Nineteen years on the factory floor, not in boardrooms.

It started with language, not compliance. I studied German at university, and my first international posting was with KfW Development Bank in Germany from 2006 to 2008. I was there to observe development finance in practice, but what I actually learned was the persistent gap between what institutions write in their frameworks and what happens at the implementation level. That gap never left me.

When I returned to Vietnam, I joined Intertek as a social compliance auditor. The role was technical — show up at a factory, check the records, write the report. For four years I did this methodically. I learned the standards cold: SA8000, RBA, SMETA, WRAP, C-TPAT. But I also noticed something that made me uncomfortable. The auditing process itself had become the product. Companies were managing their audit scores, not their conditions.

More substantive work started at SCSA from 2013, where I began to see advisory as something distinct from auditing. A factory doesn't need someone to find its problems. It needs someone to tell it what the auditor is going to find before they arrive — and then help fix it in a way that doesn't need fixing again.

I founded GSS Company Limited in 2015 specifically to close this gap. Not another audit firm. A firm that builds compliance management systems — the kind that make the next audit a formality because the factory has already internalized what the standard actually requires. The early years were slow. Three clients. A lot of conviction.

Training found me next, not the other way around. Factories couldn't send people to external courses, and most external courses weren't designed around real factory conditions anyway. What started as in-house sessions grew into a formal certification stream — now delivered under ILO, VCCI, and Global Affairs Canada through TFO Canada. The advisory stream deepened as I began my SEMBA programme. I'm still mid-process. Still learning from every factory I walk into.