Recap: Making The Leap From Employee to Entrepreneur

On the 12th of November 2015, Founder Institute held an event “Making The Leap From Employee to Entrepreneur” featuring Clarence Leong, CEO of EasyParcel. This event was emceed by Chan Kee Siak, Founder of Exabytes Group. Before having Clarence Leong to share with us his stories, Kee Siak shared us some details about Founder Institute.
Founder Institute is located in Silicon Valley, home to hundreds of start-up and global technology companies including Facebook, Google and Apple. This company was founded by Adeo Ressi and Jonanthan Greechan in 2009. Founder Institute was founded to help entrepreneurs across the globe to launch meaningful and enduring technology companies. You can read more here.
Some of the Founder Institute’s graduate are PeerBy, Udemy, iCarsclub and many more. If you are seriously thinking of starting your very own company, Founder Institute will be the company you are searching for. Join here.

Making The Leap From Employee to Entrepreneur by Clarence Leong

Before EasyParcel was founded, Clarence Leong was a Master’s Degree graduate in Material Science Aerospace Engineer from University Wales Swansea, UK. He landed a high pay job in building rockets and few other jobs as well. Besides that, he was also involved in his own trading business.
By the age of 28 years old, he started to question himself whether he wanted to stay in UK to spend the rest of his life as a Material Science Aerospace Engineer. At the end, he choose to come back to Malaysia on the October 2010 and his entrepreneurship journey begun. He realize that people love discounts and vouchers or coupons and he started his venture into this business by building a platform for companies to offer or sell vouchers/coupons.

In December 2010, Clarence launched his business, EziVoucher in Penang mainly focusing on offering vouchers. During the talk, he told that as an entrepreneur, he is CEO himself, HR manager, Sales Manager, Officer and even cleaner. This is what we called in Chinese, “Bao Sua, Bao Hai”. Everything from management to sales must been done by himself. EziVoucher focuses more on food, facial, fashions and many more. He also pointed out that everyone has ideas but idea is still an idea without action.
EziVoucher has featured itself in The Star newspaper, GuangMing newspaper and many other medias. In 2 years time, EziVoucher has 150,000 subsriber, 18,000 deals offered and 65,000 vouchers sold. Unfortunately, Clarence had to closed this business down as major player in the market such as Groupon penetrated the market with no financial obstacles. At that moment, Clarence made up his decision to close down his business.
“What happen next?”, Clarence ask the crowd.

In September 2013, Clarence launched his next business, EasyCorner, a business in magazine line. EasyCorner provides valuable information mainly focusing mainly on Penang via both offline and online channel. The magazines printed were distributed for free around Penang. EasyCorner’s magazine contents mainly focuses on upcoming events, travels, products and many more. That time, EasyCorner’s sales team went door to door to find potential customer to be featured in their magazine.
“It was never easy but it’s worth it”, Clarence said.
In 2 years time, EasyCorner has 300,000 readers and tons of companies looking for EasyCorner to feature themselves in the magazine. After the 8th issue, EasyCorner closes it’s door. Clarence explained that this business model is hard to scale thus Clarence closes it down.

Clarence had launched his another business in 2014 which is the EasyParcel and was managed concurrently with EasyCorner at that time. EasyParcel is a brand new business model in Southeast Asia that provides integrated online booking platform for courier services in Malaysia. EasyParcel is a business focusing on  solving customer’s problem such as manual writing AWB, going to the post office to deliver parcels, overhead cost and many more. Currently, EasyParcel delivers parcel to whole Malaysia including Sabah and Sarawak. Soon EasyParcel will be covering international shipment.
Up to date, EasyParcel had more than 50,000 users delivering parcels around Malaysia. Furthermore, EasyParcel won the 4th place in Mampu, emerges as one of the Top 20 Achievers for Cradle “Coach and Grow” Programme, nominated in the MSC Malaysia APICTA awards and many more.
Clarence asked, “What lessons can we learned here and the difference between Employee and Entrepreneur?”
As an entrepreneur , you learn to delegate your task efficiently and effectively. You learn to create a system that will help the community or enhance the country ecosystem. Not only that, Clarence pointed out discipline makes a difference. Without discipline, you will not be able to propel your business forward.
Before Clarence conclude his talk, he further explained things to considered before becoming an entrepreneur. You will have to define your motivation and take note that no one will care about your dream as much as you do. Not only that, Clarence encouraged the crowd to test your own scalability, see how far can you go. The talk ended with great applause from the crowd.

Hope this recap will be able to give you some glimpse of the talk held and of course knowledge and information about the story of an entrepreneur. If you have any comments or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment. We would love to hear from you. Thank you.