Organizing a gala dinner for 1,000 guests at the Shangri-La involves more moving parts than most clients fully account for in advance. Venue coordination, lighting and sound design, entertainment timed to mark a decade of a company’s existence, catering executed across multiple service windows. CEOMAN Entertainment handled the Sijiyoumei tenth anniversary on exactly those terms, according to the company’s own account of the evening. That scale is representative of what the company does.
CEOMAN stands for “Creative Event Organizer” and “Mastermind Architect Navigator.” Sherman Heng Guan Jing, the company’s founder and chief executive, launched the business in Melaka in 2015, trading initially under the name CEO Entertainment. He incorporated CEOMAN Event Sdn Bhd in late 2017. The company’s registered entity is now SAT Entertainment Group Sdn Bhd, with CEOMAN as the operating brand. Operations shifted toward Kuala Lumpur as the client base expanded.
The portfolio CEOMAN covers is wider than most event firms of comparable size. Fan meetings for Asian entertainment acts and large-scale concerts occupy one end of the work. Artist exhibitions and corporate events fill the other. Each format demands a different logic. A fan meeting is built around the relationship between artist and audience in ways a corporate anniversary dinner is not. An artist exhibition requires curatorial judgment alongside run-of-show discipline. CEOMAN’s stated position is that working across varied formats produces stronger organizers than concentrating within a single one.
In 2019, Entrepreneur Insight magazine recognized Heng among the 100 Most Influential Young Entrepreneurs in Malaysia. The award gala, organized by Armani Media Sdn Bhd at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, drew around 1,300 attendees and was officiated by senior Malaysian government officials. Around the same period, Heng launched Onitez, described in his professional profile as an online event platform. The decision did not carry obvious significance in 2019. Several years later, with physical events suspended across the industry for an extended period, companies that had already developed digital capacity held a structural advantage over those building it from scratch under pressure.
Heng’s activity outside CEOMAN has grown into a substantial parallel structure. He chairs the Melaka Creative Arts and Culture Association, a community role that connects him to arts development in the state where his commercial career began. He holds a position on the CEO Faculty at Portman Education Group in Malaysia, participating alongside executives from finance, media, hospitality, and other fields in the institution’s business curriculum. Through Crown Social Responsibility, an initiative he founded, Heng has built a philanthropy component into the wider group.
He founded BANM Capital Sdn Bhd in January 2021 as a holding and investment vehicle. He also took on the role of Managing Director at The Alley Malaysia, the beverage brand. Taken together, the picture is of a founder who builds outward across industries as much as upward within any single one.
What that expansion means for clients who engage CEOMAN for their events is something each project settles in its own way. The Sijiyoumei gala at the Shangri-La, with 1,000 guests and a client marking ten years in business, is the kind of project the company points to when asked what it can deliver.
