Sometime in 2019, we received a phone call from a customer at Cube, asking for the contact number of a moving company that belonged to Ismail Bin Osman. She wanted to use Ismail’s moving service again because she had a great experience with his service, and she trusted him. And that’s how Cube’s relationship with Gymah Logistics, a small moving services company owned by Ismail, started.
One Sunday afternoon in February, we sat down with Ismail to get to know him and his company better. In 1995, Ismail migrated from Singapore to Malaysia, leaving a marketing job for an international company and determined to start his own business in Malaysia.
However, his first business wasn’t a success. Instead of getting a job or start another business, he went to a madrasah to re-learn and deepen his Islamic faith. This was a personal journey of self-development, and it was around this time he met his wife, Asmah. Together they worked in the rubber industry in Negeri Sembilan for a while and later moved to Kuala Lumpur.
In KL, Ismail was once again looking to start a business, and eventually, in 2014, he started Gymah Logistics.
“Gymah is my wife’s nickname,” he smiled and then continued telling us how challenging it was in the beginning to get a job.
He relied upon third party logistic platforms to find jobs, which was very competitive as there are thousands of movers out there.
“For a couple of years, I partnered with a massage chair company, delivering massage chairs all over west Malaysia, including assembling them…and according to Google map, the amount of traveling I’ve done while working with that company is equivalent to 4 times going around the world,” he laughed. “But the good thing about that opportunity was that I learned how important customer’s satisfaction is with our services.
Moving forward, that’s how we build trust and good relationships with our customers—this way they will refer us to their friends and family, and they will come back to us whenever they need moving services again.”
Since COVID-19 has become a full-blown pandemic, many businesses are forced to shut their doors for the sake of public health. Although the logistics industry falls under the essential services and is unaffected, jobs become lesser than before.
“The first MCO was really hard on us,” said Ismail. “We had no income for about three months… Getting jobs directly from Cube helped us a lot — it definitely made a difference in our business. Now, we are no longer fully relying upon third party logistic platforms to get jobs.”
One of Cube’s long-term goals is to have a sustainable business that is also helping other businesses to grow.
In addition to helping businesses with storage solutions for their business stocks or any self storage needs and providing co-working space and virtual office, we also want to give a hand to a small moving company like Gymah Logistics, especially during this difficult time.
In the spirit of helping one another, Cube is partnering with Gymah Logistics to provide free moving services for anyone who needs to create more space at home by storing non-essentials at Cube or businesses that needs to store documents or business stocks. This would resolve any issue of moving your items into our storage during MCO.
To learn more about this promotion and other promotions we have, visit our Promotions page.
It was a pleasure to know about Gymah Logistics and the husband and wife who runs the company. One thing for us to take away from this 1 sq.ft. story, is for us to be inspired by Ismail’s strong-will and determination for success, not only in business but also in self-development through continuous learning from our past experiences and our present.
