He Retired in 1994 and Accidentally Built a 30-Year Company · Rick Yvanovich, TRG International

What we talked about.

In this episode of The Sunny Ray Show, host Sunny Ray sits down with Rick Yvanovich, founder of TRG International, to unpack how a planned retirement in 1994 turned into more than three decades of running a company. Rick explains that after being made redundant as a finance manager at a global oil company, he took a voluntary package expecting to relax, but was bored within a week. A software vendor asked him to become a distributor almost by accident, and what began with one man and no dog grew into TRG. The conversation traces his path from stacking supermarket shelves through supermarkets, breweries, and defense manufacturing before settling into accounting, then follows his surprise posting to Vietnam in 1990, where he became one of the longest serving British expats, watching the country transform from near zero GDP to a recognized emerging market. Rick also opens up about the dot com bust, financial crises, and COVID nearly derailing the business, and what he learned about resilience along the way. This is part one of a two part conversation.

A finance manager took voluntary redundancy in 1994, got bored in a week, and accidentally built a 30-year company across Vietnam and beyond.

The questions, and the answers.

Give us the 30-second high-level story of TRG International, this 30-year company you've built.

It wasn't really an accident. I retired as finance manager of a global oil company in 1994 through a voluntary redundancy scheme. I was bored stiff within a week. A software vendor I used asked if I wanted to become a distributor, and I signed without fully knowing what that meant. My friends became my customers, and it grew from one man and a dog, though I never actually had a dog, into TRG.

You trained as a management accountant across supermarkets, breweries, defense manufacturing, and news agents. What did that range teach you?

I didn't get the grades for university, so I started stacking shelves in a supermarket as a management trainee. Out of nowhere I decided I wanted to become an accountant, went to night school, and worked through a tiny old fashioned accounting practice, then a brewery, then other industries. I kept switching jobs for bigger titles and more pay, with basically zero deeper logic behind any of it.

BP posted you to Vietnam in 1990. What did the country look like then, and what made you want to stay?

Honestly, I didn't want to stay. I'd been offered a posting in China and told I'd be based in Beijing, then five seconds later I was welcomed to Ho Chi Minh City instead. I was upset at first, but ended up staying 35 years. Back then Vietnam felt like an old sepia postcard, rice paddies drifting in the wind, calm and quiet, and the people were exceedingly welcoming.

As one of the longest serving British expats in Vietnam, what do foreign firms still get wrong about the market?

Vietnam has gone from near zero GDP to being reclassified as an emerging market, with some of the highest year on year growth in the world and around 100 million people. But with that much change, the legal framework and infrastructure don't always keep pace with what's been announced. If you want black and white clarity, it's not quite there yet. If you want dynamic growth and energy, it's a great place to be.

30 years is longer than most industries last. What almost killed TRG along the way, and what did you change afterward?

We got hit by the dot com bust after I set up a cloud computing style joint venture in Singapore that crashed and burned. A regional financial crisis wiped out customers who still owed us for delivered work, and COVID wiped out one of my businesses entirely. We also got overly reliant on a couple of large customers and lost them. I think we've mainly learned to get up faster each time.

How has the company's size and shape changed over the years?

We started with fewer than 50 people in that division and have since swollen to about 500 across different businesses. Oddly, one division has roughly doubled in headcount but is doing the same or even less revenue than before. So there's pressure on right now, and I think we may have gotten a bit large, and maybe a little slow or complacent, as we head into this next stretch.