I never thought that you would do this

to me . . .: a breach of trust at Fortune

Weddings Inc.
Jihad Mohammad and Farzana Quoquab

A cloud at Fortune Weddings Jihad Mohammad is based

at IBS, Universiti Teknologi
For seven years, the couple Anis and Nissa were business partners at Fortune Weddings, a Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur,
small to medium-sized wedding planning business based in Seri Kembangan, Serdang, Malaysia and Farzana
Selangor. Their business venture was growing, and their revenue was increasing every year. Quoquab is based at
International Business
Anis and Nissa incorporated Fortune Weddings in 2006 to offer wedding planning and
School, Universiti Teknologi
catering services. As a wedding planner, the company offered a full-service wedding package Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur,
to future brides and bridegrooms that covered everything they needed on their wedding days, Malaysia.
such as make-up, wedding dresses, wedding daises, photography, catering, canopies,
sound systems and gifts for guests. It also offered catering services to individuals and
corporations for personalized events such as special prayer ceremonies, birthday parties,
dinners and other things. Over the previous few years, Fortune Weddings had organized
several weddings all over Malaysia, from Selangor, Pahang, Penang and Perak to Johor. The
company’s production had not only attracted media attention but had also been featured on
several TV shows in Malaysia. Its catering services also became trusted among local
authorities, which often used to provide food at several government events.
After finishing one big wedding event and working very hard for three months, on 13 May
2015, Anis decided to take his wife out for dinner to celebrate the success of the event and
also to have a little time off from their busy schedule.
That night, when Anis entered the house to ask her to go out to dine at their favourite
restaurant, Al-Qala, Nissa called out loudly to him:
I am terribly shocked! My hands and legs are trembling. For sure, after hearing what I am gonna
say, you will feel the same.

Anis could hardly control his curiosity as Nissa was not saying anything about the issue
except expressing her wonder and grief.
Anis: “My dear, could you please elaborate further what happened exactly? What made you
so shocked?”
Disclaimer. This case is written
Nissa: “I just found out that Samera is a thief. She has stolen some of our money, and we solely for educational purposes
never realized it.” and is not intended to represent
successful or unsuccessful
managerial decision-making.
Anis, who was expecting a happier greeting, was speechless hearing this shocking news The authors may have dis-
guised names; financial and
about Samera, an employee who had been working at Fortune Weddings for the past three other recognizable information
years. He could not believe his own ears. to protect confidentiality.

DOI 10.1108/EEMCS-06-2017-0141 VOL. 9 NO. 1 2019, pp. 1-17, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 2045-0621 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j PAGE 1
 Anis: “Are you sure? Who told you? How did you find out?”

Nissa: “I called Puan[1] Ruhana to discuss her preference of flower arrangements for her
daughter’s wedding. And then she informed me that she already paid 10 per cent to Samera
by cash last week. But I can remember very well, I did not find the entry of this money by Puan
Ruhana’s name in the entry book before I left office this afternoon!”

Anis mumbled: “Oh boy! I never thought that she could do that to us!”

He decided to go back to his office at the bridal boutique to double-check the company’s
financial records. Their plan for dining out was undoubtedly cancelled.

