There was a time when I thought stability meant having a steady salary.
I came from a small place where even transportation was not convenient. After university, I remember thinking that if I could earn RM3,000 a month, perhaps life would be stable enough.
But reality taught me something very different.
When your income is fixed, your choices can become fixed too.
At that point in my life, I controlled my daily spending to around RM15. Even with that discipline, I could save only about RM300 a month.
I could have told myself to simply spend less.
Instead, I asked a different question:
“What if the answer isn’t to reduce my expenses, but to increase my capacity to earn?”
That question changed the direction of my life.
From Saving Money to Creating Possibilities
I started looking for ways to create additional income.
I taught tuition part-time. I handed out tissues in shopping malls. I tried different things, sometimes without knowing whether they would work.
Looking back, those experiences were not glamorous.
But they were incredibly valuable.
Because I wasn’t simply trying to make an extra few hundred ringgit.
I was learning how to communicate.
How to sell.
How to understand people.
How to create value.
How to turn effort into income.
And, most importantly, I was learning how to build capabilities that could accumulate over time.
That became one of the earliest principles of my career:
Don’t only work for today’s income. Work to build tomorrow’s capability.
Money earned today can be spent.
Capability accumulated today can continue producing value tomorrow.
That distinction changed how I approached my career.
My Next Education Came From the Health Industry
Eventually, I entered the health industry, beginning from the most fundamental level: product sales.
At first, sales was simply sales.
But the longer I stayed in the industry, the more I realized that health is an entirely different business.
When you work closely with doctors, healthcare professionals and people with technical expertise, you cannot rely purely on persuasion.
You have to understand the science.
You have to understand the product.
You have to understand certification and compliance.
You have to understand consumer behaviour.
You have to understand market structure.
And most importantly, you have to earn trust.
That environment forced me to grow quickly.
I began to understand that successful health businesses cannot simply be built around selling products.
They have to be built around education.
Because people don’t simply need another product.
They need understanding.
They need guidance.
They need a system that helps them make better decisions.
And that was when my perspective of the health industry began to change.
I started seeing health not merely as a product category, but as an educational ecosystem.
A product can be purchased once.
But knowledge, habits and capability can be transferred, repeated and multiplied.
That is where scalability begins.
From Selling Products to Building a System
In 2023, together with two partners, I founded Trend Global International Sdn Bhd.
Our ambition was never simply to create another company selling health products.
We wanted to build something more integrated:
Health products + Education + Community + Digital Entrepreneurship.
These four components became increasingly important to us because we recognized a fundamental gap in the market.
A customer may buy a product.
But what happens after the purchase?
Who teaches them how to use it?
Who helps them understand their health goals?
Who supports their journey?
Who gives them the knowledge to make better choices?
And on the business side, who teaches entrepreneurs how to build something sustainable rather than simply chase transactions?
Those questions shaped the architecture of our business.
We developed health products around natural formulations and focused on areas such as liver and gut health management. We complemented our products with professional nutrition support and one-to-one consultation.
The philosophy was simple:
We don’t want people to merely buy a product. We want them to understand the problem they are trying to solve.
At the same time, we began building digital marketing and entrepreneurship systems that could make business development more structured, repeatable and scalable.
Because if everything depends on one person’s talent, it isn’t really a system.
It’s just an individual performing at a high level.
A true system should allow knowledge to be documented, taught, repeated, measured and improved.
TRENDWellness™ and TREND™ Academy: Building the Platform
From this foundation, we continued developing TRENDWellness™ and TREND™ Academy.
The larger vision became:
Health × Education × Digital Entrepreneurship.
This is where my thinking about business evolved again.
I no longer wanted to ask:
“How much can I personally achieve?”
I started asking:
“How many people can become more capable because the system exists?”
That is a completely different leadership question.
Today, we have cumulatively served more than 20,000 customers.
The company has also received recognition through the SME100 Awards 2024 as a “Fast Moving Company”, while I was selected as one of the SME100 Top 10 Women Entrepreneurs.
I am grateful for those recognitions.
But I don’t see them as purely personal achievements.
Behind every award are customers who trusted us, team members who stayed through difficult periods, partners who believed in the vision, and countless people who contributed when nobody was watching.
An individual may receive the award, but a system creates the achievement.
That distinction matters to me.
The Hardest Lessons Were Not Learned in the Boardroom
Of course, business growth has never been a straight line.
There were moments when I experienced conflicts in values and philosophies within the shareholder structure of a previous company.
There were also personal chapters when life did not unfold according to the plans I had imagined.
Marriage…
Family….
