• Noorman Mubarak worked a comfortable, glamorous job as a flight attendant for Singapore Airlines.
• But he felt unfulfilled, saying he was wasting his life serving coffee in the skies.
• In 2017, he started a hawker stall, working 18 hours in front of the stove. Now, it has 31 outlets.

When Mohammed Noorman Bin Mubarak Ahmad opened his first hawker stall in 2017, he woke up at 2:45 a.m., after just three hours of sleep.

While most of Singapore slumbered, he cooked spicy sambal and marinated chicken and stocked up his tiny stall for a busy day. He squeezed the prep in before his oil and gas job, then ran back after work to serve dinner.

The long hours in front of the stove were a sharp departure from his cushy job as a flight attendant with Singapore Airlines.

Noorman's early alarms and career pivots paid off. Eight years later, he has expanded the first stall into a chain business featured in the Michelin Guide.

Seven years travelling the world, and feeling unfulfilled

Noorman, now 46, has been working in kitchens since he was six.

His father used to run a hawker stall, and he helped out before and after school. After studying a degree in Business Management in Australia, he came back to help his father with the stall, which sold Malay food. After many disagreements on how to run it, he decided he needed a break.

"I just needed to get out," he said. He joined Singapore Airlines as an air steward.

His seven years working as a flight attendant for Singapore Airlines, from 2004 to 2011, were glamorous as he flew to South Africa and Europe. He said he was paid about 5,000 Singapore dollars monthly in the role.

"I thought, this is the life. I'm not going to get married anymore. I'm going to stay single and travel," Noorman said. "For seven years, I forgot about all the things that I learned and aspired to be."

Eventually, a sense of emptiness crept in.

"The job was too easy. Just asking, 'Do you want coffee or tea, chicken or whatever?'" he said. "I didn't need to have done a degree for it."

In 2011, he quit his job at Singapore Airlines and worked a maintenance gig at an oil and gas company in Singapore. Shortly after he quit his job, he met his now wife, who was also a flight attendant at the time.

He stayed there for seven more years, working his way up to a managerial role.

Setting up Nasi Lemak Ayam Taliwang

Still, he wanted to build something of his own. And when Yishun Park Hawker Centre was under construction, right in front of his house, he decided to take the leap.

He got a friend to partner with him, and they each put SG$20,000 of their savings into the stall. He started Nasi Lemak Ayam Taliwang in 2017.

Noorman decided to add a twist to the classic nasi lemak recipe. His wife, who is Indonesian, whipped up a mean ayam taliwang — a spicy grilled chicken dish — so they decided to combine the two.

For the first few months, business was slow. He said he earned less than SG$5,000 monthly, which felt like a huge step back.

"I didn't want to be earning the same amount as I did about 10 years back, and working double the hours," he said.

He ran the stall while working his 9-to-5 job at the oil and gas company, meaning he would come back to the stall after work and feed a hungry dinner crowd until 10 p.m. Then he got up the next morning to prep before work.

"The thought of working almost 18 hours a day, every day, for the next two to three years, that was the most challenging," Noorman said.

The business was also hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw Singapore go into a full lockdown.

Then, in 2021, his stall was included in the Michelin Guide.

Sales started picking up, and Noorman scaled up massively.

Now, Nasi Lemak Ayam Taliwang has 31 stores around the island city, including one in the food court in the glitzy Marina Bay Sands mall. He said daily sales for each of his stalls range from SG$800 to SG$4,000.

A spicy dish with tender meat and fragrant rice

When I visited Noorman's first stall in Yishun Park Hawker Centre, I tried the SG$7.60 Nasi Lemak Ayam Taliwang, the most popular item.

Nasi lemak is a rice dish with origins in Malaysia, served with roasted peanuts, an egg, anchovies, a sweet and spicy chili paste called sambal, and cucumber slices.

The staff ladled a generous heap of chili paste onto the grilled chicken. The spice did not overpower the savory marinade.

The meat was tender and fell off the bone. The sambal added sweetness to the dish, and the jammy egg made it rich and creamy.

Jay Sim, a regular who has been buying the stall's SG$6.60 double chicken wings set fortnightly for about five months, said it's one of the best nasi lemak stalls he's tried in Singapore.

Sim, a 21-year-old TikTok streamer, said the chicken was always crispy, and the rice, flavored with pandan leaves, was fragrant.

Hands off the stove, and happier than ever

Now, with a workforce of about a hundred people manning his 31 outlets, Noorman said he has not picked up a ladle in six months.