The wedding planning business in Malaysia

The Malay community is famous for its customs and traditions. During the 1990s, the spirit of
gotong royong (teamwork) that was ingrained in the community underpinned the common
practice of helping each other to prepare for events such as weddings. Slowly, with the
country’s massive urbanization, such values were fading. In this instance, preparing wedding
events had been outsourced to wedding planners. Wedding planners were considered to be
professionals who assisted with the design, planning and management of their clients’
weddings. Weddings are considered to be significant events in people’s lives, and thus,
couples were often willing to spend considerable amounts of money to ensure that their
weddings were well-organized. Malaysians who reside in urban areas tend to have time
constraints due to their busy work schedules and have little spare time available for sourcing
and managing wedding venues and wedding suppliers. Thus, for the sake of convenience,
they have preferred more recently to use wedding planning services. Nowadays, wedding
planning has become a mainstream occupation, providing a commoditized service designed
to address couples’ competing demands at work and home.
In Malaysia, there are more than 3,000 wedding planners registered with Suruhanjaya
Syarikat Malaysia (the Companies Commission of Malaysia). According to the Department
of Statistics, Malaysia (2010, 2013), there were 196,093 registered marriages in 2009, which
increased to 214,799 in 2012. The total population of Malaysia in 2018 was estimated at
32.4 million which has been increasing with a 1.5 per cent population growth rate
(Department of Statistics, Malaysia, 2018). There were 59.2 per cent of the total population
classified as youths with a median age of 26.2 years in 2010. The mean age at first marriage
for males was 28 years and 25 years for females. With half of Malaysia’s population being
under 28 years old, the marriage market was expected to increase over the next 5 to 10
years.
The country’s economic condition also played an important role in the expansion of the
wedding industry. Malaysia’s economy has been growing for the past few years, which has
favoured the overall growth of the wedding industry. The country has observed an annual
growth rate of 4.74 per cent since 2000 and per capita income was projected to increase by
4.2 per cent in 2015 to RM 36,397. Middle-class people ramped up their household
spending as they had more disposable income. According to the Malaysian Economic
Development Plans (2009, 2016, 2017), the mean monthly household consumption
expenditure of Malaysians increased from RM 2,190 in 2009 to RM 4,033 in 2016 which was
a 6.0 per cent increment annually. Thus, it was expected that the wedding industry would
follow a similar growth rate, as these middle-class young couples would be more willing to
incur higher expenses to make their wedding dreams come true.

The competitive landscape in the Malaysian wedding planning industry

During 2006, there were not many players in the wedding planning business. However, in
2014, the wedding planning industry in Malaysia became highly competitive since there

PAGE 2 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j VOL. 9 NO. 1 2019

were several wedding planners who were competing closely with each other. These
companies provided similar products and services and competed fiercely on price.
Sometimes, the prices and the packages they offered were quite similar. It was tough
competition for Fortune Weddings since the company was more concerned about the
quality of service rather than offering a cheap price.
One of the factors that attracted new startups in the industry was that the seed capital to
enter the wedding industry was comparatively low; particularly for small-scale businesses.
For instance, Fortune Weddings’ initial capital was between just RM 30,000-50,000, which
Anis and Nissa had accumulated from their personal savings. Money was not an issue in
this business, as long as the wedding planners had ideas. Anis remembered that they got
to break even after three years of operation. However, with the passage of time, wedding
businesses started to face stiff competition. The players who had large amounts of capital
could gain advantages by using high technology to differentiate their products/services to
attract customers.
At the initial stage of its establishment, Fortune Weddings only provided services for making
wedding daises and wedding dresses. The profit they earned from each order in the early
years was reinvested to buy clothes, equipment, and jewellery to support the collection
displayed at their bridal boutique. Today, they had their own catering department and in-
house tailors. Most of the wedding planners did not have their own catering services and
thus used to hire third-party vendors, which were difficult to control and monitor during the
production process. Fortune Weddings had their own kitchen staff, which they could
supervise directly to minimize errors. Fortune Weddings also had its own tailor to make
wedding dresses. “There was one time when we had to make a wedding dress in just 3
days before the wedding, and we managed to do it,” Anis remembered proudly.
For the company, which did not have much capital, its knowledge of and relationship with
suppliers was important. There were many suppliers available in the market and the
wedding planners needed to have the experience to find quality suppliers to support them.
It was necessary to build good relationships with suppliers to create trust in order to reduce
uncertainty.
The trend in the wedding market shifted from offering stand-alone products/services to
providing a one-stop service as grooms and brides had less time to organize the
component parts of their ceremonies by themselves. Those who were living in Kuala
Lumpur had less time to travel during rush hours because of traffic jams and thus tended to
choose locations for their ceremonies nearby the centre of Kuala Lumpur. Others would
prefer any nearby place which was easy to reach using local transport. The internet played
an important role for couples to find out about suitable wedding planners to organize their
weddings. It was a useful channel to communicate directly with customers.

