How Charlie’s Café digitalised their SME business with Maxis Digital Marketing Starter Kit

4 mins read 08 Sep 2021

Established in 2015, Charlie’s Café is an F&B-based social enterprise that aims to serve the less fortunate members of the community through donations from its customers.

Despite being affected by the pandemic, the café was one of the many F&B businesses that persevered through a very challenging year and managed to stay afloat.

It was during the first Movement Control Order (MCO 1.0) that Desonny Tuzan, the café’s founder, stumbled upon AmBank-Maxis SME-in-a-Box, a digital solutions bundle designed to help SMEs take their businesses online quickly and affordably.

As with many SMEs, Desonny didn’t have much to invest in new technologies. But with the SME Digitalisation Grant, he was able to claim up to RM5,000 with the purchase of a Maxis Digital Marketing Starter Kit. His grant application experience was simple and fast – with a higher chance of approval – thanks to step-by-step guidance from the Maxis SME Help Squad.

The Maxis Digital Marketing Starter Kit lets you create and manage digital ads easily from anywhere, on any device.

With it, Desonny was able to easily run social media marketing campaigns and reach more customers online without compromising his day-to-day operations. After all, time is of the essence in the F&B industry. The Digital Marketing Starter Kit allows hims to create ads using high quality design templates and deploy them using an easy self-serve platform.

For Charlie’s Café, the kit was a solution that ticked all the boxes – affordable, quick to set up, and easy to use.

Concurrently, Desonny also got help from AmBank in opening a bank account and setting up a new credit card terminal to accept payments from all major e-wallet services in Malaysia. This enabled the café to better meet increasing customer demands for more contactless payment options.

Recalling his experience, Desonny said: ‘The digital solution with the SME grant by Maxis is very important in running today’s business. I honestly think that this SME business grant will help a lot of business owners like me because small businesses like us do not have the funds to invest and go digital.'