Li Network Enterprise: More Than Just a Grocery Store

If we are to think about a grocery store, people could imagine that they can buy daily necessities, like foods, personal care products and stationaries from it while the location of it is in the neighbourhood area. No one would have thought that a grocery store could offer you more than just groceries like what Li Network Enterprise is doing.

While being a grocery store, Li Network Enterprise offers multiservice for their customers which are groceries, money transfer service and telephone shop service. Yes, you can buy any groceries you want even frozen meat and poultry, you can use their money transfer service to send your money outside the country, you can even buy telephones or use their service to repair telephone or mobile reload from them.

Li Network Enterprise is a grocery store located at Bemban Raya in Batu Gajah, Perak. Being a friendly neighbourhood grocery store while offering multiservice, has made the store has many loyal customers that frequent their shop. The shop has a longer journey before they can reach to the state they are right now.

Started from a Telephone Shop

Before Li Network Enterprise was a grocery store, it started first as a telephone shop. The owner of Li Network Enterprise, Ramli Lodin, started the business around year of 2005 with 10 thousand ringgits as his modal. The shop was selling mobile phones and top up as well as phone repairing service.

At that time, he was still working as a manager in a local factory, so he hired some workers to help him run the shop. He started the business because he saw that there were not many telephone shops available in his area and he had always wanted to open a telephone shop as his passion is in anything related to telephones service and he is good in repairing mobile phones.

In 2011, Li Network started to add another one service to the shop which is money transfer service. He added this service to help foreign workers from around the neighbourhood to send money to their family in another country. Most of the foreign workers are the Indonesians and the Bangladeshis.

When the telephone shop’s business down in 2012, Ramli decided to evolve the shop into a grocery story. With the money from his salary as a factory manager, he remodelled the shop to accommodate it as a grocery store.

At first, before it gets turned to a grocery store fully, he added a refrigerator enough to cool canned and cartoon drinks to sell them in the telephone shop. He wants to build not just an ordinary grocery shop, so he builds a grocery shop that offers more than what other grocery shops nearby could not offer, such as his shop offers to sell frozen foods and meats alongside with other groceries.

Li Network Enterprise is a Family-Run Business

Li network Enterprise is managed by Ramli and his own family members. He managed his own shop’s management, financial and marketing, with the help of his wife and his daughters. After they closed the shop, they will have a meeting between their family members on how to improve their business.

Ramli is running the shop by himself with his family members, even from the retail service work. He decided to do this style of management due to his shop security system, after his shop experienced breach of trust before this.

Other than the breach of trust, the shop robbery that they just faced, teaches them on how to improve more on their security system. They already have CCTV in their shop, but they will improve the protection on the lock and the warning devices.

Li Network Enterprise shop also employs another two local workers to help them look after the shop. The two workers are two men that just finished their high school and lived around the shop area.

Losses and Gains are Normal in Business

Along the journey, Li Network has made some losses and gains in the business. Among the losses are from the impacts of workers’ breach of trust and shop’s robbery.

In 2012, Li Network suffered the worse economy condition which they were in the brink of bankruptcy. It was still a telephone shop at that time, it suffered a big loss when the workers that are hired to run the shop breached the trust and stole away the shop’s money. The total loss from when the workers stole the money was around 20 thousand ringgits from year 2015 to 2017.

They may lose the money the most from the breach of trust, but it is not as worst as when they were hit with shop robbery that just happened recently this year of 2021. The breach of trust stole away the shop’s money little by little like a hundred for a day until 20 thousand ringgits were gone. They lost 5 thousand ringgits from the shop’s robbery under one minute and 25 seconds, and that is a big amount of money gone under a short period.

However, after the robbery scene, Mr. Ramli noticed there is a positive cash flow in the business. Off course that every month there is a positive cash flow, but around the latest event happening, the shop’s sales also increase as well as the daily number of customers coming into the shop.

Li Network also profits the most during the first term MCO (Movement Control Order) when the covid-19 pandemic hits Malaysia. As people cannot travel further away from their home, Li Network has become the main source for people living around Batu Gajah to obtain their groceries results in high number of profits.

Services Offer Makes Li Network Became More Special

As for Li Network Enterprise at first when they started the business, they use a traditional media such as they send flyers from house to house and just telling the neighbours about their shop to make sure people know about their shop existence. However, right now because the presence of social media it makes their marketing became more easier as people can know everything about Li Network Enterprise such as the product for sale and others.

Li Network Enterprise is a shop with the service and retails but mostly the power of Li Network Enterprise is located on retails sales especially during the MCO. The retails sales during the MCO could reach RM 7000 per day.

This makes their sale resulting in a sharp increase in profits. Even though during the MCO is hard time for most business, but when it comes to retail shop it makes a profit because people are depending on retail shop to get their household item

There are two competitors near the Li Networks Enterprise. However, what makes them became a choice compare to others two is Li Networks Enterprise has offered the service that the other two is not offering. Also, in this retail shop they sold the product in volume in affordable price so that people are more attracted at their shop compare to others two.

The channel that Li Network has been used is WhatsApp, Facebook and Website. They just started creating their Facebook page and Website on Wix when one of their marketing staff went to a digital marketing class.

There are also some customers that promote their retails shop to other people. There are a lot of people that love the shop especially foreign workers because of the services that Li Network offers is not just a top up but also transferring money to other country and paying bill.

Although Li Network Enterprise already have social media as their marketing platform, they are still seeking ways to improve on the method of their marketing. Also, they are planning to expand their shop premise and add more services for the future development.