OPPORTUNITY DOES NOT COME TWICE
Director's Article No. 3 · An Entrepreneur's Perspective
Dao Van Kinh
Director and Founder, An Viet Industrial Co., Ltd.
If someone asked me, "What is the most valuable lesson you have learned in more than twenty years of running a business?"
I would not say technology.
Nor would I say modern machinery or advanced management systems.
What I have learned most deeply is the value of keeping one's word, continuously improving and believing that a small enterprise can achieve significant results if it refuses to give up.
One story has remained with me for more than twenty years. Even today, I still feel the emotion of those difficult early days whenever I recall it.
An Opportunity Born from an Emergency
In its early years, An Viet was a very small company.
The workshop was basic, machinery was limited and a formal management system was almost nonexistent.
I repeatedly presented our capability profile to FDI manufacturers, but most attempts were unsuccessful.
After assessing our workshop, equipment and management system, they concluded that An Viet did not yet meet their requirements.
Honestly, there were moments when I felt discouraged.
But I continued to believe that if we lacked the advantage of scale, we had to compensate through dedication, a willingness to learn and the ability to solve problems.
Then one day, an opportunity arrived in a way I had never expected.
An Indian FDI manufacturer experienced a failure in a stamping die used for a component on its production line.
The die had been made by a supplier in Taiwan. Returning it to Taiwan for repair would take approximately ten days for transportation alone.
The customer had only about one week remaining to complete its order. If the problem was not resolved in time, the production schedule would be seriously affected.
In that emergency, the purchasing department brought the die to An Viet and asked one short question:
Can An Viet handle this?
I looked at the die and replied:
We will do everything we can.
Only after the customer left did I fully feel the weight of that commitment.
Three Almost Sleepless Nights
During the first two days, I could hardly find a workable solution.
Time continued to pass, and the pressure increased by the hour.
I understood clearly that if we failed, An Viet might not receive another opportunity like this.
On the third night, I was alone in the workshop.
Exhausted, I made a pot of tea, sat quietly in front of the die and continued thinking.
At first, I focused only on restoring the die to operation.
But the longer I studied it, the more I saw an opportunity for optimization.
I asked myself:
If I were designing this part from the beginning, how would I do it?
That simple question changed my entire approach.
I stopped thinking like someone carrying out a repair and began thinking like a tool designer.
Instead of repairing only the failed area, I decided to modify the design within the existing die.
The trial run exceeded our expectations.
We not only restored production within the required lead time; the revised solution also reduced the process from seven stamping operations to five while producing a more stable, better-formed part.
When we started, even I had not imagined such an outcome.
That experience taught me another lesson:
Solving a difficult problem does not always require doing more. Sometimes it requires the courage to think differently.
Why Did the Group Chairman Hear About An Viet?
About one month later, I received an unexpected message:
Next month, the Group Chairman will visit An Viet.
To be honest, I felt more anxious than excited.
Their staff had previously assessed An Viet and concluded that our capability and management system did not yet meet requirements.
I thought: "If their employees already found us unqualified, how could we possibly meet the expectations of the Group Chairman?"
Then I asked myself another question: "Why would the chairman of a large group know about a small company like An Viet and want to visit us personally?"
I understood the reason only later.
When a serious incident threatens production, the responsible departments must report clearly to management: What happened? What was the cause? Who owns the action? What is the solution? When will it be completed? What was the final result? How will recurrence be prevented?
In the report on that die failure, An Viet was the company that had accepted the problem and completed the work on time.
Those reports were probably how An Viet's name first reached the group's highest level of leadership.
I then understood that the visit was not accidental.
It began with a difficult problem that An Viet had accepted responsibility for and solved through measurable results.
This became one of my earliest and most important management lessons:
An incident is less dangerous than an organization in which incidents are not reported, ownership is unclear, deadlines are undefined and no lesson is captured to prevent recurrence.
A strong enterprise is not one that never experiences a problem. It is one with a system transparent enough to reveal the problem, accountable enough to resolve it completely and capable enough to learn so the same failure does not recur.
Words I Have Remembered for More Than Twenty Years
When the Group Chairman visited, An Viet was still a small company and our reception area was extremely modest.
I knew we had nothing impressive to display.
The only things I could offer were sincerity and a determination to perform the work well.
Through an interpreter, I said:
Our Vietnamese company is still small and has many limitations. But with our knowledge, our determination to improve and our willingness to keep learning, we will do everything possible to complete the work your company entrusts to An Viet.
The Chairman smiled, stood up, shook my hand firmly and said words that I have remembered for more than twenty years:
That is all right. Keep going, An Viet. Fifty years ago, we were just like you.
Those words stayed with me.
Fifty years.
That was not simply a gap of several years or several generations of machinery.
I understood that, in the industrial development journey he described, Vietnamese enterprises like ours were still far behind companies that had started much earlier.
But the distance was not what I remembered most.
What mattered was the second part of the message:
They, too, had once started where we were.
They were not born with large factories.
They did not begin with advanced technology or complete management systems.
Behind the growth of every mature enterprise are many years of learning, accumulation, discipline and improvement.
From that day onward, I no longer felt inferior because An Viet was small.
I began to think differently:
What matters is not how small we are today. What matters is whether we will be better tomorrow than we are today.
One Opportunity — Three Lessons
More than twenty years have passed.
Looking back, the greatest value of that die was not simply one successful repair.
It taught me three lessons.
First, when an opportunity comes, even a small company must have the courage to accept responsibility and commit its full effort.
Second, when facing a difficult problem, do not settle for a temporary repair. Find the root cause and be willing to think differently so the result becomes better.
Third, an enterprise that wants to mature must turn every incident into data, every piece of data into a lesson and every lesson into a better standard of work.
This is what I always want the An Viet team to remember.
We may not yet have the largest factory.
We may not yet have the most advanced machinery.
But we can always choose to keep our word, continue learning and perform our work better each day.
Opportunity sometimes comes only once. But when we seize it and act with full responsibility, one opportunity can open an entire journey.