As part of VTV’s Hope 2024 program, the founder of BeYours interior company shared about the difficult journey of the business after Covid-19 and new hopes. It is known that founder and CEO Vu Trung Anh Rim (Anh Rim) is one of the 9X bankers who quit their stable jobs to start a business.
In early 2017, Anh Rim had the opportunity to talk to furniture manufacturing and exporting factories. At that time, he realized the paradox that Vietnam is among the top 4 countries in the world in terms of furniture export, but most Vietnamese people still consider domestic products to be cheap and of low quality, while imported and exported products are synonymous with high prices and good quality. In addition, people with average incomes do not have many opportunities to use export-standard products, so Anh Rim “joined hands” with his friends to establish BeYours.
In 2019, officially quitting the banking job, focusing on BeYours
The company started by importing small quantities of furniture from factories in Binh Duong for online sales. The products focus on Korean-style furniture. BeYours is also one of the pioneering units to bring modular furniture to the Vietnamese market; at the same time, it provides export-standard products at reasonable prices.
By August 2019, when the company’s scale grew and the workload in the startup was much larger, Anh Rim decided to leave the bank to focus full-time on “his brainchild” BeYours. In the beginning, BeYours developed quite well. In just over 3 years, the company owned 3 main showrooms in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, 6 production workshops with a total area of 17,000m2; 2 warehouses with an area of more than 1,500m2. The peak assets of BeYours exceeded millions of USD.
Photo: BeYours warehouse in Binh Duong.
However, the unexpected Covid-19 pandemic caused the company’s revenue in each industry to decrease by 70-80%, even though it quickly switched to online sales, the storm did not stop. Economic recession, reduced purchasing power, increased costs… caused the founder to fall into debt.
At times I was very scared, waking up every morning with only debt collection messages
Sharing with VTV, Anh Rim said that there were times when he could not control himself, his hands and feet were shaking at night, and he was very scared waking up every morning with only debt collection messages. To develop the company, Anh Rim not only borrowed from banks but also borrowed from relatives and friends, which increased the pressure on him.
Trapped in debt, the company had no direction to develop, which put BeYours on the edge of bankruptcy, and Anh Rim himself was also on the verge of divorce. “Just as my wife described me during the crisis, I looked like a ‘devil’, at that time I just tried to solve one problem after another. People call it resilience, so at night I felt like I couldn’t control myself anymore,” Anh Rim recalled.
In the “extreme moment”, Anh Rim mentioned the help he received from his older brother, which helped him calm down and untangle the mess. With the debts from relatives and friends, Anh Rim faced them directly and asked for a 2-3 year extension before repaying. The company also started to recover, and new signals gradually appeared. “BeYours has just exported a batch of goods to Japan and is negotiating with customers in the UK,” Anh Rim shared.
After the failure, the lesson the founder learned was that he was fortunate to have early success, so he was arrogant and pushed the company to develop faster than his own personal growth, which led to a lack of management and operation skills when facing difficulties. Although people think that Covid-19 and recession caused the crisis, this 9X CEO emphasized that those factors only triggered the crisis.
And today, the biggest change of BeYours to survive until today, according to Anh Rim, is that he himself has changed, seeing everything differently.
