From Foodie to Founder in Vietnam, Dao Chi Anh’s Story

Join us on the Growth Leaders Podcast as we dive deep into the remarkable journey of Dao Chi Anh, a trailblazing entrepreneur with a passion for food and wellness. From her unconventional career start in sales and marketing to founding multiple successful ventures in Vietnam’s food and beverage industry, her story is nothing short of inspiring. Tune in to learn how she balances entrepreneurship with motherhood, the challenges of fundraising while pregnant, and her exciting plans for the future as she leads larger teams and ventures into new horizons. Don’t miss this engaging conversation filled with valuable insights and a dash of entrepreneurial spirit!

Discussion Topics: From Foodie to Founder in Vietnam

• Starting On Her Journey
• Selling Her Business
• Learning About Growing a Business
• Birth of a Child vs. Birth of a Business
• Shifting Businesses
• Finding Her Interest
• Managing Time After Having Twins
• Greatest Learning About Self

Transcript: From Foodie to Founder in Vietnam

Alison: Welcome. I’m so happy to have you on the Growth Leaders Podcast.

Dao Chi Anh: Happy to be here. It’s my first time on somebody else’s podcast.

Alison: Ooh, nice. I wanna talk with you a little bit about your journey what’s happened and what you’ve learned along the way. And if I go, if I look at the very beginning of your career, you started in quite a traditional way in sales and marketing. You were working in a really large Japanese corporation, but then, in a fair way. Short period of time you left and within six years you started four companies in the F&B space in Vietnam. That’s pretty prolific, right? This was the Cafe Group Kitchen, Art Yung, Taiwanese Tea House, and Dining, which you created with Golden Gate Group. And then D C A Holdings, which was Vietnam’s first creative food and beverage agency. So that’s crazy.

Starting On Her Journey

Dao Chi Anh: The enthusiasm that I have for cooking was the first motivation to go into the food space. So when I moved back to Vietnam the food space was rather limited sometimes 10 years ago. So I find myself wanting to bring more food. And beverage options to the people here in Vietnam, especially the younger generation that have a wider exposure to Western and international culture.

So that’s why whatever I created, was very fully embraced quickly by the market. And It’s addictive. Like you, you’ve done one successful concept, you will start thinking about the next. And then there’s just so many things to do in the food space, different cuisines, different styles of serving. And from food, I went to drink and then back to food. I went from Asian cuisine to Western cuisine.

Alison: So clearly very creative. I’m just curious, what led you to just love food? Did you grow up loving cooking?

Dao Chi Anh: I would think I was a late bloomer for becoming a foodie cause I grew up pretty oblivious to food until I started working. In my corporate job. I was still quite oblivious to everyday meals. It was just a way for me to get by and then back to work, back to life until I had the chance to travel to Europe, to Spain for my sister’s wedding.

So many flavours. People are so relaxed. It was always a time to eat and drink in Spain, and I just got so amazed by the colours, the flavours, and the love that people had for their food. When I returned to Singapore where I was working and living, I just missed that feeling so much that I tried to recreate it. On my own time, I bought cookbooks and I started to learn cooking. And I guess that led me down the rabbit hole of getting into food and becoming passionate about it. Cooking.

Alison: I know that one of these businesses that you started with Golden Gate Group you actually grew it significantly and then you sold it two years later. What was that like as a leader?

Selling Her Business

Dao Chi Anh: I think about it, for the first two years I was still very possessive over the business and everything related to products and how we would market it, branding, but it would still, it would be limiting the business from scaling if I was controlling every minute detail. I feel that either you stay very involved or you just hand off completely. As for me, there’s no in-between.

It’s maybe still something that I need to learn, but I just need to be in there, like hands dirty, mind completely being in that space. So I think that it was a good learning experience, to know and to let go and to see if they could do it without me. And of course, they could. It may not be the exact same original shape style and feel, but it’s still alive. It’s still doing well today, six years on, and it’s still growing, so I must have done something right.

Alison: Nice. What was your biggest learning about growing a business?

Learning About Growing a Business

Dao Chi Anh: It has to be something you’re good at, that you have so much fun and flow doing because, for every single business that I made, it started out of, I. Passion. It started out of my own innate need to have it created in this world. So that is a very strong drive to make it happen.

