I find what abusiness and itspeople have notyet used - andbuild from there. For companies thatneed it to reachthe balance sheet,not just the deck.
about
about
Sy Nguyen,
I do two things, and I keep them apart. Business Strategy starts with the owner rather than the brief: I research the potential a company has not yet spent - in the operation, in its people, in its capital, and in what the founder actually cares about - and turn it into an operation that runs and a community that gathers around a business with an ideal behind it. Business Applied AI puts new technology inside that operation until it produces something the business can sell or depend on. 9 years, from agency communications to the desk beside the CEO, carrying a self-taught technical practice the whole way.
I work in two practices that run in parallel and never get blended together. Business Strategy is the work of finding what a company has not yet used and building the business around it: the potential in the operation, the potential in its people, the potential in its capital, and - the one most often left out - the potential in what the owner personally believes in and wants to build. Positioning, growth models, community architecture and the documents behind a fundraising round all sit downstream of that. They are what the answer looks like once it has been found; they are not the work. The point of the work is an operation that can actually run, and a community that gathers because the business stands for something. Business Applied AI covers putting new technology inside a working operation until it produces something the business can sell or depend on.
Both practices stand on the same three foundations. The first is marketing communications strategy, from the agency years. That is where I drew a rule that still holds: a message only counts once it changes what someone does.
The second is programming, self-taught since 2009. Because of it an idea reaches a working product rather than stopping at a slide. It is a personal passion rather than my profession - and it is also why I finished a brand game and an operations platform without ever calling myself a software engineer.
The third is business strategy done directly alongside CEOs and COOs. That foundation has taken three forms in practice: marketing-driven business, community-driven business and client-service-driven business. All three lead to the same conclusion from three different angles: a plan is worth exactly what the operation can carry.
I have built toward depth rather than title, so I have not held a role with management in its name. That was a direction I chose, not a promotion I missed. I have still led specialist teams, through professional influence rather than positional authority: a Business Strategy Group whose core members were themselves managers across finance, operations, strategy and legal, working toward a healthy business model; and a company-wide effort to adopt AI, where the work was creating the motivation to use it and coordinating the people who built the new service lines around it.
expertise
- business strategy
- business applied ai
- brand & go-to-market
- growth & community
- fundraising narrative
- marketing communications
recognition
- Built a Community & Web3 business unit that reached $1.2M revenue in its first year
- Supported a $1M Pre-Series B raise involving generative AI and Metahuman work
- Drove company-wide AI adoption and coordinated the people building new AI service lines
- Designed end-to-end brand and go-to-market strategy serving brand and sales together
clients
FMCG - food, beverage & personal care23
Pharmaceutical & healthcare8
Technology, electronics & mobility8
Finance, banking & insurance7
Retail, property, industrial & trade bodies16
experience
experience
001.The foundation
9 YEARS, AND ONE LINE RUNNING THROUGH THEM.
Everything I do now rests on three things, and they arrived in that order.
002.oRo Vietnam
WHERE THE APPLIED-AI PRACTICE BECAME A SERVICE THE COMPANY COULD SELL.
This is the role where the second practice took its current shape. The work is not campaign planning; it is designing growth ecosystems where technology, community and commerce connect, so that spend builds a durable asset instead of temporary awareness.
003.CREATORY
THE MOVE FROM ADVISING A BUSINESS TO BEING ACCOUNTABLE FOR ONE.
The shift here was from recommending strategy to carrying its consequences. The focus was new revenue and investment readiness: turning strategic ideas into products and business units that had to stand on their own numbers.
004.CREATORY
COMMUNITY AS A BUSINESS MODEL, NOT A CHANNEL.
The brief was to help brands reach Gen Z and Alpha, but choosing influencers was the shallow version of that problem. The real work was understanding the creator economy from the inside and building growth strategies for the creators themselves - which is what makes a community durable rather than rented.
005.RED2 Digital
CONNECTING MARKETING ACTIVITY TO A NUMBER SOMEONE IS ACCOUNTABLE FOR.
A Vietnamese company operating across Vietnam and Singapore, working with businesses moving from traditional trade into digital. My job was the unglamorous part: installing the plumbing that connects marketing activity to measurable commerce, so a budget stops being an act of faith.
006.Edelman Vietnam
STRATEGY THAT BEGINS WITH TRUST RATHER THAN WITH ADVERTISING.
At a communications firm whose core subject is trust, the work was building the foundation of a reputation rather than a campaign for it: corporate narrative, complex B2B communication, and messages that had to hold for very different audiences at once - parents, engineers, regulators and investors reading the same company.
007.Mullenlowe Vietnam
THE GROUNDWORK, DONE BY HAND.
The starting point, at a network formed from a United States agency and a United Kingdom and European one. I ran the daily digital mechanics for global brands and contributed to the strategic process from underneath it.
008.University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City
WHERE THE COMMERCIAL GROUNDING CAME FROM.
Marketing, with the coursework weighted toward research, trade marketing and brand communications. What carried forward was less the syllabus than the habit it enforced: every argument had to be defended with evidence someone else could check.
009.Hoang Le Kha Gifted High School
THE HABIT OF CHECKING THE WORKING.
A specialist mathematics stream in Tay Ninh. It taught a way of approaching problems that has been more durable than any particular technique: state the assumptions, follow them honestly, and accept the result even when it is inconvenient.
Thought & Observation
Thought & Observation
001.The 39% problem
71% OF COMPANIES USE GENERATIVE AI. 39% SEE IT REACH EBIT.
McKinsey's The state of AI (November 2025) reports that most organisations have adopted generative AI, while well under half can trace an effect on earnings. The instinct is to read that gap as a technology problem - better models, better prompts, more training.
contact
contact
« Bring a business that has more in it than it is currently using - in the operation, in the people, in the capital, or in what the owner wants to build and has not yet made room for.
Thirty minutes is usually enough to tell whether there is a project here. »
Let's talk
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- Phone
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- Based in
- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
- Languages
- Vietnamese (native), English (professional)
© 2026 Sy Nguyen