Networking, or the right experience. Some people start with nothing but interest, then learn along the way.
That is Puan Emma Zuraida’s story. Before she built Weddings by Emma, she spent four to five years in customer service. She had no background in wedding or event management. It all started with an interest in decoration, and then friends began asking her to decorate their events.
Emma’s way of learning business was different too. Before she formally joined the RichWorks mentoring ecosystem, she learned a lot from Datuk Wira Dr. Azizan Osman’s videos. From what she learned and put into practice, her business had already reached millions of ringgit in sales.
But high sales do not mean every problem is solved. Weddings by Emma once handled five to six events a week. The business looked busy, but after vendors, staff and operating costs, cash flow was still a challenge.
The big shift came when Emma got clear about which customers she really wanted to serve. After joining The Titan mentoring community, she started focusing Weddings by Emma on the high-end segment. To enter that market, price was not the only thing that had to change. Emma herself had to grow as a leader, together with the team, communication, presentation and the whole customer experience.
Then came the MCO. Weddings stopped and the business almost could not continue. Emma set her ego aside and did whatever it took to survive. From managing big-ticket wedding projects, she went back to selling food products and cookies, even when some only gave a margin of around RM4 to RM5.
When the market recovered, Emma did not just go back to the old way. She strengthened her niche, her systems and her focus on something premium clients value highly: the certainty that their big day is in hands they can trust.
Today, Weddings by Emma handles events for royalty, VVIPs and high-profile clients, with sales figures discussed on the podcast now reaching RM20 million, compared to around RM1.5 million to RM1.8 million a few years ago.
Emma’s journey carries one important lesson. Growth does not necessarily come when we try to serve more customers. Sometimes growth starts when we are truly clear about who we want to serve and what value we want to give them.
And resilience is not just about refusing to give up. Sometimes we have to be willing to do something smaller today, so that we can survive and build something far bigger in the future.
The events Emma handles keep getting bigger because Emma herself first built the capacity to handle something bigger.
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