The Brands Vietnam Journey #1 - The Fateful Start

I became the Content Leader at Brands Vietnam for a short period of 5 months. The Brands Vietnam Journey is a series of 3 articles which summarize... the Brands Vietnam journey, from what I have to do to prepare myself to my stumbles along the way to the end of the journey. 

You should read this if: 

- You are an average guy (university degree, no big background) who want to become a team leader within 3 years of working. Stick around, you maybe able to learn something. 

- You are a new team leader. Congratulation. Now let's see some of my novice leading mistake so you can avoid it. 

- You are an HR personnel who's looking for a management level candidate (Or you read my CV and came here). This blog should give you a lot of information for your consideration. 

A good looking-ish picture - courtesy of Brands Vietnam.

The impossible

Fate contributes immensely to me working at Brands Vietnam. In order to join Brands Vietnam team, you need to have 2 abilities: marketing and writing. Unfortunately for me, I have none of those.

Even with 3 years of Marketing and an RMIT degree, I don't have a lot of experiences. Working mostly in start-up environment and jumping around a lot, I gather a lot of know-how in different areas of marketing, but shallow in terms of knowledge. 

As for writing, I have never like it and I hate reading even more. Couple of months doing Facebook page management and 1 script writing class are all that I have under my belt. It would be a bit insane for anyone who looked at my unimpressive CV and would hire me for a Content Leader position. Well, that's where fate comes in. 

Fate - the perfect wingman

It was somewhere between February and March - my last month as an Idea Executive at ECOE, a co-worker suggest that I do something with my spare time. She was the one who inspired me to create this blog and wrote my first articles. It wasn't so that I can become a famous blogger or I would write a book. At that time, it was just for fun. By the time I finished writing my 3rd article, I saw that Brands Vietnam was hiring. With extremely high hope but also prepared mentally that i would fail, I put the link to my blog in my CV. And they called. 

Meeting Mr. Nghi - Founder of Brands Vietnam is an honor. The man gives out the most enthusiastic and positive energy. Couple that with his incredible knowledge, I was surprised that he was impressed with me and my writing. He said he still having some doubts about my marketing and Vietnamese writing abilities as well as the speed. He gave me an assignment, within a day, write 1 article about anything related to the conflict of Milo and Ovaltine. And I did it. 

Lessons learned

Looking back, I learned that nothing is wasteful. I was able to impress him in the interview by interpreting my knowledge of story-telling techniques that I learned in script-writing class to answer some questions. The 3 blog posts that I wrote to escape temporary boredom turned out to be the deciding factor to me getting the job. Fate plays a huge role from the very beginning, but you have to do SOMETHING! Sitting around and wondering where you would go, how you would turn out will never get you anywhere. If you're bored, just do literally anything. It may be useful sooner than you think. 

Quanny Nguyen