Success Stories

Women

Zaidah

ZaidahZaidah, PWD Woman

Income Before: RM 1,000 – Income After: RM 12,000

Having met with an accident that caused her to lose the function of both her legs, Zaidah is a true survivor especially after losing her business to a fire on top of recovering from her accident. After the program, she got out of depression and reopened her business. Today, she is contributing back to society by hiring 2 underprivileged people and providing a better education for her family.

Zaidah was living an ordinary life as mother to 5 young children and also as a strong entrepreneur.  To support her family, she was running two businesses all by herself. She had a tailoring business together with a restaurant business. Her tailoring shop was located right above her restaurant. Things in her life were going on extremely well. 

Unfortunately, this moment did not last long. On the day she was heading to pick her child up from the kindergarten, the most unimaginable event happened to her when a trailer hit her car from the side. The impact of the hit almost cost her life. She found herself bed ridden in the hospital with both her legs unable to function as it used to. Zaidah felt devastated and hopeless. She was forced to be admitted in the hospital for about 6 months long. During this period, she has no choice but to close down both her business operations. She had no choice but to temporarily move all the equipment from the restaurant to her tailoring shop for the time being.

During her recovery process in the hospital, another unfortunate event occurred where she received news that her tailoring shop caught on fire. Apparently her neighboring shop caught on fire due to a short circuit and that fire spread to her shop. This catastrophe cost her a total loss of RM200,000.  She lost all of her tailoring materials, as well as all of her restaurant equipment’s that she had stored in there. Besides her own materials and equipment, she also lost all of her customers’ things. Zaidah was completely heart broken and sorrowful. She couldn’t believe all the things that were happening to her. It just seemed as though her life had become a series of unfortunate events. All of this led her to fall into a depressive state of mind. 

One year later, Zaidah was still in the midst the of recovery process. During this time, she realized that as a mother to 5 young children, she needed to step up and out of her depression. She realized that if she continued behaving like this, it will not bring any benefit to herself and her family. This is when she decided to start making some changes in her life again. Being the entrepreneur she once was, she started a small business selling “kuih goyang” from her house. A few months later, she managed to receive a small amount of fund to kick start her tailoring business back again. 

Shortly after, she received an invitation from Jabatan Kebajikan Masyarakat (JKM) to attend the RISE training. During the training, Zaidah managed to learn a lot knowledge on how she can improve her business. . She applied all the knowledge gained from the training in both her businesses. She learned how to use the right medium to reach out to the right customers. She was actively using her Facebook account to keep her customers updated on the menu as well as events that occurs in her restaurant and tailoring shop.  She also used the credibility of well-known people in her area by taking pictures of their visit to her shop and posts it on social media. On top of that, she even started her own live cooking show on Facebook account to keep her account active. All of this activity on Facebook managed to attract a TV host who was interested in featuring her in a cooking show called Cooking for Love. Besides being active on Facebook, she also constantly applied the FLIP technology which was though during the R.I.S.E programme. She takes negative feedbacks from people and converts it into positive thoughts. She no longer allows the words of others to affect her negatively. 

Three years after joining the RISE programme, she now provides catering service to big events. With the current income, she can afford to hire two workers for her business. One of them has learning disability and the other one is from a poor family. Besides work, she is also able to provide better for her family. She doesn’t have to worry about solely depending on her husband anymore. She can easily shop for food and groceries for her family now. On top of that, she is also helping to support her siblings. As for herself, Zaidah is no longer a JKM beneficiary on receiving their welfare on a monthly basis. She is glad that her income is enough to sustain herself and her family. She also received an award for being a successful entrepreneur during Women’s Day. Finally, Zaidah is overjoyed for being able to use her both legs again. After years of depending on a wheelchair, she has finally recovered and is able to walk again.

Norzaliza

Norzaliza, woman entrepreneur

Income Before: RM 4,000 – Income After: RM 9,000

Norzaliza has previously struggled juggling between the roles of a mother, wife and entrepreneur. Previously, her business used to be stagnant due to her limited time and resources. After attending the program, she became more efficient and is now opening a physical store to provide better services for her customers. Life has never been better for Norzaliza and her family.

As a wife and entrepreneur, Norzaliza is always on the move to provide a better living for her family. She started running a mobile spa, providing spa treatment and confinement services for customers at their homes. However, due to insufficient funds and the lack of business ideas, she had to run a mobile spa as she couldn’t afford a proper establishment to run her business. This meant she would often go to her customers’ homes on request and she would provide her services there.

On top of that, Norzaliza was also torn between her business and family, where the more time she spent on business, the lesser time she has with her family. This has been discouraging her from expanding her business.

After attending the program, she became more motivated and started looking for new opportunities to improve her business. From there, using the Customer Value Proposition module, she started to prioritize customers’ wants and needs. She also started to provide her services with more flexibility and even included consultation to help her customers make decisions.

Besides that, using the Blue Ocean, four quadrants module, she started taking 50-70% upfront deposits for each appointment to avoid last minute cancellations. This has helped stabilize her business and made it easier for her to plan her operations. As part of her business expansion plan, she is hiring and teaching an assistance to help her.

Today, Norzaliza is able to have more savings and is currently surveying properties to open a physical spa centre, where she can provide a more conducive environment for her customers and provide better services. She is proud to be able to afford a better life for her family and looks forward to further expanding her business in the future.

