VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY

INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

INTERNSHIP REPORT
ADMINISTRATIVE INTERN
AT GREENIE LANDSCAPE CO., LTD

Student’s Name: Mai Thảo Nhi

Student’s ID: BABAIU18149
Supervisor: Ms. Lu Kim Khanh
Instructor: MSc. Nguyen Phuong Thao
Internship place: Greenie Landscape Co., LTD
Internship time: 42 days from 04/01/2021 – 30/05/2021
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TABLE OF CONTENT
I. Summary...............................................................................................................................3
II. Description of the company ...............................................................................................4
1. About Greenie ......................................................................................................................4
2. Products and Services ..........................................................................................................5
3. Company structure ...............................................................................................................7
4. Company performance .........................................................................................................8
III. Internship description ....................................................................................................11
1. Administrative activities ....................................................................................................11
a. B2C activities ...............................................................................................................11
b. B2B proposal ...............................................................................................................13
c. Event organization .......................................................................................................13
2. Evaluation and discussion ..................................................................................................16
IV. Assessment of internship .................................................................................................19
1. Skills and qualifications learned from the internship ........................................................19
a. Skills ............................................................................................................................19
b. Qualifications ...............................................................................................................20
2. Responsibilities undertaken during the internship period ..................................................20
3. Influences on future career plans .......................................................................................20
4. Correlation between internship activities and classroom knowledge ................................21
V. Conclusion .........................................................................................................................22

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I. Summary
The company I had the opportunity to work for is Greenie Landscape Co., LTD
(will be called as “Greenie” later then), a small landscape startup company founded 3 years
ago. Among a variety of choices like multinational corporations, developed and well-
known companies, I do believe it is a wiser option to select a small startup company at first
due to some benefits that will be mentioned later in this report.

Being a part of Greenie administrative team (will be called as “admin team” later
then), it was such a valuable chance for me to be in charge of main activities and
communicate directly with customers. My main responsibility is to follow up the daily
orders as well as keep in track with current customers to maintain the relationship with
them and also stabilize the workflow during the low season. Besides, I was also involved
in event organizing and some logistics activities at some special occasions of Greenie.
Further details would be discussed later in the report.

The report of internship consists of three main parts as below:

- Firstly, some overall information of Greenie and their position in the landscape
industry in general, versus more details about how this company operates and
endure its best performance to achieve its objectives.
- Secondly, internship activities and other related tasks in detail that can conclude my
job involvement and responsibility in Greenie. Further descriptions about the admin
team are also discussed in this section.
- Lastly, the assessment of the internship part is considered as my self-reflection after
this period of time and a lodestar that redirects and strengthens my career path in
the future.

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II. Description of the company

1. About Greenie

In 2018, Greenie was registered as a household business by Ms. Nguyen Tran Minh
Anh. By her fondness for plants and the flaming passion for startup, she decided to leave
Singapore, put aside the welfare and glory that she received as a senior manager, Ms. Minh
Anh came back to Vietnam and made her dream come true. At the very first time, she built
this business from nothing, brick by brick, until Greenie has received a considerable
reputation among the expats living in Ho Chi Minh city.

Figure 1: Individual customer projects conducted by Greenie

From November of 2020, Greenie has officially become Greenie Landscape limited
liability company with the headquarter located in 130/8 Dien Bien Phu, Binh Thanh
district, HCMC. Greenie also shares the same villas with L'herbanyste restaurant in 215E4
Nguyen Van Huong street and has Wild Thyme nursery garden in street No.12 in Thao
Dien ward.

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Further information can be reached via:

+ Email: greenie.saigon@gmail.com

+ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Greenie.saigon

+ Instagram: greenie.plantstudio

2. Goods & Services

Greenie has offered hundreds of plants and care services each year. The company
aims to achieve the best service and high customer satisfaction in every step. The products
can also be clearly divided into two types: goods and services.