After starting all those businesses, another thing I learned is that it’s very different to be. Starting a business and running a business. So I could be very good in the first six months to one year, but. Two years on, three years on, I may lose the steam, I may lose the drive because the company needs very different things by then. It needs more operational skills, it needs more capital, runway, and a lot of things to think about and that requires patience and a lot of love for that business for you to not. Lose the drive and the energy.

Alison: It’s a lot of energy.

Dao Chi Anh: And people just need you.

Alison: Now in this period of time, you then got married in 2014. And in 2016, you gave birth to yet another baby. This was a baby boy. So after the four businesses, you had your first child. Talk to me Mom, founder. So how do you compare the different types of birth and growing pains?

Birth of a Child vs. Birth of a Business

Dao Chi Anh: I think it’s quite similar in the sense that there’s a phase of easy preparation. Just more intention setting, knowing yes, you’re doing this and having a few people know about it and quietly prepare with you. And then comes the phase where you start to need more people to be involved. And then the final raise towards birth is when you have to have a plan ready, that time it would be at least a 30-day plan counting from the day you enter the hospital to the end of the first month of having the baby.

It should be very well planned and everyone should know what they have to do. The hospital will need to know what they want, what we want, and a birth plan. And then once we get home everyone should know their role so that they could help us. And it’s the same with businesses, I think leading because I do a lot of restaurants, so we always have This two week period before.

Alison: Star opening. That’s really intense, but also really exciting. And then I would throw everything else aside and then just be really in a mission mode and go into every minute detail with my team. And we tackle it day after day. I love that. I love that. So much and I’m fascinated by the fact that when you were pregnant, you were also fundraising. What was that like?

Dao Chi Anh: It was probably one of the hardest experiences to go fundraising during the second trimester of pregnancy. I was not small anymore. We had to walk a lot. I remember being out. Breath, just talking cause having a baby, you would need my oxygen and are generally more out of breath.

But I was also more emotional, so it was not easy. I felt stressed out a lot and I feel like being pregnant made me feel the need to show the investors even more. It doesn’t bother me with pregnancy to show them that I’m all game. I’m this founder. I’m all game to raise this funding to scale my business and this pregnancy is not gonna be in the way at all so putting up such a tough image was really tiring.

Alison: Did people question your dedication to the business?

Dao Chi Anh: I think 90% of the people I met were male, so they did not really comment about the pregnancy, but some of them asked if I would be taking a baby break and what I would do for the business to be functional while I was away. So some questions like that popped up and yeah it just felt like I had to. Make the pregnancy the most unconcerning matter.

Alison: You continued to start new businesses and in 2018 and 2020, you started two others that were different. So you shifted from the F&B phase to businesses that were more focused on women in health. Talk about that, like what led to that transition, what excited you about starting those businesses?
Tell us about those businesses.

Shifting Businesses

Dao Chi Anh: I think after four or five years of being in a very high rush of studying restaurant after restaurant and being very overworked. I got more interested in quality living, especially a nutritious diet. After two years of going down that rabbit hole, I pretty much stopped everything else. Like I did not, I. Do any F&B business. During that time, I just focused on studying and training and after I finished all those certificates, I wrote my first app, it’s a fitness app.

So I wrote the exercises, I filmed the exercise videos, I wrote a meal plan and I put it all together in an app and we launched it. And what’s it called? It was called t g l the Good Life. And it’s pretty much everything I knew at that time about a good way of living. I provided meditation, audio workout videos, and nutrition meal plans, and I pretty much maintained it very religiously for I think at least two years, three years. Did you find that interest, was it, did that make you wanna be more of an entrepreneur in that space, or was it that you also saw a need and an opportunity in the market?

Finding Her Interest

Dao Chi Anh: I think both are interested in wellness, I looked up a lot of different services, but most of them are still in the West and women in Vietnam, if they want to exercise, still have very limited options. So it’s mostly just going to the gym. Also for a nutrition space, there was really an empty space, like what to eat. Everyone was just talking about a low-cap diet, but. It’s not really the only way to eat healthy, not necessarily the best way to eat healthy either.

