Hello Grasshoppa,
Since I was 14, I have been involved in a variety of businesses with one ultimate goal which is to earn more money. Learning to try & fail was not easy but the lessons I got along the way was worthwhile. My goal since I was young until today has always been the same, which is to get rich. The goal has remained constant throughout the year, but with a different ‘why’ with each phase of my life. It is the same naive mind that many of us used to have when we were young. My goal when I was young was to get rich so that I could buy all the games I wanted & owning the latest sneakers. As a young adult, my “why” changed to wanting to live in the biggest house & driving the biggest car. As for now, it is all about having no debts & retire early.
To help me to achieve the goal of getting rich, I know that building a business is the way to get me there. It is a reality to many of us as we can see many young graduates got their first job & getting paid around RM2,500-RM3,500. 5-6 years of working experience later, they’ll probably be eligible to earn between RM4500-RM6000. We all know that the amount of money is just enough for us & it is not possible to have the best cars or live in the best house. That’s the fact that is hard to swallow for all of us when we know that the average house may cost around RM400,000-RM500,000 & we have to pay between RM2,000-RM2,500 each month.
With the sad reality, we can opt for a few paths which would either be to continue to climb the corporate ladder where it will take a really long time or we can choose to do our own business. That was what I did briefly where I quit my 9-5 job to start my own business while pursuing my dream to be an MMA fighter. It was really unwise for me to quit my job before my business got stable & I definitely learnt my lesson in a hard way by pilling a huge amount of debt. My family has warned me to continue working until my gym business became stable but I was too stubborn to listen to their opinion.
Years went by & having a huge amount of debt with limited income, I have not much choice to either go back to my corporate job or choose to start a new business to make my ends meet. That’s when I took my chances to try out a new business venture from my home kitchen where I started selling healthy food and I was one of the first to venture into this industry. Starting a business requires a solid business plan & I started by testing out potential food that I wanted to sell with the price point that Penangites were willing to pay.
The business started & the first few weeks was very tiring but motivating for me. I was using Facebook ads to boost my posts & the response that I was getting is really good. Orders were coming in & feedback from customers was quite good. To order the food, the customer had to place their order & pay before 9 pm for their next day order. That will help me to prepare some of the ingredients the night before. Since I was running my gym as well, I will only be home after 10 pm to start with the preparation. The next morning, I have to be awake by 7.30 am to continue with the preparation. After cooking, I had to pack & deliver it to all customers before 12.30 pm. The good thing is, my mum was there to help out with some of the processes.
The challenge that I had was the location coverage as there were not many places that I was able to cover by myself. Foodpanda was not really a hit at that point & I was also engaged with a food delivery company called DeliverEat. Back in those days. food delivery companies were not as in demand as what we are experiencing currently but I am still able to get some orders from them. I have to pay them 20% of my selling price since I was based in Mainland Penang, I had to deliver to their office which is on Penang Island. My main coverage area was only for Bayan Lepas area & any orders further than that are not accepted.
Some of the mistakes that I made during that time was to have 5 menus per day for a week where I had to cook 5 different meals. Having an average of 30 orders per day made it even harder. Not only did it cause me to have lesser time n terms of productivity, but it was also reducing my efficiency. The good thing was, I had quite good support from many of my friends & family.
The daily routine of buying ingredients, preparing food day & night to delivering the meal, have made questioned whether or not I could do this long term. The good thing was, I have gotten an offer from my current company with a decent amount of money that has led me to stop this & focus on my new job. That itself allowed me to focus on paying my debts, working on my gym business & rebuilding my career path again which eventually led me to write my blog and sharing my journey towards my retirement with all of you.
OSS!