Greenie provides customers with mainly indoor plants that need low maintenance
and also plants for roofed balconies with a decent amount of sunlight. All plants are potted
in premium soil, which ensure the appropriate fertilization and good ventilation. Besides,
a variety of hand-picked pots are always available in terra cotta, sturdy plastic, ceramic,
cement or ready to customize the unique ones for the reservation in advance.

In addition, Greenie offers free house consultancy for those who still consider many
plants options and want to choose the most suitable ones for certain conditions at home.
House service sessions including trimming, repotting, plant treatment and plant food are
also available with reasonable prices.

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Figure 2: Individual customer projects conducted by Greenie

Thanks to the consistency in quality and the improvement in performance over time,
Greenie has received the encouragement and credibility from customers, especially the
foreigners living in HCMC, who also account for a majority of traffic to Greenie. Beside
the individual customers, during my internship period, I had a chance to observe and work
for B2B plant project of Forbes office (belongs to PHC’s media), MyStorage Saigon, E-
Maison International Pre-school and so on.

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3. Company structure

CEO – Founder
(1)

Administrative team Construction team

(3 members) (4 members)

Figure 3: Greenie company structure

Greenie has two separated teams named: Administrative team and construction
team. Admin team takes the responsibility for working with customers, arranging time for
orders, updating the financial inflow and checking up the plant inventory. All members in
this team have to keep in track with daily orders and control the best performance of the
team including nice appearance of plants, available stocks, customer services, house
consultancy and so on.

The second team for construction purposes has three full-time staff and a part-time
expert. All of them are trained to be plant experts and are able to diagnose the plant sickness
through a few symptoms and suggest the proper treatments for the plant care. They are the
ones who directly carry out the orders as the customers’ requirements and give them
advices for better maintenance.

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4. Company performance

With the elite management from CEO and a hundred percent effort of both teams
from the beginning up till now, Greenie has grown significantly through years and is
expected to potentially expand into larger scale in the near future. This graph below shows
the quarterly revenue of Greenie, from quarter III of 2018 to quarter II of 2021. As the
internship period lasted until the end of May, 2021, so that data of June is not included in
data demonstration and analysis.

Revenue
400,000,000
350,000,000
300,000,000
250,000,000
200,000,000
150,000,000
100,000,000
50,000,000
0
Quarter Quarter Quarter Quarter Quarter Quarter Quarter Quarter Quarter Quarter Quarter Quarter
III/2018 IV/2018 I/2019 II/2019 III/2019 IV/2019 I/2020 II/2020 III/2020 IV/2020 I/2021 II/2021
(exclude
June)

Figure 4: Greenie quarterly revenues 2018-2021

For the first year of operation, the total revenue each quarter only fluctuated from
60 millions to 150 millions, equal to around 20-50 millions per month. This also meant that
the CEO had to pay for the salary budget by withdrawing her personal savings in order to
endure the whole team. The second year of Greenie incomes expressed a positive signal,
which ranged from 30-80 millions for each month. After two years from the foundation,
Greenie probably recognized their core value, built firm relationships with customers and
strengthened their team to gain upon-the-expectation revenue that reached upper 100

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millions per month. I believe that with this tendency, Greenie will become a strong
competitor in the house plant industry and be a well-known brand in no more than 5 years.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, while other companies had to struggle with crisis
due to social distancing and interruptive demand, Greenie broke through and took
advantage of the opportunity to assert its position among SMEs in HCMC. When everyone
has to follow the isolation and distancing regulations at home, this is also the golden time
when the need to decorate private corners and green the house increases. Therefore,
Greenie's revenue in the time of Covid is still maintained, even increased compared to
normal times.

Figure 5: Feedbacks from Greenie customers on social media

At the first sight, Greenie seems to be a normal seller like other nursery gardens.
After a period of time working here, I realize that the core value of Greenie comes from
performance and high-quality service. And these feedbacks on our social media page, as

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an evidence for stable and premium service quality, are able to prove that Greenie has
endured their service through years and become more and more famous among foreigners
living in HCMC. And not only stopping at word-of-mouth influence among individuals,
Greenie has created a wonderful impression on business offices in HCMC, then has many
opportunities to work with big plant projects worth tens of millions. Working at such a
great start up, especially at its robust development stage, is my happiness and honor to this
opportunity given by this business and International University.

