More Than Selling: What Entrepreneurship Really Takes

Chuah Qui Hui and Yen Kaijun joined the JA Company Program through JA Malaysia with curiosity and almost no sense of what running a real business involved. They quickly discovered that entrepreneurship wasn’t just about selling a product: “You have to understand finance, you need creativity and innovation to create products, and you have to learn a lot.”

After long discussions, hours of research, and a shared desire to promote eco-awareness in their community, their JA student company chose to create and sell terrariums. Along the way, mentors, volunteers, and JA workshops helped them sharpen their financial, marketing, and sales skills. The learning felt real: practicing sales strategies, identifying target customers, and eventually selling their terrariums at a mall alongside hundreds of other students.

Both girls credit the experience with transforming their confidence—whether speaking on stage, making decisions as part of a team, or managing the operations of a student company. Chuah now dreams of starting her own craft-based business, while Yen hopes to become a pilot and return to mentor younger students. For both, the JA Company Program became the moment they stopped seeing entrepreneurship as a distant idea and started seeing it as something they could actually do.