Noney

Noney, Single Mother

Income Before: RM 250 – Income After: RM 1,800

Having suffered from muscular dystrophy since birth, that did not stop Noney from living her life. She became a mother of 2 and was running a makeup service business that was doing poorly. After attending the program, she became motivated and started using the right strategies that helped her business grow. She can now send her sons to private schools and provide better care for her health.

One-year old Noney Gondolos was a healthy toddler before she experienced a lot of bone fractures here and there, and after consultation with a doctor, she was diagnosed with Osteogenesis Imperfecta – a genetic disorder which is also known as brittle bone disease. This disease changed her life as she has to be extremely careful with her movements to avoid bone cracks or fractures. But Noney is thankful of her family who always loved her despite her condition. 

Her father had 5 children from his previous marriage and another 5 with Noney’s mother. One of Noney’s half-sisters had the exact disease as hers. Looking out for two persons with disabilities had her family in despair as the treatment fee that came doubled for both. Being a teacher of Christianity, Noney’s father’s salary wasn’t enough to fulfill the needs of 10 children. 

In 2000, Noney met the love of her life and got married. Her husband is a person with hearing disabilities, and they were blessed with two children. Their love life did not last long as her husband decided to keep a mistress who was also her best friend – everything while Noney was pregnant with their first child. After he was caught cheating, Noney had never received money from her husband until they had their second child. In 2014, she filed a divorce. 

After that unfortunate event, Noney was determined to find her own source of income so she learned how to do make-up and facial massages. As she started to become more serious in her make-up business as it was where her interest lies, she didn’t have enough knowledge of ideas and strategies in order to expand her business.

After RISE, she learned tricks and tactics on ideas and business strategies that she could apply in her life. She started to hold make-up classes that catered to communities who wanted to learn make-up skills. Being a make-up artist has driven Nancy to hone her skills diligently and as practice makes perfect, she improved her skills by making sure the customers were satisfied with the quality of her service. Her expertise in make-up skills went round like wildfire and had high demands from customers compared to other make-up artists. This caused a sharp increase in her income where she can now earn RM1800 per month; more than 600 percent of her early involvement which was RM250.

With the money she brought in, Noney sends her first son, who is now 16 years old to Tamparuli Secondary School – a reputable private school, to have better quality in education. Although the school expenses were a tad expensive – RM1000 for the fees and RM400 for pocket money, Noney is proud as she’s now capable of being able to afford all this and does not require financial help from her ex-husband, not even a cent. Previously, she rarely gave pocket money to her sons but now she can afford up to RM5 per day for each of them to spend on food and stationeries at school. 

Indeed, a mother is as wise as an owl, for Noney started to have savings for her children in ASB for the sole purpose of their education. With her stable financial status, Noney can finally take care of herself by purchasing milk as supplementary drinks to help with her brittle bone condition.

She has also opened a centre that offers spa services at her family’s house early this year. Not forgetting where she came from and with a good heart, she never forgets to help her friends who are also wheelchair bound. With that, she has prepared a place where they can provide their massaging services and they only have to pay commissions to Noney for every sale they get. On top of that, she never charges them rental fee. 

Lacking physically have never bothered Noney to succeed like other people. With the love of her children, she lives her fiery life and keeps moving forward. As she always said, “If it isn’t her who changes her fate, who will?”

Yessy

Yessy, PWD Woman

Income Before: IDR 1,000,000 – Income After: IDR 3,000,000

Having faced a terrible accident that caused her to lose her left leg, Yessy lost her enthusiasm for life, but the thought of keeping her family afloat kept her going by selling snacks. However, her earnings were barely enough to feed the family. During the RISE training, she picked up the right business strategies and her business improved significantly. Today, she can now provide a comfortable living for her family and is currently saving for her daughter’s education.

Yessy is married with a 4-year-old daughter. Life was complete for the 25-year-old, and she only wants to keep her little family happy. That was until 2015 when she got into an accident and had her left leg amputated. Ever since then, she wears prosthetic legs to help her walk.

Losing one of her legs has made her lose her enthusiasm for life. Yessy could no longer work as a waitress in a restaurant and she was shunned by many people, even her own family. It took months for her to get back up to continue her life. On top of that, after the accident, her husband no longer provided income for the family. 

Although she felt that she did not have the skills or capacity to be financially independent, Yessy decided to make ends meet nonetheless by making and selling snacks. In addition to this, she also passively resells products online. However, the money she got from the business was barely enough to feed the family. Therefore, she wanted to develop her business for the sake of her only child – by attending the R.I.S.E programme by Maybank.

The RISE Programme has opened her eyes to find opportunities and to be courageous in taking that bold step in elevating the business. From the training, she felt a positive power from the Awareness and Change module, which gave her a strong purpose in increasing her family’s income. She then applied the concept of the Blue Ocean strategy by creating innovative fusion snacks to stand out from the competition. 

Besides that, she would often look out for business opportunities by using the learnings from the Business Re-evaluation module to increase sales. Recently, she became a prepaid phone credit agent as a side business, as she found a demand in that market. She also opened orders for fruit salads through her online shop and also does laundry services. By applying the Sales Strategies module, she promoted her business online and offline.  

Months after the training, Yessy managed to increase her income significantly. With her new-found wealth, she would diligently budget and track her expenses for the family, as taught in the Financial Management module from Maybank’s R.I.S.E training. 

Today, Yessy is proud to be able to provide a comfortable living for her family and is currently saving up for her daughter’s education. On top of that, she is now able to take her daughter out to eat at restaurants and occasionally buy her new toys. Yessy never thought she would ever be able to support her family like she does today. She is proud of her achievements and is thankful for being given the opportunity to attend the R.I.S.E training.

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