2007
PERSONAL MONEYNovember 2007
Cover
Julia Chong She made her first million as an employee, and then later chose to give a million away.
KANCIL AWARDSNovember 2007
Kancil Awards 2007 festival - Speak Series
HERVOICEVolume III
Entrepreneurship
A Truly Loving Company
JULIA CHONG is defying all the rules of business by running a company that donates 100 per cent of its dividends to charity.
ABWMJune 2007
Charity
A Truly Loving Company
Julia Chong has decided to use her 30 years business experience in consumer goods to set up a new corporation where the profits will be distributed through dividends to designated charities.
MADAM CHAIR Volume VIII
Cover
It Must Be Love
Julia Chong gave up a top corporate job to start a company tat would give away all of its dividends to charity.
VOLUME VIII 2007
By SHAREEM AMRY
Depending on what kind of person you are, this is either a tale of uncommon kindness or quixotic nerve. Julia Chong, 55, would say it’s neither, but as the central character here she can’t be expected to pass judgment on her own story. What does hold true – whether you’re a cynic or a romantic – is that Julia’s new business will make local corporate history. The Truly Loving Company Sdn Bhd is set up like any other trading company, with shareholders, employees, a line of products and key performance indicators. The purpose of every company is after all, to make money.
But TlC is revolutionary because it intends to make money so it can give away; Julia has pledged 100 per cent of the company’s dividends to qualified registered charities.“A lot of my friends in business, who are captains of industry, asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this. ‘It’s not possible,’ they said, ‘why not just give 50 per cent away?’ Their intentions were good but they didn’t shake my resolve,” Julia says. “I believe that if you want to make a commitment to do something, then you can’t just go halfway.”What makes this story all the more unusual is that Julia is not a crusading activists, naïve to the ways of the corporate world. Up until May last year, she was the managing director of household cleaning giant Reckitt Benkiser (M) Sdn Bhd, responsible for operations in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. It was a position that capped a successful 33-year corporate career.
But she chose to walk away from it all to start the Truly Loving Company, and seeded the whole venture with RM1 million of her own money to boot. See what we mean by quixotic nerve?
Born into a traditional family with two brothers and seven sisters in Kuala Lumpur, Julia learned from a very young age that she had to be different if she wanted to stand out.
“I wasn’t smarter than anyone else in school, but I was always very disciplined and determined. I always believed in giving my best,” she says.It was that discipline that allowed her to carefully shape a career that started in London, when she joined the Barclays Bank Trust as a research analyst in 1973.She then moved into brand management and marketing in companies such as Fraser & Neave and Warner Lambert Malaysia, before becoming executive director of food and beverage company Hexza-Mather Sdn Bhd in 1988. After a stink in Unza Malaysia as its general manager of marketing, Julia was headhunted by Reckitt Benkiser in 1999 to turn around its flagging regional operations.