Today we’d like to introduce you to Tiffany Hoang.
Tiffany, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I was born and raised in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. In 2010, I immigrated to the United States. At first, I was shocked with the culture and new environment. In addition, I wasn’t fluent in English, so I was often stressed and didn’t know where to start.
I went to Community College for a couple of years, and in 2013, I started my first part-time job as a Cocktail waitress at Maryland Live Casino in Hanover, Maryland.
After 9 months of working in the casino business, the opportunity arose for me to start my professional career as a casino host, then Manager of Relationship of Marketing, and finally to Senior Manager of International Relationship Marketing. This all happened within 2 years.
After 7 years of holding that position, I had begun earning myself a six-figure salary with bonuses. I was one of the top performers in the team by bringing a 7 figure increase in revenue every quarter.
However, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. My dream was opening a business and eventually earning passive income. I wanted to take another road to challenge myself.
It pushed me to look for a business idea– and I thought I have always loved boba tea since I was a teenager, that with my experience in customer service, marketing strategy, and new promotional ideas, I started to doing research about bubble tea market.
After a year, doing my homework researching, I took all my saving, and invested it to open my first business at Hanover, MD – Gong Cha Arundel Mills in December 2019, while simultaneously working at my full-time job in the casino.
With the success of Gong Cha Arundel Mills, another year later I just opened the Gong Cha Towson, MD in April 2021, and also I expect to open the third location in Ellicott City, MD in Fall 2021.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Starting a business never is a smooth road. However, it gave me a lot of insight. Lucky, I had my husband – Phuong Nguyen and other friends who helped me continue on the long road of starting up. It did require me a lot of time, energy, and ideas to start up.
After opening in Dec 2019, the Covid 19 pandemic started rising in the United States. The casino that I worked full time was closed, and many other businesses closed, but I decided not to close my shop.
My husband and I worked in the shop every day from opening until closing, due to most of our staff chose to stay home. We only had 4 part-time employees left to help us. It was little scary, but we were operating by following CDC guidelines, wearing masks, and staying socially distanced.
During that time, I was really appreciative how lucky we were, that we still had the work to do, when a lot of other people lost their jobs and their income.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Gong Cha is a tea drink franchise brand starting from Taiwan. Found in 2006 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; “Gong cha” means to offer the best tea to the emperor from all of one’s possessions. It is a tribute and represents the highest quality which we are committed to delivering to our customers
Nodaway Gong Cha brand has more than 1,500 stores worldwide. Gong Cha provides a premium quality of tea drinks and also has a lot of menu selections. Those are the reasons I decided to choose Gong Cha brand to do my first bubble tea shop.
Specifically to our Gong Cha Arundel Mills location, I believe we have a massive menu where customers have a lot of selection to choose from, such as: coffee, tea, milk tea, creative mix series, sparkling series, smoothies series, brown sugar milk tea series, egg waffles, etc.…
Secondly, at Gong Cha Arundel Mills we always want to provide to the customer the best service possible, and we hope to make every customer leave the shop happy and satisfied.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
My only advice for anyone who wants to start a business is- please follow your gut. Be brave enough to take risks. Whenever risks are there, opportunities will be there side by side, and of course, please do a lot of research.
Pricing:
- Dirty Brown Sugar Milk Tea: $4.98
- Pearl Black Milk Tea: $4.58
- Milk Foam OG Vietnamese Coffee: $5.63
- Thai Tea Latte: $4.98
- Mango Smoothies: $5.38
Contact Info:
- Email: Gongcha.ArundelMills@gmail.com
- Website: http://Gongchaarundelmills.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gongcha.arundelmills/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gongcha.arundelmills
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/gong-cha-arundel-mills-hanover?osq=gong+cha