"If you have the opportunity to sit down, relax, play golf, travel, and still get paid, you will want to do that rather than work in a hawker center for 18 hours," he said.

But it was important to carry on his family's hawker legacy and pass it down to his children.

"It's so tiring, my feet were always sore," he said. "But I did it because I want to create this legacy."

• The US government spent $5 trillion to stimulate the economy during the pandemic.
• Much was lost to fraud, and several bills would extend deadlines to file charges.
• A bill involving the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, which BI previously reported on, moved forward Wednesday.

A Senate committee on Wednesday advanced a bill that would give prosecutors more time to bring fraud charges tied to two pandemic-era relief programs — including one that, as Business Insider has reported, awarded millions of dollars to wealthy musicians who used the money on private jets, luxury goods, and parties.

Federal investigators believe at least 6% of the $5 trillion allocated for pandemic relief was routed to fraudsters or people and businesses who didn't qualify. Prosecutors have brought charges over a small fraction of that spending, and could run out of time to bring charges in thousands of cases that were referred to them.

Currently, prosecutors have five years after many fraud-related crimes occur to bring charges. The bill would give them an extra five years to file criminal charges against anyone who defrauded the $28 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund or the $14 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant.

Originally pitched as a lifeline for independent venues and arts groups, the SVOG program ended up awarding billions with limited guardrails, and a Business Insider investigation found that pop stars like Chris Brown, Lil Wayne, and Marshmello used the money for jets, bonuses, and a birthday bash.

Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who chairs the Small Business Committee that moved the bill forward, told Business Insider that the government should be "going after the people that truly didn't deserve the money."

"What we saw was a lot of celebrities that were gaming the system," she said, "that were able to take those dollars and buy jets and throw fancy parties and do things like that — boost up their wardrobe. That's not what the dollars were for."

The celebrities Business Insider reported on didn't previously reply to comment requests, except for Lil Wayne, who responded to a reporter's questions with an explicit sexual overture. The SBA has defended its fraud controls and said in late 2024 that it was still looking into some grants.

The agency has recently sent out hundreds of letters to SVOG grantees demanding that they repay their grants, according to people in the entertainment industry, but details on which grantees were targeted were not available.

Maggie Clemmons, an agency representative, told BI that the SBA is "continuously fighting to claw back fraudulently-obtained COVID funds, including within the SVOG program" and criticized "inaction" by the Biden administration.

The Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which cut checks of up to $10 million, has been scrutinized by auditors. Nearly a quarter of funds were awarded without doing enough to verify that grantees were eligible, the Small Business Administration's inspector general said last year, and the agency found that improper payments were "likely" in 53 out of 122 restaurant awards it analyzed.

The bill still needs to pass the Senate and House of Representatives before it becomes law. And even if the statute of limitations to bring charges is extended, whether prosecutors will clear out the backlog of pandemic-fraud cases is an open question. The agency's inspector general has said the SBA should also extend the time period for which grant recipients hold on to their records.

"My hope would be that given the priorities of the Department of Justice, that somewhere in that mix, we have those that will go after the fraudsters," Ernst said. "Fraud is fraud, and our taxpayers really need to know that the federal government takes it seriously."

The Ernst bill, the SBA Fraud Enforcement Extension Act, advanced without opposition from Democrats.

In 2022, lawmakers similarly extended the deadline to bring fraud charges over the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans from five years to 10.

Congress also allocated at least $653 billion to fund extra unemployment benefits during the pandemic. The House of Representatives passed a bill in March to allow more time to prosecute unemployment benefit fraud, but that bill hasn't advanced in the Senate.

This article is part of Creative Ventures, a series about business success rooted in creativity.

The luxury home design and fragrance brand L'Objet boasts an elegant boutique on New York City's Madison Avenue. The space, bathed in earthy hues, harmoniously blends handcrafted housewares, decorative items, and scents from the company's various collections.

For two decades, L'Objet's founder and creative director, Elad Yifrach, has sustained the business on craftsmanship and creativity. In celebration of its 20th anniversary, the brand recently released a collection of nature-inspired objets ("objects" in French), including a gold-plated ladybug bottle opener and a glazed porcelain bowl designed to resemble cenote wavelets. It also expanded its fragrance line in early May, dropping a new eau de parfum called Blindfold, created with the master perfumer Yann Vasnier.

Yifrach, who lives in Portugal, draws inspiration from his Mediterranean-influenced upbringing and international travels to places such as France, Morocco, and India. Globetrotting has connected him to artisans around the world, forging collaborations with the contemporary artist Ruan Hoffmann and the sculpting duo the Haas Brothers, among others. The brand has also opened flagship boutiques in major cities, including Paris, London, and most recently, New Delhi.

