The pursuit of an entrepreneurial journey in Vietnam from one of the nation’s pioneering batch of expat entrepreneurs
Rick Yvanovich is a Chartered Management Account with over thirty years of diverse experience spanning Oil and Gas, Hospitality, Retail, Telecommunications, FMCG and Financial Services, to name a few.
Posted to Vietnam in 1990, Rick was one of the pioneering foreigners to set foot and live in the country. He has since continued to live and work in Vietnam. In 1994, he founded TRG International and has scaled his startup into the international company it is today.
TRG International is a market-leading professional services firm focusing on delivering intelligent business software and solutions to over 1,000 global enterprises.
1. What sparked your entrepreneurial journey and the founding of TRG International?
In 1990, I was posted by BP exploration to Vietnam as a Finance Manager. Four years later, the company wanted to send me back to London in the wake of declining oil prices. I was having a good time in Vietnam and saw little reason to go back to London, so I took a voluntary redundancy package based on my expat salary and retired.
The plan lasted for roughly a week until I was bored stiff. The vendor Systems Union, who had supplied us with our accounting system (SunSystems), asked me if I wished to continue doing what I had been doing inadvertently for some years — selling and implementing SunSystems to all the oil companies in Vietnam.
Back in the day, there was little to do so I used to implement the system for my peers at other oil companies during the weekends. The rest, they say, is history.
2. Can you provide us with some insights into TRG International’s recent activities in the IT, talent, and startup space in Vietnam?
Currently, we primarily do four things. The first and central aspect is IT. We provide all sorts of systems such as Accounting, ERP, Manufacturing, Retail, Hospitality, Procurement, Performance Management — the list goes on.
Second is IT Talent, where we provide assessments that are used for people-related decisions to hire the right people and to develop management and leadership.
The third aspect is a pivot into the F&B space. Our first brand is PJ’s Coffee of New Orleans (visit our first store at Level B in Vincom Shopping Mall).
Lastly, we have startups. We were once a startup ourselves some twenty years ago, and in the last few decades, we’ve built many more, invested in as well as mentored others. Our ODC is a mix of IT, and it is a start-up in itself. We have a few startups humming along or are about to launch, in verticals including Music, HR, Media and F&B POS.
3. You’ve achieved a huge amount of success as an entrepreneur, scaling TRG International from a startup to an international company today. What’s the best piece of advice you would give to an aspiring entrepreneur?
Never give up. Have Grit — the power of passion and perseverance Angela Duckworth calls it in her book of the same title.
4. We understand you were one of the pioneering foreigners living in Vietnam in the 1990s. Share with us your experience observing Vietnam’s growth and development since then.
We used to play a game back in the early days. Take US$100 for the weekend and spend it on something you really like and thought was useful. Given that there was nothing to buy and we were on full expenses, it was pretty impossible to do. Alternatively, you could lie down in Dong Khoi street at the corner right in front of the Opera House and be deafened by the silence from a lack of traffic and the occasional bell of a bicycle.
Today, you wouldn’t last long lying on the road. Not to mention the countless malls doing their very best job to ensure you spend your US$100 as quickly as possible. Traffic has evidently grown tremendously, along with the accompanying noise and pollution. Real estate has boomed, and Vietnam attracts millions of tourists. You no longer need a permit to move from province to province and the variety of airlines leaves you spoilt for choice.
We’ve seen the birth of laws, taxes and the trickle to a flood of foreign direct investments. Incredibly, the startup scene has really started up and Vietnam is beginning to birth its fair share of entrepreneurs. It is only a matter of time before we see the unicorns.
5. What inspired you to shift TRG International’s focus to Vietnam?
It would be great if I simply said I excel at strategy and it was just so obvious to me. But truth is, I retired, I got bored, I did what I enjoyed doing — implementing accounting systems — and I guess I became good at it. It was all going well using European and Singaporean resources for projects outside Vietnam (in the first decade we primarily did projects outside of Vietnam).
If only one could use a Vietnamese resource and be able to charge a discounted international rate, providing a resource with the same technical skills. This had to be doable. Thus, we started the journey to built up Vietnam’s resource base. Today, we’ve got some 250 Vietnamese consultants and developers.
Our Vietnamese consulting team visits dozens of countries a year and we support our 80-country customer base out of Vietnam. Have we perfected the formula? Of course not. It’s still taking a very long time to build the person we want, three to five years on average. We need to get that figure down to less than a year and we believe this is very doable.
6. You mentioned TRG International is current one of the only two AWS (Amazon Web Services) partners in Vietnam. Could you elaborate further?
Today it is called Cloud, though in the late 90s’ we were doing more or less the same thing when we launched literally the first eBusiness in South East Asia, offering hosted solutions such as ERP. We built it up to more than 50 customers before shutting it down when things imploded with the dot-com bust. Funnily enough, the ERP we hosted at the time recently picked up again in 2014 to launch in Vietnam.
We currently partner with AWS and Microsoft Azure, as cloud AWS and Azure are two of the big boys. Although AWS was not present in Vietnam, we partnered with them as all our cloud clients are not in Vietnam but across the region, in Europe and the Middle East.
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Rick is one of the high-profile speakers presenting at Echelon Vietnam 2016 on the 18th – 19th November. Catch him at the Future Stage. Don’t miss your chance to meet Rick and other key personalities in the tech ecosystem. Grab your tickets here!
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