From 7Eleven to Family Mart, Malaysia is not short of convenience stores. One homegrown option that has popped up is BilaBila Mart.
For a while, the founders behind this business remained elusive. In our coverage of them in 2021, we just mentioned they were three unnamed friends with backgrounds in sales and marketing.
Since then, the team has grown out of their shells, and we now know that one of the three friends is none other than Lee Hui Jing, who you may know as EY’s Woman Entrepreneur of the Year in 2023.
I first met her at Malaysian Pay Gap’s Work Slayer Summit, where she was a guest on a panel entitled “Never too Late: How To Switch Career?”.
There, she shared how she formally started her career in British American Tobacco (BAT) before becoming an insurance agent, then eventually venturing into entrepreneurship.
But that’s just her condensed resume. Beyond those job titles, Hui Jing’s life has been quite the storied one, starting with her childhood.
A journey of character-building
Due to financial circumstances, Hui Jing began working at the tender age of 15. She opened up about her father, who had gotten the family into some debt.
“It’s really like what you see in the dramas,” she recalled. “We were locked up and held ransom.”
Experiencing this, Hui Jing decided to earn her own pocket money instead of asking for it from her mum.
Since the legal working age was 16, the teen faced a lot of rejection before landing a role at a boutique for RM4 an hour.
“Not a very pleasant experience, but it gave me a first overview to how people doing business can be,” Hui Jing shared.
She went on accumulate more experiences, such as working in McDonald’s and The Body Shop, becoming a tutor, qualifying as a finalist for the Red Bull Female Driver Search in 2009, and joining a radio station as a road runner.
After all these odd jobs, she delved into the tobacco industry—something she said was contradictory to her character.
“It’s very male-dominated, and it’s a sin industry,” she explained. “And I was very anti-smoking.”
But the money was good, so Hui Jing gave it a try. Here, she climbed the corporate ladder, leveraging her core skills in sales. Eventually, though, she felt it was time for her to leave and explore.