Growing a luxury business is no easy feat, Yifrach told Business Insider. He said entrepreneurs need to self-advocate and have a clear vision of their brand identity and target audience. "It doesn't matter how great your idea is," he said on a video call from L'Objet's Portugal office. "You still need to carve a space for yourself in the market and convince the market that you're worthy of that space — and that takes time."

Yifrach founded L'Objet in 2005 when he was in his mid-20s, working as an interior designer in Beverly Hills and developing an interest in handmade decorative pieces. "I was very young," he said. "So the brand came from a more humble and naive place of just wanting to create, experiment with different materials, and learn a lot."

Developing his luxury label required a "crazy amount of legwork," he told BI. In the early aughts, social media wasn't a commerce-driving juggernaut yet, and online shopping was inferior to coveted shelf space in brick-and-mortar stores. Digital marketing and virtual networking were also still ripening, so Yifrach said he had to rely on face time — not FaceTime.

He met with skilled artisans to learn techniques for making stylish, high-quality housewares, attended events to spread the word about L'Objet, and presented products to stores to sell as merchandise. His first-ever store client was Bergdorf Goodman.

Yifrach said he had moments of doubt even as his company gained momentum. He remembers opting out of a major trade show so that he could afford to open L'Objet's first New York showroom in 2010, but he didn't get very many visitors initially.

"There were crickets. It was really scary," he admitted. Every time he heard the "ding" of a nearby elevator, he'd jump from his chair, thinking someone had arrived to check out the space. But investing in the showroom gave the company a stronger identity, which helped in the long run, Yifrach told BI.

After 20 years, the company said it has accomplished eight-figure growth and aims to double its revenue in the forthcoming years. Direct-to-consumer channels such as e-commerce and retail have been the biggest growth areas so far this year, partially due to new boutique openings.

The landscape of luxury brand-building has changed substantially since Yifrach founded L'Objet. Omnichannel marketing is king, and cutting through the algorithmic clutter to reach — and resonate with — consumers is crucial. Virality isn't always dependable, and longevity can be hard to come by.

"You see a lot of these overnight successes that have an identity crisis," Yifrach said. "The identity was never formed — it was just a lot of fluff."

Artisanship and timeless aesthetics are two pillars that have helped sustain L'Objet, even in a volatile luxury market, Yifrach said. Sacrificing quality to create products that capitalize on trends might work temporarily, but it doesn't set a business up for long-term success, he added.

Yifrach noted that luxury consumers nowadays are especially selective about their purchases. "They're not just buying things for the sake of buying. They want to know what they're getting and why it's expensive," he said. "Brands need to be ready with the right answers. You have to justify more."

L'Objet's CEO, Stanislas Le Bert, shared a similar sentiment. "Consumers are more educated," he told BI during a visit to the brand's Manhattan showroom. "They want to understand the story and the 'why' behind the price. They expect transparency."

Hannah Reed, a research manager at the market research agency Walnut Unlimited, previously told BI that "the pressure is now on for luxury players" to convince shoppers that their products are worth the hefty costs. "Brands really need to look at design with more intention," she said, adding that they should "lean into craftsmanship and individuality."

Yifrach said that L'Objet emphasizes the use of sustainable materials such as organic porcelain and ceramic and 24-karat gold, the purest form of the metal. He said gold is a particularly "fussy" material to work with when it's plated or painted onto pottery. "It looks like a muddy water solution, and it's extremely sticky," he explained. "It requires a steady hand and an understanding of how much force to use when brushing so that you're not overdressing a piece. You have to sit for hours and paint at a certain rhythm." Very few people, he added, know how to do this skillfully.

Collaboration has been vital to improving L'Objet's designs and scents, said Le Bert, a veteran executive in the luxury fragrance and lifestyle space. "There's a creative dialogue at the beginning of every collaboration before the structure comes in — that moment is crucial," he told BI.

He added that his perspective — viewing housewares as "vessels of emotions" and fragrances as "invisible home designs" — helps drive important conversations with artisans. "I admire passionate people," he said. "We like to push back to form a healthy tension that serves creativity."

Yifrach compared luxury products devoid of ingenuity to music without sentiment. "There are a lot of people who have beautiful voices, but when they sing, you don't feel the emotion," he said.