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III. Internship description

1. Administrative activities

In the period of internship, the admin team totally has three members, two of them
are full-time and another one is me, a part-time intern with 3 working days per week.
Particularly, there is one member who works as an operation manager, mainly follows
some financial procedures and keeps an eye on the overall performance and the process of
the two teams. Another one is incharge of keeping the inventory, following the just-in-time
method so that she ensures the stocks can meet the customers’ demand during each period.
And the last member of the team is me, who both follow up the main activities of admins
and organize a couple of events for upsale and increasing brand identity. Even as a part-
time staff, I was still in charge of all the admin tasks as other teammates.

There are three main tasks that I jointly arranged with the support from Ms. Minh
Anh, the founder of Greenie and other colleagues: working with individual customers,
preparing documents for other business projects and conducting special events.

a) B2C activities
Greenie offers three major types of service, including: House consultancy, plant
order (delivery or pick-up) and house service. Most of the orders are proposed via
Facebook and are managed by Business Suite application. The time arrangement and
person in charge are usually organized in advance, which also ensures the logic and the
equivalence between work requirement and each staff’s ability.
- House consultancy process: This session is offered when the customers
require it at first and also suggest the proper time works for them. Besides, some
customers can choose to send some pictures of the corners that need putting plants,
then admin member can consider either give suggestions via message (if the
condition of these corners is clearly reckoned and a couple of plants are needed)

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or provide on-site consultancy service (if everything is hard to tell from photos
and the plant choices are various).
- Order process: Sometimes, this process works as the next step of the house
consultancy process, when the plant proposal is well prepared according to the
discussion and living condition consideration. Besides, customers can freely take
a look at the shop function on our Facebook page to see which plants are available
and affordable for them. Otherwise, customized products are also possible for the
plant lovers who are fond of unique or variegated plants. After all, the sum in
detail will be sent and delivery is ready to provide on time.
However, there are still a few problems arising after the delivery. Sometimes,
the delivery process can break a branch or shed some leaves, which leads to the
dissatisfaction of the customers. To deal with this problem, Greenie released a
return policy for the orders within 30 days after the delivery date, with no further
charge for wrapping up a new plant. Greenie team is willing to deal with
everything until the customers are totally satisfied with the plants. This is also a
core value of this startup.
- House service process: This session can be booked if the customers feel their
plants need treatment or repotting. In some cases, the large garden or big projects
such as clinic, bar, restaurant, etc. can choose to book a regular check up every
two weeks, for example. Admin members will help to arrange proper time and
construction team members to come directly on-site and do the house service.
Exceptional task for house service: During the low season, some older invoices
should be checked and I would send the reminder to the customers that their plants need
some food and treatment after a period of three to six month since the latest order. This can
keep the team working and also create a chance for the new construction member to
practice and sharpen his skill.

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b) B2B proposal
Thanks to the trust and good feedbacks from the customers, Greenie is also
approached by some international companies that have their own offices or branches in
HCMC. These orders are mostly processed by Ms. Minh Anh, the founder of Greenie, and
I helped her to edit a proposal following the requirements of the partners.
The process for proposal preparation includes:
- Image collection: Real image and recommendation set-up
- Data input: Position, type of plants and pots in detail
- Price and illustrative photo respectively
- Sum up and examine

Figure 6: A part of PHC Media’s plant proposal

c) Event organization
- Easter clearance sale

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As I mentioned above, Greenie has a nursery garden located in Thao Dien ward,
district 2. This garden is utilized for nourishing the plants which are not in good conditions
and shapes, not ready to be picked up for customers. After a period of full recovery, a
variety of plants are reconsidered to sell at good prices along with special offers including
up to 50% off on plants, 20% off on pots and other garden accessories. This event was
celebrated from March 19th to March 22nd at the villa of Wild Thyme restaurant, 2a street
No.12, Thao Dien.

