In 2015, at 25 and with less than two years in the travel industry, Emily Lim was asked to take over Amazing Borneo's entire sales team. The Mount Kinabalu earthquake had closed the mountain, the office was fielding calls from every climber booked onto it, and someone had to hold the commercial side of the company together. She had spent the previous two years building the Singapore sales office. She took the team, steadied it, and has led it ever since. [Her account of that week →] 

She had not planned on any of it. She grew up with four brothers and a father who sold for a living, and what interested her was whether she could do it too. She gave herself six months to find out, and had earned enough by the end of it to buy herself a car.

Five years at Fuji Xerox Singapore followed, on multinational and major accounts across shipping, manufacturing, insurance and private banking, where she closed a half-million-dollar deal and finished a year in the top two among her peers. Amazing Borneo headhunted her in 2013. 

She was made Regional Sales Manager in 2016, and Sales Director in 2018. Then COVID-19 and two years of closed borders, which she spent moving the team onto online initiatives and upskilling rather than waiting it out. Today she runs international business development for Amazing Borneo and its subsidiaries, covering the travel trade, corporate and MICE clients, educational groups, and partnership negotiations.

What makes her good in a negotiation is what makes her good as a manager. She reads a room quickly and adjusts to it, and she runs her team the same way: equity rather than equality, regular one-to-ones, support shaped to the individual. "Leadership by example is fundamental," she says. "I don't ask for anything I wouldn't do myself." 

There are more than twenty of them now, predominantly women and from every kind of background, and building that team is the accomplishment she names before any revenue figure.