I didn’t choose Professional Communication at RMIT because I dreamed of inheriting a cleaning company. I chose it simply because it felt right for me. It wasn’t until my second year, when my father founded Tina Services, that I realized the missing piece in what he was building was exactly what I was learning to contribute.
He didn’t let me walk straight from graduation into the family business. Instead, he encouraged me to work elsewhere first in both small and large companies, in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi so I could understand how different systems operate and how different people think before I learned his way of doing things. Looking back, I see that as its own quiet act of love: he believed in me enough to let me leave, trusting that I would return stronger because of it.
When I finally returned, leading the Marketing Communications and Business Development department, I quickly learned that being “con gái sếp” (the boss’s daughter) was not a privilege; it was pressure. Every decision I made was measured against my father’s. Every misstep felt like proof, in the eyes of those watching, that I had not earned my place.
The staff who had been with him since the beginning more than a hundred of whom stand beside us today quietly waited to see whether I understood their world or only my own. Earning their trust did not happen in a single moment. It happened slowly, in the way RMIT taught me to communicate: not by speaking louder, but by learning their language how they approach problems, what they value, and what they fear losing.
The same people who once tried to go around me eventually started coming to me before client negotiations and campaign decisions. Earning trust also meant proving that I did not need to become a copy of my father. While he built the company through instinct and decades of relationships, I brought new tools, technologies, and networks from my years elsewhere, carefully adapting them around the people who were already here rather than forcing change upon them.
My father often reminds me that everything our family has today exists because of the employees who show up and work with their hands, quietly, every day. Society still looks at their work and says, “They clean because they couldn’t do anything better,” without realizing that, without them, the hospitals, malls, and schools we move through every day could hardly function.
He has told me that every decision I make will affect the livelihoods of these employees and their families, so every decision must be considered carefully. It is the responsibility he has carried since the first day of Tina Services, when the company began with four employees and one small office, built from nothing but his own hard-earned experience. It is the responsibility I now want to carry forward.
He didn’t let me walk straight from graduation into the family business. Instead, he encouraged me to work elsewhere first in both small and large companies, in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi so I could understand how different systems operate and how different people think before I learned his way of doing things. Looking back, I see that as its own quiet act of love: he believed in me enough to let me leave, trusting that I would return stronger because of it.
When I finally returned, leading the Marketing Communications and Business Development department, I quickly learned that being “con gái sếp” (the boss’s daughter) was not a privilege; it was pressure. Every decision I made was measured against my father’s. Every misstep felt like proof, in the eyes of those watching, that I had not earned my place.
The staff who had been with him since the beginning more than a hundred of whom stand beside us today quietly waited to see whether I understood their world or only my own. Earning their trust did not happen in a single moment. It happened slowly, in the way RMIT taught me to communicate: not by speaking louder, but by learning their language how they approach problems, what they value, and what they fear losing.
The same people who once tried to go around me eventually started coming to me before client negotiations and campaign decisions. Earning trust also meant proving that I did not need to become a copy of my father. While he built the company through instinct and decades of relationships, I brought new tools, technologies, and networks from my years elsewhere, carefully adapting them around the people who were already here rather than forcing change upon them.
My father often reminds me that everything our family has today exists because of the employees who show up and work with their hands, quietly, every day. Society still looks at their work and says, “They clean because they couldn’t do anything better,” without realizing that, without them, the hospitals, malls, and schools we move through every day could hardly function.
He has told me that every decision I make will affect the livelihoods of these employees and their families, so every decision must be considered carefully. It is the responsibility he has carried since the first day of Tina Services, when the company began with four employees and one small office, built from nothing but his own hard-earned experience. It is the responsibility I now want to carry forward.
