Never Be Afraid To Pivot 

By: Sheahnee Iman Lee

Pivots can take you exactly where you need to be. I started my career as a broadcast journalist in 2002. It was an unplanned, but very rewarding experience. I’d graduated in MassComm hoping to do PR but didn’t hear back from any of the companies I’d sent CVs to for months.

On a whim, and desperate to start work, I sent in a resume to ntv7. They contacted me the very next day. Within one interview, I’d gotten the job.

Eventually the PR companies got back to me with interview dates but by then, I was happily learning the ropes in TV and realising PR was not a great fit for me. 

8 years later, I was married and pregnant with my first child. I left journalism to focus on motherhood. I hoped to still present part-time and did get some work but reality quickly hit. Juggling new motherhood and regular TV presenting was hard. And, I really wasn’t earning enough part-time to make being away from my newborn worthwhile. 

So I decided to venture into entrepreneurship. At a time when e-commerce was fairly new, I started importing playpens, and taught myself to run a website and use Facebook to sell baby products. 

That went great until I got pregnant again with Baby 2. I did the best I could juggling the business throughout terrible morning sickness and managing Baby 1. I could not have done any of this without the support from my husband and parents who helped deliver playpens while I was ill for months.  

Still we managed. And then to my surprise, despite taking all the precautions, I got pregnant again with Baby 3. A 99.9pct miracle baby. 

I surrendered. Clearly running a growing business on my own with 3 small kids under 5 was untenable. 

So I went back to emceeing. That was something I’d done quite a bit of during my TV career. I was good at it but hadn’t really focused much on it, and never as a fulltime freelancer, always as a side gig. 

But it took off. I was scoring more jobs and earning more than I’d ever had before. Plus, I had the flexibility to work around my kids and be there for them in a way I couldn’t while running the business. 

Then, life took a turn. I went thru a difficult and depressing time personally. I found solace once more in my faith and decided to don the hijab. 

The emcee jobs came to an abrupt stop. I lost long-time clients who felt my hijab didn’t jive with the look they wanted of their emcee. I was devastated. 

Over time, I gained new clients who valued my intellect over my looks. I will always be grateful for them. But with fewer jobs, I began itching for a new challenge. 

My husband and I, perhaps stupidly, started another business. My kids were bigger. I felt that this time, I could manage. 

And we did. Oh boy, we did. 

In 4 years we built a massive playground cafe around our love for Lego. We raised over a million in crowdsourced funds and expanded, with our plans set on opening new branches in Johor and Penang. I learnt new skills and refined many old ones, building a new brand, running our social media, managing staff and customers, marketing our concept. We also started a Lego education centre, where I started to develop syllabi and teach as well. It was a WILD ride. 

And then 2020 happened. What were the odds! We’d finally hit on something big and now that very concept that should have been foolproof was precisely the one that could not operate in a pandemic. 

Once more, I felt lost. How were we ever going to start over? I had stopped and rebuilt my career so many times by this point I was exhausted and downtrodden. I actually began to feel deeply sorry for myself. 

But you know what’s so fascinating about this journey called life? Opportunities are always there, if you only open your eyes to them. 

When we came out of our two year funk, we were driven to restart our lives. We learnt that there was so much we could not control and predict. We had no money left to build a new, capital-intensive business. 

But what we DID have now, was experience. So much varied, colourful, life-changing experience! We could use that knowledge to coach people. Maybe even help them to avoid some of our mistakes. We could bundle up all that expertise we’d developed over two-plus decades to create courses. 

• Presenting & communicating from our TV and emcee experience.
• Executive coaching from the several workshops we’d done adhoc over the years upon request. 
• Marketing, PR, and branding from building 2 completely different businesses. 
• Developing syllabi and teaching skills from running an education centre. 
• Personal branding from repeatedly having to reinvent ourselves. 

It really was a no-brainer. We had come full circle from having to pivot countless times throughout our journey. 

I know this may not be the end of the road. Im sure there will be more challenges and another necessity to pivot down the line. 

But I am finally doing something I truly love, with so much purpose I never knew I had. I revel in this with a joy I cannot explain except that it is knowing I’m doing what I should always have done. 

When I was a kid, my ambition was to be a teacher, then graphic designer, then a PR executive. In nearly 3 decades of adventure, ups and downs… I’ve been able to do all that and more. How blessed am I! 

That’s my rather long story. What’s yours? What pivot put you on a path that was better for you than the one you were on before? 

Would love to hear from all of you out there!

Sheahnee Iman Lee is a former news anchor, senior producer, and broadcast journalist who forged her TV career in both ntv7 and Astro. Follow her on LinkedIn.