Responsibility…
Rebuilding….
Starting again….
These experiences were painful.
But today, I don’t describe them as failures.
I describe them as system upgrades.
Because every difficult chapter forced me to examine what was no longer working.
What beliefs needed to change?
What habits needed to be strengthened?
What boundaries needed to be established?
What kind of person did I need to become?
I learned that sometimes the biggest transformation in business begins with transformation within ourselves.
So I chose discipline.
I exercised…
I learned…
I trained…
I ran more than 500 kilometres in a year and continued completing a Half Marathon every year.
Not because running itself was the goal.
The deeper lesson was consistency.
There are days when motivation is high.
There are days when it isn’t.
But execution cannot depend on motivation.
You become stronger when your commitments survive your emotions.
That lesson applies equally to business.
The Greatest Leadership Test Happened at Home
Perhaps the deepest lesson I have learned about strength did not come from business at all.
It came from family.
Twelve years ago, my elder brother passed away.
I watched my parents fall into a deep emotional low.
At the same time, I was pregnant and carrying the responsibility of supporting my family.
That was one of those moments when life forces you to grow up quickly.
I had my own pain.
But there were also people depending on me.
And that taught me something I will never forget:
Being strong does not mean you don’t feel pain.
It means you can feel the pain and still choose to move forward.
I tried to help my family slowly rebuild.
I encouraged them to step out of the emotional darkness.
I helped my mother find her strength again.
And through that experience, I discovered something that later became deeply relevant to my leadership philosophy:
One person’s stability can influence the stability of an entire family.
The same is true in an organization.
A leader’s emotional state travels.
When a leader panics, people panic.
When a leader loses direction, the organization loses direction.
But when a leader remains grounded, especially during uncertainty, that stability gives other people permission to remain steady too.
“定心定天下” — Settle the Heart, Then Settle the World
There is a Chinese philosophy I increasingly appreciate:
定心定天下 — settle the heart, and you can settle the world.
For me, this is not about being emotionless.
It is about emotional regulation.
It is about knowing when to move quickly and when to slow down.
It is about remaining optimistic without becoming reckless.
It is about being ambitious without becoming impatient.
It is about making decisions based on principles rather than temporary emotions.
Every entrepreneur eventually faces uncertainty.
Market conditions change.
People change.
Partnerships change.
Customers change.
Technology changes.
Sometimes the strategy that worked yesterday stops working tomorrow.
The leader’s job is not to prevent change.
The leader’s job is to maintain clarity while navigating change.
That requires three things:
A stable mind.
A clear direction.
A disciplined execution rhythm.
When those three are present, an organization can adapt without losing its identity.
The Evolution of My Definition of Success
When I was younger, success meant earning more.
Then it meant building a successful company.
Later, it became about creating products that could genuinely help people.
Today, my definition has changed again.
I believe the true meaning of business is not simply to make money.
Business should create systems that give people more choices.
Choices about their health.
Choices about their education.
Choices about their careers.
Choices about their income.
Choices about the future they want to build.
That is why I believe the highest form of leadership is not creating followers.
It is creating capable people.
If everything still depends on me, then I have not really built a platform.
If my knowledge disappears when I leave the room, then I have not built a system.
But if the knowledge can be taught, the process can be replicated, the culture can be transferred, and other people can create opportunities for themselves and others — then we have built something that can outlive any individual.
That is the difference between building a business and building an institution.
From Experience to Systems. From Individual to Platform.
When I look back at my journey, the seemingly unrelated chapters now make sense.
The girl who learned to live on RM15 a day taught me financial discipline.
The young woman who took on tuition jobs and handed out tissues taught me resilience and resourcefulness.
The salesperson in the health industry taught me the importance of credibility, education and trust.
The entrepreneur taught me how to build systems.
The mother taught me responsibility.
The daughter taught me emotional strength.
The runner taught me consistency.
And the CEO continues to learn that leadership is ultimately about multiplying capability.
Every experience became a building block.
Every setback became feedback.
Every challenge became an opportunity to upgrade the system.
And perhaps that is what true strength means to me today.
The strongest people are not necessarily those who have never fallen.
They are the people who can take what they have experienced, extract the lessons, turn those lessons into systems, and eventually use those systems to create opportunities for others.
That is the journey I am still on.
I am not building only a health business but I am building a long-term platform around health, education, entrepreneurship and systems — with the hope that what we create today can give more people the knowledge, capability and choices to build a better tomorrow.
Because ultimately, the greatest legacy of a leader is not what they achieve alone, but what becomes possible for others because they chose to build.
