It isn’t often that a parent and their child decide to set up a business together. Most family businesses are multi-generational ventures, with each generation inheriting the business from the one before. And yet, going against the grain is exactly what 58-year-old Azhar Mohd Yusof and his son Shafrizy Hazim, 36, have become good at.
Azhar is a former travel agent with charisma and charm oozing out of every pore while Shafrizy is the brains of the operation – a former deejay who has also spent over a decade in the F&B industry, working in hotels and restaurant chains. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the two decided to team up on a shoestring budget and start an online seafood delivery company. Eddie (seated) and Shafrizy are the father-son duo behind Itameshi.
“Our story actually started from zero. We did not have anybody to help us. We had no capital for our online business.
So when Shafrizy asked me, ‘Daddy, let’s start a company’, I said, ‘Where got money?’ “We had a reprieve from our monthly commitments for a six-month period (when the government issued a moratorium on bank loans) so we didn’t have to pay our housing loan for six months. So he said, ‘Let’s use that money that we are saving to start a business’,” says Azhar, better known as Eddie. Their online seafood business called Seafood Maestro was a huge success but it was tough from the get-go as the duo did everything themselves – from designing the website to actually deliveri.
