40 Under 40 2021: Joscelin Kwek, Muse & Motif

Joscelin Kwek

Managing director and founder
Muse & Motif
Singapore

From her career beginnings in the mid noughties as a PR assistant, Joscelin Kwek has worked across various communications practices in mid- and large-sized agencies and in-house roles acquiring skill sets that would ultimately lead to her launching the communications agency that she runs today, Muse & Motif.

Prior to founding Muse & Motif in early 2020, Kwek transformed the fortunes of another agency, Prospr Communications, where within eight months of becoming manager she generated 42% of its revenue by expanding its scope of services. Kwek has repeated that success with her own agency Muse & Motif. The agency successfully achieved seven-figure revenue by the end of its first financial year, representing 35% growth across 6.5 months despite the challenge of the ongoing pandemic. Better still, in 2021, year-on-year revenue increased by 70% and net profit by 30%. The pitch-conversion rate also increased from 67% in 2020 to 85% in 2021 under Kwek’s leadership.

As a leader, Kwek aims to empower her team to grow their skill sets, as well as rank and form their own teams. To enable this, Kwek came up with the idea to introduce an individualised optimisation performance metric. Each employee is tagged to an optimisation rate based on their job band and salary, and the individual’s performance on functional and core skill sets are monitored against a unique scorecard designed for the agency. With targets met, each employee will continue to increase their headcount with the goal of managing their own team eventually. 

Committed to giving back, Kwek devotes 10% of Muse & Motif's resources to pro-bono work supporting causes that matter. This includes Forest Conservation Fund (FCF), a not-for-profit foundation that aims to decentralise conservation by empowering local communities and private sector actors to protect forests under their control.