Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.
– Walt Whitman, American poet
VOICE OF ASEAN is a very ambitious project – it brings 10 countries together in one platform, where we leverage on the expertise gained networking amongst top echelons of corporate and government in Malaysia, but expanding it all over South East Asia. VOICE OF ASEAN is the bridge between corporates and government in South East Asia and the bridge between the rest of the world and South East Asia
It takes an enormous amount of confidence, belief and strength to make this happen, and when I formed this company as a media tech startup last year, many were surprised. “The size of your vision!”, they exclaimed.
The IBR Asia Group has grown organically over 25 years without any external financial injections, grants or government funding, and now we are raising funds for VOICE OF ASEAN. Asking RM10 million seed funding for the initial phase of expansion. And interestingly, going on a crowd funding platform. Because the ambition was so unbelievably big, I didn’t want to give away a big chunk of the business to a private investor at a point when the company is still fragile and does not have much to show for it.
I don’t doubt myself at all. You know why?
Because I remember that 25-year-old Physics teacher who was breeding Bullmastiffs and was pregnant with her first daughter, nursing baby puppies with a milk bottle while wondering how she is going to get all the text she scribbled in her notebook into a printed pet magazine.
I remember her driving around KL with her heavily pregnant belly almost touching the steering wheel and trying to connect the dots on getting a printer to print the publication, a designer to get the idea she had in her head out onto a proper professional medium.
I remember the 26-year-old girl with a baby in her arms, being told by distributors that the magazine she produced was not going to get sold because it was a crazy idea to put a dog or cat on a cover. (A year later they came seeking us out to distribute it because people started asking for it.)
I remember that girl not giving up and making a deal with pet shop owners all over the country to take our magazines on consignment basis and then getting magazine racks built with whatever little money we had and driving up north and south to put these racks in each pet store and driving back to all these stores the next time we had an edition out and collecting money from the sales of the magazines.
I remember the girl crying at her 30th birthday because she had not achieved the success she thought she would after working so very hard, wiping her tears, quietly wearing the blue dress her husband had bought for her and going down to celebrate her birthday, feeling like a failure. Yet she trudged on.
I remember the girl going for presentations with acute asthma but for one hour speaking like a champ and then coming out of the meeting gasping for air. For that one hour she had no choice but to capture that one opportunity and so she did not let herself be weak.
I remember the many people who left the company leaving the girl feeling utterly devastated but she never gave up and always found better ones to work alongside with.
I remember the woman who raised two children while totally working nonstop on building a career, disregarding the contempt and gossiping from relatives who kept saying she was not a good mother.
I remember the woman breaking down and losing five years of her life after a devastating divorce that pulverised everything in her life as she knew it. A total shattering of ego, self-esteem, the business that she had built up, the crutch she had leaned on, the emotional trauma, the profound sadness, the depression and anxiety and then scratching her way up from a pit that nearly buried her, to find a spot in the sun and build again. And she built it back better.
I remember the woman who was thrown to the wolves and came back leading the pack.
I remember that woman and if she could do all that, she can do what she has now put in front of her.
No vision is too big if you have the heart for it. We may not be a MNC or a big government-linked company but it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog, something I learnt during those Petworld days.
So if you believe in this dog, click on https://equity.pitchin.my/businesses/voice-of-asia-sdn-bhd and vote for us. Or contact us at investors@voiceofasean.com
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasiagroup.com