Fortune weddings
After receiving his Vocational Certificate of Education Examination degree (in Malay, Sijil
Pelajaran Vokasional Malaysia or SPVM), Anis served at a steel company as a welding
supervisor, while Nissa worked for 14 years as a quality control officer at a packaging
company. In 2000, when the economy was still in crisis, the couple were looking for better
job opportunities. Nissa noticed that every week they used to receive wedding invitations
from people they knew. She expressed her thought to Anis, “You see, the wedding planning
business is huge, because weddings are something that people always celebrate.” Nissa’s
words made Anis think about the business opportunity in wedding planning. At the same
time, there was a friend who asked Anis to join his part-time business making wedding
daises. Anis realized that the work of decorating the dais was not as complicated as it
seemed to be.

VOL. 9 NO. 1 2019 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j PAGE 3

 They started to take small orders making wedding daises for four years. Later, they offered
a boutique for wedding dress rentals for another four years. After they were able to handle
the wedding dresses and daises, they started to think about adding catering services. They
received plenty of orders for catering services. Anis noticed that there was a huge demand
in catering as well as wedding event management. Eventually, they started to take orders
for catering services to organize corporate as well as personal events.
Opening a business in 2006 was difficult for Anis and Nissa. At that time, applying for bank
loans was difficult and to apply for government loans such as from the National
Entrepreneur Group Economic Fund (in Malay, the TEKUN Fund) and the People’s Trust
Council’s Fund (in Malay, the MARA Fund), one had to submit a business plan, a marketing
plan, background information on the industry and other proofs that the business would
work. Finally, they decided to not take out any loan and started their business with the
personal savings that they had accumulated from 14 years working as factory labourers.
After overcoming many obstacles, they succeeded in opening Fortune Weddings.
Fortune Weddings was established in September 2006 in Seri Kembangan, Serdang,
adjacent to the Mines Shopping Mall. The business location was strategic and had facilities
to arrange a bridal boutique, office, store and workers’ hostels. Fortune Weddings
expanded the business and opened new bridal boutique branches in Section 7, Bangi, a
wedding hall in Cherise, a bungalow event space in Kepong, and a function hall in Sentul.
Having several choices of wedding venue was beneficial to Fortune Weddings as the
wedding venue was the most important part of the wedding ceremony. Fortune Weddings’
wedding hall and bungalow event space were newly refurbished and renovated in a more
modern style. Fortune Weddings’ bridal boutique branch in Bangi was also advantageous
for attracting potential customers in the Bangi and Kajang areas.
The wedding business was growing in Malaysia. Wedding ceremonies were an important
social practice within communities to announce marriages as well as to share the
celebrations with close relatives and friends. According to the Department of Statistics,
Malaysia (2013), the number of marriages was increasing as the population was also
increasing (annually by 29 per cent). Furthermore, due to modernization and the increased
purchasing power of the Malay people, the need to use wedding planners increased. To
date, the Malaysian wedding market value has aggregated to approximately RM 7bn. In
addition, with such growth and high market value, competition in the Malaysian wedding
industry was becoming increasingly fierce among its players. In line with the growth of the
wedding industry, Fortune Weddings also grew significantly over the years (Table I). Its
revenue increased from RM 95,000 in 2007 to RM 300,000 in 2014.
In early 2015, Fortune Weddings had 19 full-time employees, who worked in several
different departments such as its Kitchen, Decoration, Operations, Catering, Bridal and
Boutique and Tailoring sections (see Figure 1 for the organization structure). Anis used to
consider his staff as a solid, reliable and hard-working team. As a service provider, it was

Table I Profit before tax of Fortune Weddings from 2006 to 2014

Year No. of weddings managed each year Profit before tax (RM)

