It’s hard to miss the black and white advertisements that are cheekily playing with the acronym BFM (89.9 FM), the newest radio station in town. “Bodek Free Minutes”, “Brake Faster Macha” and “Bribe Free Malaysia” are some of the eye-catching phrases emblazoned on Business FM’s (BFM) advertisements.

It’s almost odd that a radio station that focuses on business news and issues would market itself so playfully, but after meeting its founder, Malek Ali, one can understand why.

Malek is a man full of ideas, literally: he has a notepad of ideas that he carries everywhere he goes. This habit started early on, and whenever his notepad is filled up, he will transfer the contents to his compilation of ideas and start fresh with a new notepad. So, it is not surprising that the seed to his idea of running a radio station was sown a long time ago.

It all started at Harvard Business School where he took up an MBA from 1993 to 1995. It was the cusp of the dotcom boom in the US where the personal computer (PC) was just making its way into our lives and the Internet was still in its infancy. “Yet, you could already feel a little buzz about it on campus,” Malek recalls. “What really sparked my interest was during an elective class I took in 1994, called Marketing Space, when my professor came in with a desktop loaded with the Mosaic browser. He tapped on it and said that we would be able to hear the radio from it. I mean, it sounded really absurd at that time to listen to radio from your PC, when even the PC was still new! But that got me thinking…Over the years, it (the idea) was always there,” says Malek.

But the radio station market was never right for Malek. In Malaysia, Time Highway radio was the pioneer in private radio stations that started it all in the mid-1990s. But they began to lose their footing when a new giant entered the game. In 1995, Measat Broadcast Network Systems launched six new radio stations. “I know enough that when a deep pocketed corporation launches six new stations, it isn’t the perfect time to start your own radio business,” says Malek.

Trained as a lawyer, he practised in the financial centre of London before arming himself with an MBA. He took a job with the Boston Consulting Group when he got back to Kuala Lumpur. But the entrepreneurial spirit inside him never died, and in early 1997, he started KL Classifieds (another idea that was simmering in his book of ideas), Malaysia’s first free classified ads newspaper. Unfortunately, the market was also against him. The financial crisis came and he closed the business, incurring a loss of RM300,000. Frustrated, he was about to take up a job offer in Singapore when he was asked by Mark Chang, CEO of JobStreet, to be part of the new Internet venture. Malek met Chang when he was running KL Classifieds.

But the clincher was the offer by one of the JobStreet founders (not Chang), to pay off RM200,000 of Malek’s debts from the KL Classifieds venture if he joined them. Talk about your signing bonus!

Soon, Malek found himself writing the business plan for JobStreet. He left in 2003 and worked for Maxis and then Yahoo, delving in new media strategy for mobile phones and the Internet. It wasn’t long before he found himself bored with his 9 to 5 job. “I felt stifled working in those jobs. At Yahoo, I was far away from the C-level people who were the decision makers. I mean, I was in Singapore and they were all the way in Sunnyvale, California,” says Malek.

He needed to get back into the centre of action, which was when his radio station idea started resurfacing in his mind. “It was while I was at Maxis that I realised the radio channels available was either too young or too slapstick for me. And then there is the other end of the scale, which was too old for me too. I felt that there was nothing substantive out there.”

Believing that “content is king” and with his experiences in print, mobile and Internet, Malek sought to offer a new kind of radio station in Malaysia. BFM 89.9 was born in July 2007, and its first broadcasting test was an occasion to remember. “We had to test the 89.9 frequency. We had just a normal MP3 player attached to a transmitter in Ulu Kali, near Genting Highlands. A freelance presenter came in to host. That was it. Funnily, we started getting job applications from people in the radio industry who tuned to our station early on,” says Malek.

Their targeted listeners are business executives, finance professionals and the investing public. While there is no specific age target, BFM 89.9 aims to appeal mostly to audiences ranging from ages 23 to 60, who are concerned about personal wealth, finance and business ventures.

BFM 89.9 officially went on air on Sept 4, 2008, and now has 21 employees. It is backed with funds sourced from successful entrepreneurs, including alumni of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School. Malek has raised RM5 million with RM800,000 of that being his own money. One of the investors — surprise, surprise — is Chang from JobStreet. Malek’s family which runs a mercantile business and to whom he credits his entrepreneurial fire, have also invested.

Their burn rate is currently around RM200,000 monthly. “For this year, my first objective is to cover our burn rate. After that, I can sleep easy at night,” says Malek. Right now the pressure is on to convert their sales pipeline of RM3 million into committed advertising. Not easy, considering the present environment.

True to Malek’s original idea, BFM 89.9, is also an online radio station and streams live over the Internet. You can go to www.bfm.my and listen to their guest speakers or receive updates on the latest finance and business news. For those who miss the shows, they have podcasts which are put up within 24 hours on their website. Malek hopes to cut down the lag time to six hours, perfect for listeners to catch at night, in the comfort of their own homes.

This new form of radio delivery is a good example of how new media is converging the analog and digital world. BFM 89.9 is also trying a new marketing strategy by sending emails with links to their hot shows to a targeted audience. “When Martin Sorell (advertising expert) came on our show, we disseminated the links to our podcasts by email. It becomes viral when the recipients start forwarding it too. That really helps us market,” says Malek. He has plans to expand this marketing strategy by providing a more tailored approach, specific to the user’s needs.

Malek is proud of the fact that BFM 89.9 has a positive bias towards supporting start-ups, new technology, ethical business practices and equal opportunities. He believes strongly in creating value and solving problems and also that most start-ups strive to do just this.

“For us, we want to learn more about the value creators out there. I have been there before. You’re trying to get yourself known and you don’t have the credibility yet, and everyone’s asking who your corporate parent is. At least we give them [start-ups] a platform. You don’t need to buy any ads, all you need to do is to tell your story. And through radio, they might find business partners, customers and even some pesky vendors! I’ve had previous guests who told how they have got new employees and customers after our shows,” says Malek.

Adding value is definitely BFM’s 89.9 highest priority, and the feedback has been good. AirAsia Bhd’s group CEO Datuk Seri Tony Fernandes, a previous guest, has said he loved seeing innovation out there and is glad that someone is building something different in the radio space. Malek sums it up best when he says, “The key point for me is for our listeners to learn and take away something from our shows. I’m very, very happy whenever this happens.”

This article appeared in Netvalue2.0, the technology section of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 744, March 2-8, 2009