Stable sales have never been a sign that we should open more stores.

A few days ago, I met my younger brother and his wife, who have been running their coffee shop for over eight months. The business is doing reasonably well, and sales are starting to pick up, so they said something very familiar to me: "We're planning to open another branch." Because I'd been traveling constantly for the past few weeks, they finally managed to arrange a meeting. We talked for about an hour. I didn't analyze any charts or advise them on whether or not to open another branch; I just asked a few simple questions: Who are your main customers? If you open another branch now, what are your strongest points? And what areas of potential have you not yet explored with your current store?

At the end of the meeting, the two of them were silent for a few minutes, then smiled and said, "Well, we probably won't open yet. We need to focus on building this store first." That moment felt very familiar to me, as familiar as a story from almost a year ago when I started working with the couple at Nhat Que.

When we first met, they already had two shops. Being traditional sausage makers, their thinking was very practical and professional: to sell more sausages, they decided to open a rice roll shop to boost sales. Everything was based on experience, hard work, and the belief of someone in the trade. But as our team delved deeper into their business and analyzed the numbers, we realized their system was quite fragmented; revenue was present, but expenses were unclear. If you calculated all their hard work, they were barely breaking even. I made a difficult decision at the time: close the two old shops and start anew at 135 Hoang Dieu.

Over the past year, the entire team, along with the owners, have carefully selected sales locations, re-measured customer traffic, clarified data, optimized the menu, streamlined operations, and adjusted every small expense. The result today is that revenue has doubled, and profits have increased many times over. But what makes me happiest isn't the numbers, but seeing that you all have "improved," learned to read numbers effectively, and that the path ahead has become much clearer.

For me, partnership has never been about doing things for someone else, but rather about learning together, working together, correcting mistakes together, and developing together, with each person doing what they can and what their strengths are. The longer I've been on this journey of opening a store, the more I believe that in this stage and in the future, the one who goes the furthest isn't the one who opens the most stores, but the one who opens the most solid ones. Efficiency is more important than quantity; going slowly but steadily is better than opening quickly and then having to start over from scratch.