2014 30 300,000
2013 29 290,000
2012 27 270,000
2011 26 182,000
2010 25 175,000
2009 25 175,000
2008 21 105,000
2007 19 95,000

PAGE 4 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j VOL. 9 NO. 1 2019

 Figure 1 Fortune Weddings' Organigram

CEO
& Sales and
Operations Marketing
Anis Nissa

Kitchen Catering Bridal and Handling Decoration In-House

4 Services Boutique customers 3 Tailoring
employees 4 4 Samera employees 3
employees employees employees

important for the staff to have positive attributes as this influenced the quality of service they
offered. Anis believed in creating a positive image for his business to attract customers and
to position the company as friendly, helpful, and attentive towards customers. Honesty was
also another highly valued virtue because Anis trusted his staff. He expected each staff
member to be truthful, and he would not hesitate to fire staff if there was a breach of trust.
Other than full-time employees, Anis also hired 60-80 part-time employees to assist on the
days of events based on necessity.
Another strong point of Fortune Weddings was that the food and beverages provided for
customers were prepared with high-quality ingredients. For the wedding menus, most of the
dishes were Malaysian. However, Fortune Weddings also offered other catering concepts
such as BBQ, Steamboat and Western food. Fortune Weddings offered a variety of wedding
packages and promotions for wedding couples to select from. Fortune Weddings’ mostly
targeted middle-income couples.
In the early days of Fortune Weddings, the promotion was done by delivering A4 flyers from
house to house. They also made buntings to put on trees. Wedding planning businesses
were not so popular back then, hence word-of-mouth referral was important. Anis
remembered:
Sometimes we had customers who recommended our services to their friends; that’s how we
built our customer base. By the time we officially established the business, we already had our
own customers.

Nowadays, with technological advancements and social media’s expansion, Fortune

Weddings has set up its digital marketing platforms on sites such as Facebook and
Instagram, and via its own blog to attract more customers. Fortune Weddings had also
actively attended wedding expos such as Expo Galeria Perkahwinan in Damansara,
Festival Pengantin MARA in Kuala Lumpur and Pameran Pengantin Malaysia in Shah
Alam.
Fortune Weddings started to get media attention from TV shows, radio stations,
magazines and newspapers. It all started when Anis’s friends were looking for properties to
shoot dramas for TV series. Some of them would borrow a few properties from Anis. After a
while, people working in the media started to recognize Fortune Weddings. They often
sponsored breakfasts for Malaysia Hari Ini, NasiLemak Kopi O. Their wedding daises and
wedding dresses were often rented for dramas and other TV shows such as Pergilah Air
Mata (TV1), Maharku Untukmu (TV3), Menongkah Kasih (TV9), and Akadku Yang Terakhir
(Astro Prima).

VOL. 9 NO. 1 2019 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j PAGE 5

 Anis, Nissa and Samera
Anis was 37 years old. He studied at vocational college in Slim River. Nissa was 3 years
younger than Anis and was an SPM[2] holder. Both of them were factory workers and used
to work 48 h per week on minimum wage. After obtaining his SPVM[3], Anis worked at a
steel company as welding supervisor. Meanwhile, Nissa worked for 14 years as a quality
control officer at a packaging company. They were married with five children and lived in
Kuala Lumpur. Neither had any degree in business nor had they any experience in
business. Anis was skilled in making wedding daises, and his role was primarily to co-
ordinate with the staff, while Nissa had experience in salesmanship and customer relations.
Her phone number was used as the contact number of the company, and she took care of
the customers’ orders and inquiries. She was also responsible for maintaining the social
media marketing of the company, such as on Facebook, Instagram and the company blog.
Samera was 38 years old and based in Kajang. She was born in a poor family. She
completed her Malaysian Certificate of Education (SPM). She was a single mother with three
children. Nissa hired her in 2013 to work for their company. Nissa came to know about
Samera from a friend who encouraged her to hire Samera to help her to support her family.
Her job was to discuss the wedding details with customers and prepare their budgets and
take care of the accounts. Samera had a pleasant attitude, smiling face and was helpful to
the customers. Hence, customers felt comfortable consulting with her. Customers never
had any complaints about her or her work and nor did Anis or Nissa.
Usually, there was only one person in the bridal boutique, who was the wedding planner
herself. Sometimes, Samera had to play multiple roles. Apart from her duties as wedding
planner, occasionally she received payments from customers. Most customers of Fortune
Weddings would make their full payments in cash. They also accepted payment by bank
transfer or bank cheque. Fortune Weddings had two bank accounts for customers to make
payments. Whenever customers made their payments, the employee available at the
boutique would have to accept it and make out a receipt for the customers.

