An empty shop can look like a warning. To Dato’ Liaw Choon Liang, during the Asian financial crisis, it could also look like an address. As other retailers slowed down, the founder of Focus Point pushed beyond Johor into the Klang Valley. Shopping mall space became easier to secure. So did people to staff it. A difficult economy had changed the price of getting noticed.
There is a pleasing complication in Liaw’s career. The entrepreneur who made a conspicuous bet on a vast shop also learned, through an expensive bakery experiment, that a smaller shop could be the better idea. His story has room for ambition and revision. The square footage depends on what you are selling.
The first investor was his mother
Liaw grew up in Batu Pahat, Johor, moved to Kuala Lumpur for A-levels and spent three years working in a small optical shop in Klang. In 1989, a friend opening a supermarket in Muar invited him to start an eyewear business there. His mother supplied RM20,000. Liaw and his brother opened Focus Vision Care Centre as a small counter.
The family money is an important detail. Before the listed company, the franchise network or the succession of retail brands, someone close to him had to be willing to back a young shopkeeper. His mother’s contribution bought an opening. The brothers still had to discover what they could make of it.
Liaw’s later account of his beginnings is refreshingly free of destiny. He initially took the work as a way to earn a living. Interest developed as he understood the business and watched it grow. In a 2019 interview, he put it simply: “My love for eyewear grew along with my business.”
That is a useful corrective to the idea that an entrepreneur must arrive with a lifelong calling already prepared. Liaw’s attachment followed experience. The counter gave him something practical to learn from: products, customers and the daily evidence that a shop could support another shop.
When the neighbours went quiet
In 1994, Liaw moved to Johor Bahru and opened at Holiday Plaza. Then came the decision to expand into the Klang Valley during the 1997/98 crisis. By 1999, he was taking on a 15,000-square-foot optical shop at Mid Valley Megamall. The outlet entered the Malaysia Book of Records for its size.
A shop on that scale does more than hold stock. It announces the retailer to people who have never bought anything there. In Liaw’s case, the move made physical space part of the argument for the brand. A modest counter had become a business prepared to occupy a conspicuous piece of a major shopping mall.
His explanation for expanding in a downturn was practical: desirable locations and staff became available. He returned to that thinking in 2016, planning further openings while other retailers held back. The attraction was the opportunity created by a quieter field. The risk, of course, remained his to carry.
A way for employees to own the keys
Expansion also posed a less photogenic question: who would run the next outlet? Liaw’s franchise approach gave experienced employees a route into ownership. People who already understood the stock, customers and working habits of the business could become franchisees. Their experience inside the company mattered to the selection.
The change required more than handing over a signboard. Employees accustomed to a salary were being asked to take responsibility for rent, inventory and a workforce. Liaw described reluctance at the beginning. A familiar workplace can become a rather different proposition when its bills acquire your name.
The early conversions helped demonstrate the model, and the company arranged financing support and payment schemes. There was a commercial logic to the arrangement as well as an opportunity for staff: the group could expand with operators who had already learned its routines. Ownership supplied a new reason to care about a late delivery.
This part of Liaw’s story is less about the founder making every decision himself than about finding people able to make decisions at the next counter. Growth demands that transfer. A chain needs a name customers recognise, but it also needs someone responsible for opening the doors each morning.
The company reached the ACE Market on 23 August 2010 and transferred to the Main Market on 5 January 2023. Those dates mark another change in the job: the founder of a family-backed counter was now responsible for a business with public shareholders. Each new venture would appear in results that investors could examine, alongside the performance of the established shops.
Then he put bread on the balance sheet
Focus Point entered the food and beverage business through Komugi in 2012. A Japanese bakery brand made for an unexpected companion to eyewear retail. For Liaw, it offered another business that could be developed and franchised. It also supplied a set of lessons that experience in optical shops had not settled in advance.
The early years were costly. The bakery operation had to learn its own economics. By 2022, Liaw was describing a turning point in 2017, when wholesale was added. Komugi supplied pastries to corporate customers including FamilyMart, Starbucks and Don Don Donki, alongside its retail stores.
Those customers changed the shape of the opportunity. A bakery could sell through another company’s network, rather than depend entirely on visitors walking past its own display. Liaw was looking for more corporate buyers and examining street shoplots for retail expansion. Each route asked a different question of the same kitchen.
Persistence, in this account, includes changing the arrangement. Staying in a business does not oblige an operator to keep every early assumption. A founder can believe there is demand for the product and still discover that the premises, costs or route to the customer need considerable work.
The bakery story also resists a neat happy ending. For 2025, the food and beverage division reported a RM3.1 million loss before tax, following a profit the previous year. In August 2026, improving efficiency and narrowing those losses remained part of Liaw’s stated agenda. A turnaround requires maintenance.
The boardroom has other doors
Alongside the company, Liaw built a working life in retail associations. He served as deputy president of the Malaysia Retail Chain Association from 2012 to 2014, then president from 2014 to 2016. His later roles include lifetime honorary president and chairman of its Branding Education Charity Foundation.
In 2025, he became an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Business and Communication at INTI International University. He also serves as deputy president of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Kuala Lumpur and Selangor. These roles place him among other operators, educators and business organisations, beyond his own group’s outlets.
His language about achievement gives employees a place in the picture. Accepting recognition connected with the MRCA-8TV entrepreneurship awards, he credited the people behind Focus Point and their work through good and bad periods. It is an appropriate emphasis for a business whose name appears over many doors he cannot personally stand behind.
At that conference, his account of business responsibility used four headings: education, employment, entrepreneurship and empathy. The group’s partnership with The Lost Food Project had contributed nearly 8,500 kilograms of food for families facing food insecurity. The bakery operation had found another destination for its output.
A mountain with no quarterly target
There is also Liaw the eyewear collector and returning visitor to Mount Kinabalu. In 2015, he talked about taking part in the retail association’s annual charity climb, which raised money for an orphanage in Kota Kinabalu. The previous year’s effort had raised more than RM20,000.
One memory has the welcome untidiness of an actual holiday photograph. After his first summit, the climbers looked back at their picture and noticed a rock behind them shaped like an orangutan. They had taken the customary victory shot; the mountain had quietly supplied an extra guest.
“So pace yourself and enjoy the beauty of nature.”
Liaw on climbing Mount Kinabalu, 2015
That advice complicates the image of a founder always accelerating. On the mountain, he recommended taking time and returning for a different experience. There is no need to turn every climb into a management lesson. The odd rock in the photograph is enjoyable enough on its own.
The next address is still on his mind
By the first half of 2026, Focus Point reported revenue of RM152.8 million and profit after tax of RM18.2 million. Revenue had risen 4.9% from the comparable period; profit had risen 11.3%. The optical business drove the improvement, while food and beverage remained a task requiring attention.
In September, Liaw described plans for 20 store openings during the year. He discussed more street shops in new residential areas, alongside mall locations, with projects in East Malaysia and the Klang Valley. These were plans with work still to do. The location choices show a retailer continuing to reconsider where his customers might be.
The contrast with the early counter is considerable, but one question has survived the distance: where should the next shop go? Liaw has answered it with a supermarket counter, a large mall outlet, franchises and neighbourhood premises. His career is full of addresses. The interesting part is how often he has been willing to try a different one.