There’s an old piece of advice that almost every young professional in Vietnam hears
Just focus on doing your job, and management will take care of the rest.”
In 2026, we all know that is no longer true.
People often treat terms like “Process Improvement Cycle” as fancy academic ideas that only professors talk about. In reality, it is much simpler than that. It is just the natural way a company has to grow if it wants to survive.
A business is like a human body: if it runs out of money, it dies. Money comes from customers, and customers demand more every single day. Good advertising might get them through the door once, but if your actual product or service quality stays frozen, they will quickly leave for a competitor’s promotion.
No one wants to buy something that hasn’t improved in ten years. Look at everyday consumer goods, even brands selling sanitary pads have to constantly improve their materials and designs to keep customer loyalty.
But improving a product means nothing if the internal operation behind the scenes is broken. Let’s look at two real-life examples of how small Vietnamese companies struggled and see what went wrong.
Danger when relying friends and favors
The first case is a tech startup that tried to build a tourism app to showcase beautiful destinations in Vietnam. The project completely shut down around 2023. While many businesses failed after COVID-19, this team had serious problems from the very beginning.
An analysis of their early operations showed a complete lack of an organized working culture. The biggest bottleneck was the leadership style. The boss ran the entire business based on personal relationships. He happened to be close friends with a powerful local official.
The twist is networks shift and people change. When that friend was unexpectedly removed from his position, the company’s entire stream of business contracts vanished overnight.
This is a massive risk for many older bosses who rely heavily on introductions and personal favors to close deals. Contracts were signed because of who the boss knew, not because the app was getting any better.
Personal goodwill has an expiration date. Clients might like you as a friend, but they will not keep buying a product that brings no actual value to their business.
Good things don’t last forever. You cannot expect your friends to keep handing you business when they are about to retire or step down.
To survive today, a company’s internal culture must focus on actual processes and talent. Flashy ads and political connections are just short-term fixes. The real heartbeat of a sustainable company is a daily commitment to making internal operations run a little smoother.
What is the Process Improvement Cycle?
If we take away the big words, this cycle is just a routine way a business checks how it operates, finds where things are getting stuck, and fixes them. It is a continuous loop: once you solve one problem, you move right to the next one so you can keep doing better.
In the business world, this is known as the PDCA Cycle, and it is very simple:
- Plan: Find the bottleneck or problem, and set a clear goal.
- Do: Try out a change on a small scale, like testing it with just one team, so you don’t ruin the whole business if it fails.
- Check: Look at the data. Did your test actually fix the issue, or did it make things worse?
- Act: If it worked, make it the new official way of doing things. If it fails, learn from it, adjust, and plan again.
In the case of the tourism startup, survival meant using this loop to fix internal workflows and find new ways to grow. Sadly, leadership failed to act in time.
“Revenue First, Infrastructure Last” Trap
The second case involves a local childcare service provider that tried to expand too fast. During a market downturn, management bought up struggling centers across the city at cheap prices, quickly growing from one location to four.
While the workload and number of schools quadrupled, the internal marketing and admin infrastructure stayed completely frozen. For years, the entire marketing engine for all four locations was run by just one person operating as a “one-man army”, handling planning, graphic design, content writing, and ad campaigns all at once.
The core vulnerability was a lack of proper software. The company did not use any CRM or project management tools. Sending files, storing data, and checking work were done entirely inside chaotic chat groups on Zalo.
Predictably, when new staff were eventually hired to help, the lack of clear guidelines and transparent systems led to immediate turnover. Team members quickly left due to burnout and stagnant pay that failed to match inflation or the growing workload.
When student enrollment eventually dropped at one location, forcing it to suspend operations, a healthy business would have used the Check phase of the PDCA cycle. They would have looked at the data objectively and asked:
- Is our marketing funnel broken?
- Are we losing customers because our service quality dropped?
- Is our workforce burnt out?
Instead, management skipped the Check phase entirely. Rather than diagnosing the actual infrastructure problem, leadership simply looked for a scapegoat to blame for the revenue drop.
This is a fatal business mistake: a company cannot claim that a single worker’s daily workflow is vital to the survival of the business, while simultaneously freezing that worker’s value and tools for over years
Takeaway
The data from these business failures points to one clear conclusion: You cannot optimize your external marketing if your internal operational loop is broken.
A company cannot successfully grow on the outside if it refuses to fix itself on the inside. Trying to scale a business by squeezing an old infrastructure and ignoring an unappreciated workforce will eventually cause the foundation to collapse.
Continuous improvement is not an academic theory but a reason for keeping business alive.