Fortune Weddings’ management

Although there were several departments, the hierarchical arrangement of lines of authority,
communications and rights and duties in the organization was not properly established. The
roles and responsibilities of different levels of management were not well-documented. In
general, Fortune Weddings had a decentralized structure, where the decision-making
power was distributed and the departments and divisions enjoyed different degrees of
independence.
Business leaders must always assert ethical leadership to protect the foundations for their
organizations’ sustainable prosperity. There were two regulations that the company could
use; a code of ethics, which governs decision-making, and codes of conduct, which govern
actions. Both codes are similar insofar as they attempt to encourage specific forms of
behaviour by employees. Ethical guidelines attempt to provide guidance about values and
choices to influence decision making, whereas conduct regulations assert that some
specific actions are appropriate or inappropriate. However, both codes were deliberately
not established at Fortune Weddings. Furthermore, the relationships between Anis and his
employees were mostly based on trust.

A breach of trust
Anis and Nissa worked very hard in March and April as there were many wedding events
held during those two months. Due to their hectic work schedule, the couple could not get
enough rest. Anis thought to invite his wife for an exclusive dinner at Al-Qala, one of his
wife’s favourite restaurants. However, once he arrived at the house, he heard about

PAGE 6 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j VOL. 9 NO. 1 2019

Samera’s unethical conduct from his wife, which he could not believe at first, as he always
thought that if he trusted his employees, they would reciprocate his trust by being faithful to
him.
Anis asked: “What are you talking about?”

Nissa went on to explain the issue further:

Not only Puan Ruhana, I received a WhatsApp message from another customer, saying that she
has already made partial payment for her upcoming wedding in July. When I checked our
company’s bank account through online banking, no incoming transfer was recorded. So, I
asked her whether she transferred to the right bank account. She said she transferred to the
bank account that Samera gave her. And she gave me the screenshot of the conversation, and it
turned out that Samera gave her personal bank account and told the customer to transfer the
payment directly to that account. I immediately asked a few other customers whose weddings
were in the upcoming month. Three of them told methat they made payment to Samera’s bank
account too.

Anis: “How much money did she get so far?”

Nissa: “If I am not mistaken, it is around RM 50,000, but as I said, not from all customers. She
asked only a few of them to transfer the money directly to her own account. Some of them
paid her 10% as an initial instalment.”

Anis: “How could she do it to us? We trusted her so much! She did not realize that one day
she will be caught?”

Nissa: “She didn’t ask for full payment from anyone so far. She asked for 10%. Maybe she
thought that we will not realize it since we do not check the payment all the time!”

Anis’s jaw dropped. He could not believe what he heard. His mind started racing as he had
a silent conversation with himself. “How could this reliable employee have stolen so much
right under my nose?” On top of that he did not know how long this situation had been going
on. He might have lost more than that.
He recalled that Samera looked different recently. Anis expressed his concern to Nissa:
Did you notice that Samera just bought a new car last month?

Nissa complied:
Yes, I noticed that too. She is also wearing some jewellery and fashionable clothes. It caught my
attention too. With the pay and commission we offer her, there is no way she can afford all those
things. We both were too busy handling wedding events, sothat we did not bother to ask her
about the luxurious lifestyle that she has been leading.

