From a young age I felt drawn to building things that could stand on their own. While still in high school and during my early college years in Anchorage, Alaska, I started a local drop shipping business. I signed up with a large vendor that gave me access to catalogs filled with hundreds and thousands of products. I introduced those items to people in my community, and they placed their orders through me. It was a simple setup, but in those early days it worked well and gave me my first real taste of what it means to connect people with something they want.
After I earned my bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems, I moved to Southern California. Several years later I took a bigger step and opened a physical store of my own, a nail salon. My family bought an existing longtime business that already had a solid foundation. My family members had years of experience in beauty services, and even though I had never worked in that kind of setting before, I felt confident we could make it succeed. I trusted my people skills and my ability to manage time, and I believed those strengths, combined with their know-how, would help the salon grow.
A few months after the salon was running, another opportunity appeared. My family purchased an existing franchise restaurant, part of Lee’s Sandwiches, the largest Vietnamese coffee and sandwiches franchise in the world. This business has been by far the most demanding one I have taken on. Keeping a restaurant operating smoothly every single day calls for constant attention and a steady mindset. We have successfully managed it for more than five years, learning along the way how to handle the pressure that comes with serving customers day after day.
Running both the salon and the restaurant taught me skills that no classroom could fully prepare me for. Time management, people management, risk analysis, accounting, financial analysis, and marketing all became part of my daily practice. These experiences forced me to develop a stronger mindset and showed me the real challenges of operating a business in the real world, the ones that never appear in textbooks.
Looking back, each chapter has deepened my passion for entrepreneurship. I still feel the same drive that first pushed me to start selling products from catalogs in Alaska. The work is never easy, yet every lesson has made me more determined to keep building and improving. That sense of possibility continues to guide me.