+ Planning: 2 weeks before sale, master plan should be done so as to all activities
could be prepared carefully in advance. All tasks were listed down along with more
detailed description and deadline. People in charge are assigned based on
competency, experience and workdays.

Figure 7: Master plan for Easter clearance sale 19-22/3/2021

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+ Organizing: As arranged in the master plan, Wild Thyme garden needs cleaning
up and plant setting up to create a friendly atmosphere, clear look and sorting out
by different price levels. All plants needed checking up and trimming to make sure
that it could be qualified to offer to customers.

Figure 8: Garden setup before Easter clearance sale

- EARTH DAY sustainability market

EARTH DAY sustainability market was an event to impart Green message: Let's be
the change we want to see in the world and be kind to our mother earth. All activities within
one day aimed to provide friendly environmental items, recycled handmade accessories,
natural products and so on.
+ Planning: In this event, all activities for planning followed general timeline of
the host – Social Changemakers.
+ Organizing: One week before the fair, all the beautiful plants and pots were
transported from Nguyen Van Huong garden to Wild Thyme garden. Some

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friendly environmental products such as woven and paper bags, rattan baskets
were ordered with suppliers in advance so as to fit with the concept of this market.

Figure 9: Garden setup for Sustainability market

2. Evaluation and discussion

During my internship program, in spite of the limited time, I still gain working
experience and lessons from every up and down arising in my workdays. One of the ways
to learn is to observe others’ performance. This session of the report aims to analyse,
evaluate as well as discuss some possible solutions for future corrections, mainly based on
SWOT analysis application.

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Strength Weakness
- Good English communication
- Less plant knowledge
- Hard working and high adaptation skill
- Lack of experience
- Friendly and respect others
Opportunities Threats
- Build good impression and relationship
- Late response to customers
with customers
- Cannot deal properly with irregular
- Increase sales
tasks or sudden circumstances
- Consolidate teamwork
Figure 10: SWOT analysis for Greenie admin team

There are numerous good points from every admin member that I am significantly
grateful for having a chance to work with them. The most obvious aspect is excellent
English communication skill, which is wisely taken advantage of to salute, converse and
persuade customers. It helps us to build a good impression and maintain strong
relationships with expats, who hardly find a plant shop with natural English speakers. As
youngsters born in the generation of technology with many fluctuations, all of them have
a great ability to adapt to changes as well as external conditions. Since Greenie is a garden
without an indoor office, it requires team to work well with abnormal weather conditions
in HCMC. With diverse kinds of customers from different nationalities, each of them will
show their unique demand and requirements all the time, it is when hard working and
persistence is absolutely crucial. Sometimes, serving grumpy customers is considered as a
pressure on the admin team so that all Greenie members try to create pressure-free internal
organizational culture that consolidate teamwork, motivate themselves and encourage
better performance day by day.

Beside the continuous growth, like any other start up business, Greenie also has
some drawbacks within the process that need correcting as soon as possible. Late response

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happens every week, since Greenie often receives technical planting questions from
customers that require specific knowledge. All admin members are fresh graduated
students from economics and linguistics majors, so lack of plant knowledge is a common
problem that needs improvements. For this situation, from my point of view, training
courses should be carried out monthly for basic knowledge and updated information about
new plants. All of the members need time to practice themselves, as lack of experience can
make them confused with irregular tasks and sudden circumstances.

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IV. Assessment of internship

1. Skills and qualifications learned from the internship
a) Skills

As an intern at a plant-oriented small enterprise, I tremendously gained more

technical planting knowledge and experienced various actual projects for both individual
customers and other businesses. Regarding hard skills, as a plant lover in advance, after
taking this valuable intern program, I can enrich my understanding about plants, soil,
moisture, evaporation, etc. to provide the best conditions for indoor plants. In addition, I
become more confident to impart plant knowledge and give exact recommendations to my
families and friends thanks to what I have learned. Secondly, since my responsibility is
inclusive of event management, I can practice organizing events and conduct some research
to understand customers’ insight. Thirdly, with fully English environment at Greenie, I
would love to sharpen my communication skill with native speakers and apply my English
into practice. Lastly, MS Office or computer skills are highly practised to accomplish tasks,
mostly using Excel to manage the customer database or plant projects as well as many
activities for special events.

