Questionnaire for Assessment 1

Questionnaire for Interviewing the Entrepreneur (these are some of the main issues, students may add
more questions depending upon the possibility of getting more information)
1. When and how did you generate your business idea?
Nam wish to open his own Take Away caf chain from 1
st
year of university (2008) and when he
meet Mr. Duong Hai Ninh with same dream, they plan to create the Urban Station (2011)

He learned from the success of Starbuck
He notice that the Milk tea market is full, customers need new drinks
He notice that Italian Soda, which was only popular in luxury chained at that time, might be
made cheaper
So he create the idea of Urban Station, focusing on Italian Soda, with affordable price for
middle class people, especially students
2. Did you use a business plan?
He has a clear and full business plan from beginning. As he said, the business plan help him to
keep calm when receiving failure, quickly identify the weaknesses of his ideas, which may help
him to resolve the problems. When he fails in the beginning, the business plan help him identify
the problem with Vietnamese culture to create a solution for Urban Station and solve it.
3. How long it took until you reached positive cash flow, break even?
In Year 2, the revenue comes from loss 10 mi/month to break even and gaining profit.
4. Where do you see your business in ten years from now?
Currently, the Urban Station is a partnership business. In ten years, Nam plans to develop it as a
franchise located on all large city of Vietnam, and hopefully start to expand to other nations in
ASEAN. It should be like the name, a station in urban for people to stop and relax everywhere
5. What were the biggest challenges you faced in the initial and later stage?
Biggest problem: The initial capital and the failure (Vietnamese culture prefer having space to
drink coffee. At the beginning, they do not realize this so they create a traditional Take away
Cafe
Later: The Human Resource is the biggest problem, as Urban Station is expanding quickly.
6. What risks do you face on an ongoing basis and how do you cope with them?
Mainly the Operational Risk:
Staffs work unexpectedly, lazy and annoy the customers.
Competitor: Italian Soda & Take Away caf are so popular now, creates a lot of competitors
for Urban Station
Nam predicts that the product life cycle of Caf will end, so he needs to prepare a plan for
change on that situations when people look for a new kind of products
7. Looking back, is there anything that you could have done differently?
As he said, everything is still on his plan from the beginning. The failure is considered as a TEST,
which is also mentioned in his first plan.
8. What are the two important things that have contributed to your success? (Factors for success)
The style and design: The design of Urban Station is unique and beautiful with main theme of
the light sea green color with Londons wonder, combine with urban style decoration such as
graffiti and a red door, the symbol of Urban Station. The design is appropriate for the name
Urban Station as well as the culture that Name would like to share with his customers.
The customer segment and price strategy: Urban Station focuses on middle-class people, with
an intelligent price strategy. For a long time, smoothies and Italy soda are high class product,
often sold by large caf such as NYDC or Coffee Bean with price from 50,000 VND. Urban
Stations price is from 25,000 31,000 VND, which is more suitable for middle class people.
Therefore, in this segment, there are a few competitors for Urban Station.
9. How do you attract and retain good employees?
Its not difficult to attract employees for a caf business. Urban Station focus on students, who
need part-time job for their personal expense. Depends on experience and the helpfulness, a
staff can be promoted to the manager of a store.
10. What are the most important attributes you look for in your employees?
Honesty, youth and activeness
11. What is the role of technology in the success of your business?
Play important role to brings the comfortable for customers at store, as well as to manage the
human resources
The POS help every transaction easier and smoothly
The camera system which he is planning to used will help him to manage the store, as well
as take a look at his staffs and fix the problem later
12. Is there any book that you would recommend the aspiring entrepreneurs to read/learn?
(Recommendation)
Principles of Marketing (Phillip Kotler). He said that it helps him a lot in identify target, as well as
how to attract customers. He still read the book as when feeling difficult, as his most favorite
business book.
13. Is there anything you have learned that could have helped you in the beginning?
Education is important:
Recently, many of young students have the mistake that education is not as important as
idea for an entrepreneur. Nam disagreed with this statement because education plays an
important role in his business. His favorite book is Marketing Management of Philip Kotler.
From this book, he have learned a lot of thing to apply to his business. His statement is: The
theory and knowledge from university is just effective if you do it right. If you apply this
wrong, you will see it useless
Balance:
Everything should be balanced. The good or bad, the luck or unfortunate, the finance, or
time everything should be balanced to archive the highest result. There is nothing bad, It is
just bad because of the way look at it. Therefore, trying to look at success and failure from
different side is important to be success
14. How do you maintain a balance between your personal and professional life?
He does not really concern about this. He is still young and creating business is like his
hobby. At the beginning, the workload may be a lot, but after he successfully expand the business, he
focuses more on his personal life, as well as looking for new opportunity to create a new business.