Poh Khay Inn has a talent for spotting opportunity in places other people overlook. 

She joined Amazing Borneo in 2019, and much of her work since has gone into how the company operates internally: designing systems, streamlining communication between departments, and restructuring teams around processes that hold as the business grows. It is unglamorous work with no external audience, but a good deal of the company's capacity to scale rests on it. 

She had been there a matter of months when COVID-19 closed the industry down. Through two years of shut borders she kept the websites and social accounts running on a skeleton team, so that when travel returned, Amazing Borneo had something to build on rather than starting from scratch.

Under her, Amazing Borneo has been featured in CNN, BBC, Forbes, The New York Times and Channel News Asia, alongside national media across Malaysia, a level of international attention few regional operators get. 

She brought a decade of commercial experience to the company. A chemical and biological engineering graduate of Korea University, she traded petrochemicals and gasoil at Hyundai Oilbank in South Korea, negotiated enterprise deals across Europe and Asia for the South China Morning Post, and ran the media team behind Property Hunter magazine in Sabah. At GSH Corporation she helped launch Coral Bay @ Sutera, a MYR 1.6 billion development, and cut MYR 600,000 from project costs in her first two months by restructuring vendor management. 

The two halves compound: she reads a business as a system rather than a set of departments. She addresses root causes, rather than patching symptoms, and is usually several moves ahead of the problem in front of her.

She applies the same eye to people, working out what individuals are actually good at and putting them where it will count. Her department is built around strengths rather than a fixed template. The same attention shapes what the company publishes. She drives Amazing Borneo's sustainability work, making room for subjects the industry tends to skip. 

Outside the company she co-founded Hopes Malaysia in 2016, an NGO working with rural communities around Kota Belud on clean water, food insecurity and poverty; it now supports more than 40 rural localities and has impacted more than 50,000 people. She is also a committee member of the Sabah Young Business and Industry Leaders Network (SYBIL).