In terms of soft skills, I truly experienced how time management skills play a vital
role during my workdays, especially to balance among work, study and personal care.
Sometimes, the workload and in-class deadlines came at the same time, I had to manage
my time strictly to complete my task on time but ensure the quality of the results. At a few
points of time, unbalance and trade-offs happened, which forced me to put aside all
entertaining activities and health care, rushed around all day trying to get everything done.
Besides, regular interaction with customers helps me improve comprehension and
communication skills, understand deeply into what they really need, what they are
searching for through only their first or second questions. On behalf of an event organizer,

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I also practice my leadership skill by arranging tasks with suitable staff, motivating them
for continuous workflow and strengthening our teamwork after each project.

b) Qualifications
I did learn a lot from other colleagues and Greenie founder, Ms. Minh Anh. First
point is to learn to be a good seller and consultant, satisfy customers and upsale as well.
Second is to manage people and allocate resources as an admin staff. Third lesson during
my internship period is to practice organizing events, ensure both quality and quantity from
input to output. Beside that, I learned from Ms. Minh Anh how to evaluate ourselves, how
to define us in the market, and then possesses a robust can-do attitude.

2. Responsibilities undertaken during the internship period

As I prove myself to the colleagues and supervisor, there are more crucial tasks I am
entrusted to be assigned. For the job to function, I had to perform in compliance with
responsibilities which were grouped into job responsibility and self-responsibility.

Job responsibility: As being an admin staff, organizing workflow, assigning tasks to

proper workers and communicating with customers are prioritized. Besides, supporting
other employees to accomplish tasks is also a requirement for an intern.

Self-responsibility: Regarding transparency, I had to be in charge of all my actions.

Furthermore, always completing tasks on time with wholehearted enthusiasm in working
makes me trustworthy and highly responsible. Even on my day-off, I still kept on track
with all activities to make sure that I could sort out what had done, was doing or needed
doing for the next day.

3. Influences on future career plans

By taking the internship course, I gain experiences that hugely impact my future
career. Indeed, successfully carrying out intern responsibilities will become the
fundamental background in building up a full skillset. As mentioned above, an internship

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is an opportunity for me to sharpen both hard skill and soft skill. It is when I reflect on
myself to see what I am good at, which ones do not belong to my competency and what I
have to change to be better in the future. After all, I realize that attending an internship at
a small company has such a variety of benefits. I had a great involvement with Greenie,
had a chance to follow and join my hand to carry out many tasks, observe how each team
interacted with each other and understand the way to operate a small business. If I have
more free time and Covid-19 shows declining signs, I will continue to take an internship
program to another company for a different position.

4. Correlation between internship activities and classroom knowledge

The main contributing factor of my success of the internship is the knowledge and skills
learned from International University. I had a solid understanding that could be applied to the
work thanks to subjects such as Business communication, Entrepreneurship and small
businesses, Organizational behavior and Business computing skill. Not only general lessons
from school are applied during this course, but also business mindset acts as a useful assistant
to help me have a better experience at Greenie. Lastly, taking this internship stimulates ideas
to develop into graduation thesis topics.

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V. Conclusion
The internship is beneficial for business management students because they involve
themselves in a real working place. It enables me to have a much more practical view of
the working atmosphere in a company. Additionally, management lessons in university are
also applied to real business cases, which helps me to have a deeper understanding as well
as a scanned review of what I have learned in university. Last but not least, the internship
provides me with a chance to realize points that need improving.

As an intern at Greenie, I would proudly state that the company is such a highly
recommended place for any students who want to develop further in administration. Being
an intern here will provide you with excellent treatment as well as valuable and
professional training in both academic knowledge and soft skills.

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