Lessons from a young entrepreneur
VENTURING into the competitive business world, enthusiastic, creative problems solvers and risk takers who learn from failure and thrive on challenges – these are the eminent traits portrayed by Leza Parker, a distinguished entrepreneur and investor from Singapore, who shared her experiences with KDU University College students.
Aiming to motivate and inspire business students with real-world experience, this entrepreneurship sharing session was organised by the KDU School of Business on March 21.
The session, which is part of the School’s Townhall event, saw Leza walk into the state-of-the-art lecture theatre hall in its Utropolis Glenmarie campus, meeting with an audience of close to 150.
Leza started off the session with a brief introduction of herself – a 33-year-old mother of three, she is also the founder of over six companies with 20,000 full time and contractual employees, online distributors and global partners.
In this lively session, Leza shared her own experience venturing into the business world in 2010 after being a stay-at-home-mother for almost seven years.
Her first business was based at home by making handmade hair accessories and selling them online. Later, she went on to train her production team and started supplying commercially to major department stores in Singapore and Malaysia.
From the chronology diagram she projected on screen, the students realised that Leza had then expanded her business horizon into cosmetic merchandising, bakers’ training, branding, business coaching, built up companies that create jobs as well as helped out many other small start-ups.
Based on the valuable experiences the “Youngest Malay Entrepreneur” and “Singapore Business Guru” title-winner had gone through, Leza shared some tips with her listeners made up of business students and academics, “One of the fundamental attributes to build a business is to start from small, start something before you set up a company, identify the potential setbacks and improve from there.”
She then went on by sharing something very real in the red ocean of business, “Don’t let your first failure stop you. Knowledge is always your base asset and knowledge you have learned will give you a lot of potential in future in developing yourself. You must always seek knowledge as there is no magic in doing business.”
Although she had encountered many setbacks, she enthused, “Never question how much time it will cost to achieve something – the time will pass anyway, you just need to move on, learn from it, take the experiences and knowledge with you and continue running.”
On empowering people, Leza shared, “People can’t succeed alone but will grow through collaboration. Winning people around you is a start, but empowering them is the real investment. This is an important skill an entrepreneur and future leader needs.
“The only failure I will have as a leader is when my employees leave my companies without learning anything or developing as a person.”
Among the students, Aiman Ansari Mohd Hamizan, a Bachelor of Business in Marketing graduating student interacted with Leza from the floor by telling her he had started his business in selling iPhone cases online.
When asked how Leza had inspired him, Aiman said, “The most important lesson that I bring home is that failure is not the final stage we are going to face. It is our choice to get up or stay down. No matter what we are doing, we need to have passion. With passion, we could drive any business to the top no matter what we encounter.”
Through real-life personal sharing of this kind, the KDU School of Business hopes to encourage students to get motivated and think outside the box, be innovative in developing their business sense and to cultivate entrepreneurial ideas into impactful action.
The School aims to develop its niche in Humanistic Entrepreneurialism, an approach that highlights the importance of self-awareness and self-adjustment to connect students with society and industry.
As a testimony to KDU’s dedication and commitment to its brand and academic excellence, the institution was recently awarded the Putra Brand Awards 2017 in the Education and Learning Category.
■ To find out how you can turn your world into global success with KDU University College, drop by KDU’s Open Day from April 21 to May 20. Visit www.kdu.edu.my or call 03-5565 0538 (KDU University College, Utropolis, Glenmarie) / 03-7953 6688 (KDU College, Damansara Jaya).