Before any L'Objet piece comes to fruition, Yifrach added, he has to "fall in love" with the idea behind it. The collaborations with the Haas Brothers, for instance, largely stemmed from Yifrach's interest in exploring fantasy and functionality. And in January, L'Objet released a collection with Ruan Hoffman after Yifrach was inspired by the artist's witty, playful works.

Yifrach said that if a brand creates designs with authentic artistic expression, it will shine through and speak to the consumer.

Once an item hits the market, the work doesn't stop there. Le Bert said the L'Objet team scrutinizes how the company can improve its techniques, aesthetics, and business model — a strategy, he said, that's necessary for any luxury brand to fine-tune its product portfolio. "Curate wisely," he advised. "Avoiding dilution is key."

Reflecting on the past 20 years, Yifrach summed up his overarching business philosophy with a pointed credo: "Time is the prime ingredient. That's how you build a luxury brand — time, attention, intention, and telling your story to the right people, with the right people."

• A business owner is labeling tariff costs as a separate line on the price tag of his electric bikes.
• Businesses, large and small, are hoping to retain consumer trust by showing how much tariffs increase prices.
• Business experts say consumer awareness of tariffs could spell trouble for Trump's polling rates.

When Jared Fisher found out his major supplier of electric bikes was raising its prices by 10%, he had a choice to make: eat the cost or pass it along to his customers.

"If you cut 10% into a bicycle margin, then you might as well get ready to have your exit strategy for your business because you're not going to be able to operate," Fisher, who owns several bike shops in Nevada and Utah, told Business Insider. "There's no way."

Instead, Fisher decided to be transparent with his customers about why prices were rising on some of his products. He added a new line item directly to the price tags on bikes hanging in his shops. On one bike he sells for $7,999, the price tag now shows an additional $300 "Government Tariff Charge."

"I have no problem labeling where this tax is coming from on my products," he said. "People need to know that so I have a fighting chance on my end."

On April 2, President Donald Trump imposed a 10% baseline tariff on all imports into the US, as well as additional tariffs on dozens of trading partners. Though some of the higher tariffs — with the exception of those on China and some on Mexico and Canada — are on pause, the sweeping 10% tariffs are still in place. And prices are starting to go up.

From brick-and-mortar retailers to online small businesses, many have told Business Insider that the tariffs are forcing them to pass the cost to consumers, and it's not because they want to.

To make matters worse for smaller operations, they do not have the same bargaining power with suppliers or cash flow as larger retailers like Walmart. Suppliers in some manufacturing hubs like China are also seeing ever-shrinking margins to help absorb the tariff shock.

"Small businesses are basically in danger of going out of business because of these high tariffs," Peter Cohan, associate professor of management at Babson College and a venture capitalist, told BI, "And they're trying to preserve the trust of their customers by being very transparent about why they're raising the prices."

"Maybe they're going to lose customers because of the higher rates, but at least being transparent will help reduce the damage," Cohan added.

Larger businesses may also have considered such transparency measures. After reports that Amazon is going to start displaying how much tariffs are contributing to the price of goods on its platform, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the idea a "hostile and political act." The e-commerce giant denied that it planned to display the cost of tariffs, saying its low-price section, Haul, had considered it for some items but then jettisoned the idea.

Chinese fast-fashion giants Shein and Temu — most affected by the 145% tariffs on China and the canceled de minimus exemptions — posted identical customer notices on their websites, saying that that there will be "price adjustments" because their "operating expenses have gone up" under "recent changes in global trade rules and tariffs."

At the end of April, Temu started adding "import charges" at checkout, which can double the price of the item. By May, Temu's main website appeared to have blocked US customers from seeing products shipped from China, and the site is filled with products marked "local" to signify they are at a warehouse in the US.

"Displaying tariff costs directly on product pages can offer strategic advantages for platforms like Temu and Shein," Nasim Mousavi, assistant professor at Georgia State University Robinson College of Business, told BI. "By itemizing tariffs, these platforms frame price increases as the result of external policy rather than their own pricing decisions."

"This transparency can enhance customer trust, reinforce a value-oriented brand image, and foster the perception that the platform is advocating on behalf of the consumer," Mousavi added.

According to a survey of 1,850 US adult citizens conducted between May 2 and 5 by the Economist and YouGov, 75% of those surveyed think that Trump's tariffs will increase their prices, and 61% would like businesses to display how much of a purchase price goes toward paying tariffs.

"The obvious reason why the White House wouldn't want businesses to show tariff costs is because it makes it obvious how much their policy is costing consumers," said Cohan. "It's going to drive down the poll ratings because consumers will be extremely aware of how much more they're paying and who's causing them to pay it."