Open For Business
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Open For Business
The flagship entrepreneurship show on BFM, featuring personal business stories from early stage start-ups, all the way to billionaire octogenarians in Malaysia and abroad. Notable guests include Martin Cooper (father of the mobile phone), Julian Assange (founder of WikiLeaks), Ralph Henry Baer (fath...
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2034 эпізодаў
They Raised the Dead to Build Malaysia's Biggest Animation IP
In 2018, Hendra Wardi won the MDEC IP Creators Challenge with a highly original concept: a comedy about two teenage skeletons working in a zombie groc...
Ditching E-Commerce? Pre-IPO CompAsia’s 85-Store Bet
What began in 2012 as an enterprise PC broker has evolved into one of Southeast Asia’s largest re-commerce operators, processing over half a million p...
LOL Asia’s 17 Years: From Comedy Promoter to IP Owner
What began with a single stand-up comedy show at Zouk KL’s Velvet Underground in 2009 has expanded into a regional live entertainment force, selling o...
Fixing Phones Is Dead? Secondlifeasia’s Software Pivot
For years, Secondlifeasia was recognized as a hardware-heavy device repair business. But as the company sets out to raise RM5 million at a near-RM38 m...
Infinium Robotics: F&B Failure to RM96M Exit
Following a RM96 million acquisition by German-listed DDB, Jon Woon, Founder and CEO of Infinium Robotics, unpacks what’s next for the indoor autonomo...
The Creator Collaboration Advantage
Open your brand's Instagram and honestly ask if you would follow the account if you did not work there. Most corporate social media pages function lik...
Malaysia's Natural Treasures, Waiting to Be Discovered
In 2008, Alann Tan returned from New Zealand with his degree but no business plan, driven home by his father's cancer diagnosis. To survive, he and hi...
30 Hotels in 3 Years with No Hospitality Background
Traditional hotels often force guests to pay for luxury features they simply do not use. Recognising this gap, Benny Ong and his co-founders launched...
Replacing SWIFT With Stablecoins for Cross Border Payments
Traditional cross-border payments are plagued by a severe lack of predictability. Relying on an outdated correspondent banking network and the SWIFT s...
Same Founder, Different City, Completely Different Business.
In April 2019, Muhammad Hamizan Zaidi opened Affogato, a popular coffee and ice cream dessert cafe in Kuching. Capitalising on a loyal community follo...
Why Indelible Ventures Bets on B2B, Not Consumer Tech
While the rest of Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem was chasing consumer-driven "unicorn" narratives and burning cash on a race for user growth at al...
Hand-Stamped and Hard-Earned
Most fashion businesses begin with a gap in the market. Kayla Batik Design began with a mother who couldn't find colourful batik clothing for her one-...
The Malaysian Who Moved to India to Make Pandan the Next Matcha
Matcha took a decade to go from Japanese tea ceremony to global café staple. Shivaani Suppiah believes pandan, that fragrant green leaf that flavours...
The Sustainability Metric You Can Actually Taste
When Mathew Howe was last on Open For Business in July 2024, Grobrix had just announced its partnership with Green City Growers in Boston and was proj...
Why Networking Is Broken, and What Happens When You Fix the Room
Most professional networking events fail because they focus on collecting business cards rather than building genuine connections. Jude Ashvin realise...
Why A ‘Big Health’ Entrepreneur Built A Nasi Lemak Brand
Hagen Chen originally built a fully bootstrapped, seven-figure F&B group starting with Toast Maker, a healthy sandwich and coffee concept for busy pro...
The Cafe That Grew By Shrinking
Most cafes do not survive ten years, and those that do typically rely on relentless expansion to stay afloat. Naj & Belle reached this rare milestone...
Acquiring Your Way to the Top: GenCap's Blueprint for SME Succession
Across Malaysia and Southeast Asia, thousands of profitable businesses are quietly approaching a major crisis. Their founders are entering their sixti...
MicFront's Formula for Turning Fear Into Confidence
MicFront is not a traditional public speaking class; it is a psychology-first education model. Co-founded in 2017 by Mas Mahathir and licensed counsel...
He Bet Everything On The Experience Economy. He Was Right.
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 dynam...
The App Equipping the Frontline Workers Behind Every Great Experience
Frontline staff in hospitality and facility management are often treated as the forgotten workforce. Many lack corporate email addresses and are force...
Turning an RM29M Heritage Site Into a Michelin Key Hotel
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 h...
Mapping Hidden Corporate Connections Across Asia
Every business deal relies on knowing exactly who you are dealing with, but mapping corporate relationships across Asia is an incredibly challenging t...
SMEs Need a Sales Director, Not Sales Training
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. Lac...
The Restaurant Model Is Broken. Is Freshpod the Fix?
Operating a restaurant in Singapore is exceptionally challenging. With world-leading commercial rents, strict labour laws, and volatile food costs, tr...
From Bugs to Bursa? Pet World's Ambitious Next Chapter
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 man...
Hata: $8M Series A, Bybit CEO Backing, & New Crypto
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 t...
26 Years, 15 Films & the Business No One Tells You About
Red Communications has been running since 1999 — 26 years of producing television, film, branded content, and digital programming for audiences that t...
The RM100M Bet on Automated Parking
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...
The Farm That Heals What Classrooms Can't
After a 30-year career at PETRONAS, a pandemic-induced mental health challenge pushed Zalina Abdul Rahim to completely rethink her retirement. Retreat...
Building a Six-Figure Global AI Agency Before Graduation
The enterprise AI market is currently flooded with polished demos, confident sales pitches, and massive invoices. But behind the scenes, many of these...
The Robot Revolution On The Retail Floor
Edwin Yap's family built the physical infrastructure of retail. As the leaders of Jemco Group, they grew the family business into Malaysia's largest p...
KPJ Healthcare: 3 Million Patients, One Standard of Care.
With a massive network of 30 hospitals serving over 3 million patients annually, KPJ Healthcare faces the massive challenge of ensuring consistent, hi...
Building the Waze of Malaysian Healthcare
After spending decades in clinical medicine and digital health, Dr. Raymond Choy analysed over three million data points on drug pricing and uncovered...
How Two Skaters Built a Business to Fund the Dream Malaysia Wouldn't
To compete at the international level, Malaysian National Figure Skaters Eunice and Edmund Lai train six hours a day on ice that costs money, with coa...
From Bedroom YouTuber to a Seven Figure Finance Group
In 2017, Spark Liang quit a comfortable job as a Thomson Reuters analyst to make financial literacy videos from his bedroom. Within six months, he org...
What A Horse Knows About Your Leadership, That You Don’t
Malaysia's corporate training market runs on slides, seminars, and motivational talks. It is also, by most accounts, not working. Burnout is at record...
Two Childhood Friends, A Game & A Million Views in Japan
Childhood friends and lifelong gamers Kashif Khairul and Rizal Azlan co-founded 1+1 Studios in 2024 with one conviction: that the best co-op games sho...
The Stage Has Changed. Define’s Principles Haven't.
Andrew Anthony has been in the events industry since 1995 — when he was still in school, working as an event crewmember to fund his own education, wit...
The ESG Firm That Was 15 Years Early, Then Right On Time Time
ESG guidance and advisory firm Joshua Rayan Communications (JRC) was established in 2007 with one clear conviction: that sustainability reporting shou...