Former national ice hockey player Kimberly Wan co-founded a software-as-a-service business in 2016, which is thriving today under her unfaltering leadership
"Honestly, I would love for things in my life to be perfectly balanced, but they're not," declares Kimberly Wan, whose chuckle does little to diminish her vastly impressive life achievements so far.
At the age of six, Wan was a competitive figure skater, eventually trading her figure skates for ice hockey skates and sticks in her teens. When she was just 12, Wan made it into the Malaysian Book of Records for being the youngest female to achieve the highest skating level in Malaysia. Even starting a business at the age of 22 wasn't intimidating enough for her to give up on her sports goals at the time.
You get the picture: if millennial overachievers had a patron saint, Kimberly Wan would be a formidable contender for the role.
Today, the inspiring 27-year-old is CEO and co-founder of Otomate Me, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business that equips SMEs and organisations with the digital tools needed to automate critical customer communications and other recurring manual tasks for optimal efficiency. Read on to learn what drives this unstoppable female boss.
What first got you interested in ice hockey?
My background was actually in figure skating for about a decade, from age six to 16, and I competed professionally too. I would stay back after my own figure skating training to watch the hockey players train. With figure skating, my parents supported me and the sport. I wasn’t sure how they would react to my going into ice hockey. I used my own savings to buy my first pair of hockey skates, and it started from there.
What qualities would you say sports and entrepreneurship have in common?
The biggest similarity is resilience. I define this also as the ability to take feedback to make yourself stronger. As a sportswoman and a business owner, we’re always in a position to get feedback from either our coaches or customers on which areas we've done really well in, and where they want to see more improvement.
Learning to take that feedback early on and apply it has really helped me to look for a solution rather than getting offended. At times you might be tempted to think, "But I’m already doing so much'"; learning to accept feedback has helped my mindset in business.
Team dynamics is another similarity. In ice hockey, every player has a role to play so we have to work together to perform on the ice. That sports-based philosophy of collaboration and teamwork is really what I’m striving to incorporate within my own company.
See also: Former National Figure Skater Turned Photographer Annice Lyn On Lessons From Behind The Lens
