Steven Sim Leong Thun

Cakes are quite universal and easy to relate to. It is a product category that is fun, and anyone can enjoy.

The outsider’s lens #

The decision to open a cafe built around cakes was, by every conventional measure, irrational. Sim had spent his career in professional services and then marketing — moving from auditing into a marketing director role at Tony & Guy in the hairdressing industry. He knew nothing about food and beverage operations. His three nephews could bake, but none of them had run a restaurant. The RM150,000 in savings he committed to the venture represented the accumulated security of a career spent in corporate roles.

What Sim did bring was a marketing director’s instinct for retail theatre. Where conventional restaurateurs saw a kitchen that happened to have a dining room, he saw a brand experience that happened to serve food. The cake display — an illuminated glass case positioned at the entrance — was not a dessert menu but a storefront. Customers would see the cakes before they saw the seats. The concept was borrowed not from F&B but from retail: make the product visible, beautiful, and impossible to walk past without wanting a slice.

It was an outsider’s logic, and in 1997, nobody shared it. Landlords turned him away. The few who did not were offering space in a market being hollowed out by the Asian Financial Crisis. As Sim himself later described the category insight: “Cakes, though western in origin, are quite universal and easy to relate to. It is not mind boggling or complicated.” The simplicity of the product was the strategy. But simplicity of concept did not mean simplicity of execution.

The furniture showroom months #

The timing could not have been worse. Sim opened his SS2 outlet weeks before the Asian Financial Crisis devastated Southeast Asian economies. Currencies collapsed. Consumer spending froze. Retailers shuttered. With a young family depending on him, Sim watched his RM150,000 in savings drain into an outlet that attracted more curiosity than customers. The cafe was so empty that walk-ins genuinely mistook it for a furniture showroom — the tables and chairs outnumbered diners by a humiliating margin.

The free-coffee flyers were an act of desperation reframed as market research. Sim printed them himself and distributed them on the streets around SS2. Walk-ins who came for the free coffee provided honest feedback on the cakes — and their responses told him something critical. The product was not the problem. Awareness was.

His marketing background gave him a framework that pure F&B operators might not have reached. If the cakes were good enough to earn compliments from strangers lured in by free coffee, the unit economics would work once word-of-mouth took hold. The question was whether his capital would last long enough for that to happen.

In 1998, it nearly did not matter. Sim’s team, on impulse, pulled an unprepared marble cheesecake from the fridge and entered it in the Kuala Lumpur Cakes Competition. It won Best Cheesecake. The award was modest, but for a founder who had staked everything on a product category that nobody else believed in, it was the first external validation that the concept worked. The furniture showroom had a future.

From empty cafe to empire #

Growth after the cheesecake win accelerated in ways that surprised even Sim. By 2000, Secret Recipe had 15 outlets and had entered Singapore. The Asian Financial Crisis, which had nearly destroyed the venture, also created it — malls desperate for tenants offered months of free rent, giving an undercapitalized startup the footprint that would have been impossible in a normal market.

By 2003, the transformation was complete enough to be measured. Ernst & Young named Sim its Malaysian Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year. Secret Recipe won the Enterprise 50 Award, earned Superbrands Malaysia status, and entered the Malaysia Book of Records as the country’s largest cafe chain. Six years after the furniture showroom jokes, the man with no F&B experience was running the biggest cafe operation in the country.

The expansion was not without cost. An ambitious push into Australia beginning in 2010 collapsed three years later, wiping out more than AU$7 million in investment. Six Australian entities were placed in administration; all operations eventually ceased. For Sim, the Australian failure was a corrective — proof that the formula calibrated for Southeast Asian palates, price points, and cultural expectations did not automatically translate to Western markets. He had built a business on understanding the gap between what customers see and what they expect. In Australia, he misjudged both.

A more existential test arrived in 2015, when JAKIM — Malaysia’s Islamic development authority — revoked halal certification across the entire chain. In a Muslim-majority market, the revocation threatened 18 years of brand-building overnight. Sim drove a 56-day operational sprint to restore certification, an experience that permanently changed how he thought about compliance — not as a cost centre but as the foundation of market access in regulated economies.

Letting go #

In 2011, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong awarded Sim the Panglima Setia Mahkota, carrying the title Tan Sri — Malaysia’s second-highest federal honour. The youngest of eight siblings from a poor Kelantanese family, a boy who once attached noisemakers to kites to outshine the neighbourhood children, now held a national distinction earned through enterprise rather than inheritance.

The final chapter of Sim’s operational leadership began quietly in 2013, when his nephew Patrick joined the company as a cost control manager — a junior role by design. Over 12 years, Patrick moved through every operational layer of the business, from cost management to the managing director role in 2022. It was a deliberate apprenticeship designed by a founder who understood that succession required more than a title transfer; it required institutional knowledge earned on the floor, not conferred in a boardroom. In January 2025, Steven Sim handed the Group CEO role to Patrick.

The willingness to step aside is itself a form of the outsider’s clarity that Sim brought to F&B in 1997. He built the system; he does not need to run it forever. As he once reflected in Malay — his childhood language from Kelantan — “Kita dilahirkan kosong, bila mati pun tak bawa apa-apa.” We are born with nothing; when we die, we do not take anything with us.

Last updated: April 5, 2026