So I just wanted to be a voice, a different voice, a new voice so people could try. And Indeed a lot of people followed I created a group about wellness living, and I think I gained up to 17,000 members and I was just writing and sharing every day, just out of passion, and yeah.

Alison: And so that business, you just shut it down or did you monetize it in some other way?

Dao Chi Anh: Actually it morphed into a new business that is now still run by me. It’s called her vn. So after about two years or so, I partnered with a new company called HOV. They are a venture, a VC funding. Founders in Asia. And then, I’m pretty close as friends with the owner of HOV. And yeah, we decided to take the app, rebrand it, and make it into a women’s kind of media space.

We created a store selling wellness products for women modeling after brands like Goop in the US, or. Yeah, mainly I was very inspired by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Go Side and other wellness sites that are targeted to women and it’s been very fun doing the business and it took time to build up. Oh, that’s exciting.

Alison: So I don’t see, hear any ego. I hear love and passion for what I’m doing and a willingness to work with other people, which I think is just great to hear.

Dao Chi Anh: I love working with other people. I feel like there’s so much energy and drive you gain by just working with someone like-minded and or someone who compliments your skill set. I really enjoy partnerships and collaborations and even in marketing, I always seek out chances To co-brand with other businesses, other people just bring me a lot of joy. So my last personal question to you is, it’s about 2021 and now you gave birth to twins. And I wanna just know it’s hard, how have you been able to manage your time?

Managing Time After Having Twins

Dao Chi Anh: The twin pregnancy happened during COVID-19, so we were already at home, both me and my husband. So it was a very special period where all of us were not working in the office, which allowed us to have space for the delivery and the birth. I also took two years off from everything. Just very little engagement in all businesses. It slowed me down about two years, but I’m happy with that. No regrets. Very nice.

Alison: I like that. I’ve often thought, you can have it all, maybe not all at the same time. So learning how to pace since the sequence, doesn’t mean you’ve lost it, it just means that you may, there might be times when you change priorities.

Dao Chi Anh: Yeah, and it’s not forever. Like I felt uneasy in the beginning taking time off ’cause I’ve never done that for such a long time. But over a month or two it became easier to accept that you don’t have to do everything now. And my husband at that time told me, Your full-time job now is pregnancy. You’re doing something and it’s growing babies.

Alison: Absolutely. Just if you look back, what would you say has been your greatest learning about yourself?

Greatest Learning About Self

Dao Chi Anh: I think the whole journey of starting businesses, ending businesses, or starting partnerships, ending partnerships is like having relationships as well. You, and every relationship you learn a lot from the experience itself. I think it helped me go deeper into learning about myself knowing that I’m not doing this because I want to show anything special about myself, but I’m doing this because it’s pure joy, because it brings joy to others around me.

It brings joy to my customers or to my team, and knowing that it is a simple reason like that is good enough to do what I do. Be, I guess I become less and less resolved oriented, but more flow-oriented and valuing the journey more than the destination. And what about, I think that is the most precious lesson.

Alison: What about the future? What are you most excited about as you look forward to the future as a business leader?

Dao Chi Anh: I think I’m more excited about leading bigger teams ’cause I’ve not done that in the past 10 years in the startup phase, I was always with 10, 20 people. I had a time when I scaled the business and I had more than a thousand staff. But I think I’m learning. To manage a large company, a larger company with a bigger mission, and larger stakeholders. Bigger market.

Now I think I’m in a phase where I want to grow my team and also grow myself more, and to be able to move a larger group of people to do bigger things. So that’s also why I am ending up in the corporate space again. It’s Where I can make more things with what I’ve learned.

Alison: It’s a great circle back into where you started, but in a much bigger environment and with new partners. Yes. This has been great. I’ve loved having this conversation with you. Thank you very much.

Dao Chi Anh: I love having conversations with you anytime. Thank you.

Our Guest: Dao Chi Anh

Dao Chi Anh is a dynamic entrepreneur with a background in sales and marketing. She left her corporate job to start four successful food and beverage companies in Vietnam within just six years, including Cafe Group Kitchen, Art Yung, Taiwanese Tea House and Dining (in collaboration with Golden Gate Group), and Vietnam’s first creative food and beverage agency, DCA Holdings. Her journey exemplifies her entrepreneurial spirit and innovation in the F&B industry.