Brexton Pham, CEO and co-founder of Series
Raised in a low-income household by a single-parent, immigrant Vietnamese mother in the suburbs of Marietta, Georgia, it didn’t seem likely that Brexton Pham would go on to become the co-founder and CEO of a tech company, Series, raising $25 million in seed and Series A funding within about a year. I sat down for a conversation with Pham to learn about his incredible career journey starting out as a GenZ entrepreneur, in which he revealed that his most valuable career and business lessons came, as a child, from a rather surprising source…
His mother’s nail salon.
“My mom always told me to do the complete opposite of her,” Pham recalls. “As an immigrant, she wanted me to have a better life and a solid career.” As it turns out, Pham took this advice—and didn’t.
While he avoided repeating the same mistakes his mother made in her small business venture, he picked up five invaluable gems of wisdom along the way:
Listen to your customers
Pham’s mother couldn’t speak English fluently. But she knew how to speak her customer’s language.
“My mother used to say, ‘If someone drives 20 minutes from their doorstep to our nail salon, they better get as much as they need fulfilled as possible.’ ” So she would listen intuitively to her customers, and through careful analysis of their problems was able to complement her existing portfolio of services, expanding the nail salon from solely performing nail treatments, to including Botox injections and eyebrow threading.
“Not typical services at a nail salon, right?” Pham chuckled as he mused retrospectively. He goes on to recount that his mother reasoned, “If they’re coming here to get their nails done after a long day, why not offer them other services so they can feel better?”
That was the lightbulb moment for Pham, which later became the premise for his business model.
“You don’t make that much money from just doing manicures and pedicures. So, the more you have in your inventory to sell to customers, the more robust your business can become.”
He further explained, “When you look at the majority of tech companies, unfortunately it seems they pretty much do one thing and one thing only. And they bet the entire farm on that single product and hopefully it goes to the moon. Tech is strangely the only sector that doesn’t often think about multiple products.”
The tech entrepreneur applied this concept when starting Series, noting how he relentlessly spent six months on back-to-back calls with potential clients, seeking to understand “what keeps them up at night”, as he phrased it. Pham then used these findings to inform his business plan, and subsequently, his pitch to investors.
Make long-term career and business choices based on stability
Speaking of robust, Pham went on to relate how he learned from an early age, the importance of creating a vigorous, recession-proof career that could withstand global pandemics or an economic downturn.
“With nail salons, people don’t realize how fickle the market can be,” Pham said. “For example, my mom and her employees never had a salary. Instead, they received commission. And it’s also not super lucrative because nail salons are not a ‘need,’ they rely on customers’ discretionary spend. When the 2008 financial crisis occurred and people were suddenly cost-sensitive, nobody showed up to the nail salon anymore.
“And when you look at the average customer base of a nail salon, it’s mostly a lot of walk-ins, so there are not many recurring customers. My mom had a very small percentage of customers that she worked with for decades. So in short, there’s tons of instability and uncertainty about how much money you’re going to bring in. You’re always asking yourself, ‘Can I provide for my family?’ And that was always a very big worry for my mom. So I think that has just made me run the opposite direction,” he said spiritedly.
“With my business model, I’ve designed it in a way where I am selling things that every business inherently needs, rain or shine, like payroll and accounting software, for example, and it’s a subscription that guarantees the business (and me) longer term financial security.”
Learn as you go—don’t wait to know everything
If you wait until you know everything, you’ll never take the leap and make that first step.
“You got to be fearless about it. You can’t be scared of asking questions,” Pham encourages aspiring GenZ and millennial entrepreneurs. “I fully believe that most of our knowledge gaps are already solved by someone we know or someone in our expanded network. Everyone is one or two connections away from getting advice that immediately unblocks the problem they’re stressed about.”
“What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring young entrepreneurs?,” I asked towards the close of our conversation.
“There’s always going to be something else that enters your head, that’s going to make you feel hesitant. You just need to take action and learn as you go. There’s never going to be a point where you feel ready.”
