KUALA LUMPUR: Rise and shine entrepreneurs as your opportunities to bloom are vast! For the past four years, SME & Entrepreneurship Business Award (SEBA) was established as an initiative to not only focus on Malaysia’s noble entrepreneurs and enterprises but also to discover growing talent and upcoming companies mushrooming in the face of the industry.Many upcoming entrepreneurs are unsure of the direction they are heading in and are clueless on how to seek networking opportunities to mould their business strategy. Therefore, this platform could help younger entrepreneurs in establishing and promoting their road to success.
According to the Founder of My Preneurship Yayasan Usahawan Malaysian Nitesh Malani, there are stakeholders who have successfully upsurged their organisations to a whole new level while inspiring legacies to be emulated by others. These successful companies have upped their game in the Malaysian economic growth and certainly would pave their way towards drastic progress in the future.
It is certainly not just an ordinary award that is exhibited for the fame but yet, SEBA is a catalyst for entrepreneurs to learn and grow together with their team members by coming up with fresh, innovative ideas that cater to technology advancement.
The MyPreneurship program educates, trains and mentors entrepreneurs and gives them the opportunity to meet other successful entrepreneurs.
Nitesh said,”The awards are certainly not industry focused but there are a couple of nominees that we would love to invite. Nomination is still open for this year and the number of food award nominees were a large handful last year. We had The Olive Tree Restaurant, Pampas Steakhouse and many other food and beverage chains”.
Meanwhile, one of SEBA’s entities – the Entrepreneur Education Institute (EEI) targets to deliver entrepreneurship courses designed to produce credible future entrepreneur stakeholders with viable business plans to achieve their goals with success.
Nitesh additionally said, “As such, there are no requirements to being eligible to receive an award as long as you have a credible business. We have Small and Medium sized Enterprise (SMEs), Small and medium sized industries (SMI) which are our main two ‘pillars’ and then obviously, Start Up Entrepreneurs, Conglomerates and Bigger Entrepreneur”.
Launching together with these would be the prestigious SEBA Business Club that would provide in-depth networking opportunities and knowledge to fellow nominees and awardees.
He said,” The current trend of food trucks can be incorporated into our awarding scheme if some these food truck entrepreneurs are successful enough. If there are five to ten nominees for food trucks, we may be able to open another category such as “The Best Food Truck Entrepreneur of the Year”
Nitesh emphasised on the right documentation for entrepreneurs to start up their own business. The criteria for the evaluation process are:
- Net profit figures
- Seeing how many trucks a given entrepreneur owns
- Assessing the medium of marketing based on the target audience
- Type of networking used such as GrabFood or FoodPanda
Nitesh hopes that ambitious entrepreneurs will be given the opportunity to engage with other stakeholders to exchange and develop ideas, experiment and find great solutions that will lead to successful business propositions.
“The Olive Tree is certainly at a different level now as we are trying to hike up their net profit by investing 20 million dollars approximately which will enable them to enter China’s market. This is the value we provide our awardees by helping them to grow their business opportunity” explained Nitesh.
Then there are also MURFEST MALAYSIA’s vendors where young entrepreneurs who need a platform to expand their business opportunity market their products by collaborating with other vendors thereby creating a ‘win win’ situation for both parties as there are direct rapports that are built and one can relate to a specific target audience.
Nitesh concluded that he would love to see a bigger inflow of entrepreneurs entering the food and beverages industry as these are the upcoming entrepreneurs who would start to build their own platform from now and gradually work towards expanding their business. This would in turn translate into gradual growth of Malaysia’s economy as we head into the future.
Reported by: Vinietha Veloo
