Kevin Ngo '20
March 5, 2025
I graduated in 2020 with a degree in Finance and right after Santa Clara University, I spent four years in the U.S getting my master's degree and also working at Oracle. I wasn't excelling at my job as an accountant and I didn't feel fulfilled. I felt stuck at a job.
It was during that time, I saw the opportunity for me to switch my career to entrepreneurship. My family has a business that has been operating since 1993. My grandma also had a business. I thought I could also give it a try. So that was when I decided to go back to school and I went to University of San Francisco for a degree in entrepreneurship management. After I graduated, I went back to Vietnam in 2023 and I have been working at my family business ever since and I find that investing in our business has been deeply fulfilling. I started out as a business analyst and then I moved to marketing and now I lead the digital transformation team.
Once I started working at our family business, I was able to convince the board of directors to invest in new production facilities, and now we have one currently under construction. My family business works in a couple different fields including packaging, furniture, and real estate. We manufacture things here in Vietnam and we export to the U.S market with some of our notable clients being Disney, Crayola, Home Depot, and Ikea. If you go to one of those stores, you might encounter a product that we manufactured. When I joined the business, we were in a stable position but soon, we saw increasing competition from the local competitors that caught up with the technology and also from producers from India.
"Sometimes problems can be really meaningful data points."
In Vietnam, historically we were the only business competing with China for production but now we also had to compete locally and with Indian companies. This was a rising issue. So, when we saw that problem I initiated a discussion with the board of directors about starting a new smart factory. In Vietnam right now there are no smart packaging factories yet. I believed it was time for us to focus on the higher end of the global market.
With these smart factories, we are able to produce more complex, complicated items which keeps us ahead of the competition. I traveled to China and met with one of the pioneering packaging machinery producers and we formed a partnership. They will help us build our smart factory and in return, we will be their distributor of the Smart Factory Solutions here in Vietnam.
The decision to join the family business, for me, was an unintuitive one, but at the same time, such a right fit. Initially I didn't want to. I wanted a separate and independent career path and joining the family business was a tough decision because, for me, I thought that was an easy route because it is always there.
I considered joining another company to work for in the U.S or maybe a different company in Vietnam, but then my parents convinced me to help out the family business and they wanted to give me this opportunity. This ability to continue what my family and parents have put their life into and being able to invest in it in a meaningful way that continues on with their work has been very rewarding.
I learned that it’s in my best interest to be flexible, be humble, and be open to changes. That's what I would say. Sometimes problems can be really meaningful data points. My difficulties at Oracle led me to the realization that this is not for me. This friction can seem like a problem, but maybe it's communicating to us a different route that opens up new possibilities.