had spent more than 30 years before she left to join her husband, Tony, in the business. 

In her previous corporate role, Boonsiri was a finance and operations professional leading a global team that delivered business accounting services that supported a multinational’s entire global entities.

Her turning point was a TEDx Talk that she gave in 2015 that spoke about failure for the first time ever in front of her family and people who knew her as a successful corporate high flyer.

In this interview, you will hear Boonsiri’s enthusiasm for life, work and family. She is determined, strong and capable and yet isn’t afraid to reveal that she too is human with her own shortcomings.

Find out more about Boonsiri at womenpreneurasia.com

This week, I spoke to Radha Mohan Durbha who is the co-founder and director of Kereses Consulting India Private Ltd, India.

She started her business when she was 41 and in looking back, she wished she had started much earlier!

Kereses Consulting India Private Ltd is a HR consulting business based in Bangalore, India that Radha started with her friend.

As a HR recruiter, Radha is responsible for the planning, budgeting and operations of recruitment and training, and engages with organizations to facilitate a connection between potential employers and employees.

While she helps employers in Bangalore find the right talents to power and run their businesses, she is also in her own way pushing the women’s agenda.

Radha who considers herself a tough cookie and a feminist said she would try to inject a gender perspective into the hiring process and open more doors for women in the labour force in Bangalore. 

Some factories, she said, never even had a women’s bathroom on their premises because hiring women was simply not in the equation!

These were some of the HR-related yet women-related matters that Radha is trying to push for in her business.

She may not run a social enterprise but it shows that a woman in business can influence how other women are hired and employed. 

In this episode, she talks about:

• The differences between running one’s own business versus working in the corporate world
• What she says to employers who insist that the jobs are meant for men 
• Her zero billings when the pandemic hit India and the world and hiring wasn’t even possible 
• That one single quality that differentiates a great recruiter from a good one
• How she has to chase after candidates and ensure they get to the interviews and the prep work she does before they even get to the interview 
• Why LinkedIn is a great place for people like her 
• What she does when she’s faced with a difficult decision

Find additional information on womenpreneurasia.com