Nissa uttered:
We need to file a police report. Hopefully this matter will catch the police’s attention and they will
proceed with criminal charges.

Anis’s dilemma
It was important for Fortune Weddings to be profitable for the company to maintain its position
in the market. As a small to medium-sized enterprise, Fortune Weddings could not afford to
lose money due to its narrow profit margins. On top of that, Anis planned for market expansion
in Kuala Lumpur at the end of 2015. If the company was losing money, Anis was afraid that the
plan would have to be put on hold.

VOL. 9 NO. 1 2019 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j PAGE 7

 Anis began to think about the matter. His immediate reaction was to fire Samera, as she had
committed a felony. This employee theft was not the first incidence of wrongdoing at
Fortune Weddings. In 2011, Anis experienced almost the same situation. His wedding
planning staff member then stole money from the company. Anis was able to catch that
employee stealing and fired her immediately. That employee did not manage to steal a
large amount of money. However, after leaving Fortune Weddings, the worst thing she did
was that she opened another wedding planning business and pulled some of Fortune
Weddings’ new customers over her company, which caused a loss of some custom for
Fortune Weddings. She took Fortune Weddings’ wedding package brochures and altered
their prices, telling customers that her wedding package was less expensive than that of
Fortune Weddings.
Anis realized that if an employee theft had happened a second time, there must have been
something wrong with the company’s management. His wife told him that this was just the
risk of hiring people and that when the company hired new employees, they could not
always prevent this thing from happening. However, Anis liked to think otherwise. He
believed that a fraud was likely to result from a combination of motivation, opportunity and
rationalization. He pondered, “Perhaps Samera’s financial difficulties that she faced as a
single mother drove her to steal the money.” Samera started to take some amount of money
from customer’s cash payments, and she continued to steal money by giving her personal
account to customers and told the customer to make payment directly to her account.

Moving forward
Anis had been thinking so intensely about his company and wanted to push further upward
to become one of the best reputed wedding planners. He wanted Fortune Weddings to be
not just an ordinary wedding planner. He dreamt of becoming one of the most prominent
wedding planners in Malaysia. He wanted to expand the business too.
Samera was a hard-working and efficient employee. He trusted her so much only to get her
thefts in return! Anis wondered, what would be the possible solution? He was plunged
deeply in thought:

Keywords: If I launch a police report, the company image might be put at stake. In this business, reputation
Business ethics, and image are very crucial to attract customers, especially the profitable ones. If I do nothing
Employee behaviour, and fire her, then I am not going to get my money back either! If I do nothing and just warn her,
Event planning she might be more reckless in future! [. . .] Oh God, what should I do?

Notes
1. “Puan” is a Malay word which means “Mrs”.
2. “SPM” stands for “Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia” (in English: “Malaysian Certificate of Education”).
3. “SPVM” stands for “Sijil Pelajaran Vokasional Malaysia” (in English: “Vocational Certificate of
Education Examination”; now “Vocational Certificate of Education”).

References
Department of Statistics, Malaysia (2010), Yearly Statistical Report, Department of Statistics, Kuala
Lumpur.
Department of Statistics, Malaysia (2013), Yearly Statistical Report, Department of Statistics, Kuala
Lumpur.
Department of Statistics, Malaysia (2018), Yearly Statistical Report, Department of Statistics, Kuala
Lumpur.

PAGE 8 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j VOL. 9 NO. 1 2019

Malaysian Economic Development Plan (2009), Economic Planning Unit, Prime Minister Department,
Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysian Economic Development Plan (2016), Economic Planning Unit, Prime Minister Department,
Kuala Lumpur.
Malaysian Economic Development Plan (2017), Economic Planning Unit, Prime Minister Department,
Kuala Lumpur.

Corresponding author
Jihad Mohammad can be contacted at: [email protected]

VOL. 9 NO. 1 2019 j EMERALD EMERGING MARKETS CASE STUDIES j PAGE 9