Personal Agendas
Ninh “Ninja” Nguyen
Occupation: Manicurist, Operator, Le Nail Studio
Background: Vietnamese immigrant who first moved to Sacramento in 1981, the 33-year-old came to Southern California
in the early 90s.
Agenda: Complete transition from mechanical worker to small business owner by purchasing a nail studio within three years, buy a home within five years.
I was born in South Central Vietnam, in a small coastal city called Hue. My father was career military in the South Vietnamese Army; my mother ran a small grocery shop. There were many U.S. soldiers in our harbor during the war; that was my first experience with Americans. Life under the Communists was very bad, with no opportunities or freedoms.
I was treated poorly in school because my father, who died in 1979, was former military. In 1981, I escaped in a small fishing boat carrying 30 men my uncles, their children and one of my three brothers to Hong Kong. The journey took about two weeks. My mother and the rest of my siblings stayed behind in Hue.
I spent eight months in a U.N. refugee camp in Hong Kong, before joining some relatives in Sacramento. I stayed with friends in various cities and worked different jobs, mostly auto body and construction. In 1994, I moved to the San Fernando Valley to work in the mechanical department for Arc Machines in Pacoima. I had benefits, insurance and made more than $20,000 a year.
I met my wife, Amy, a few years later. She worked as a manicurist in a nail salon in Encino. She was born after the war and had just come over from Saigon. We married in 1998 and rented a small apartment close to the nail studio, so she could walk to work. Today that apartment costs more than $900 a month, and we have two children, aged 4 and 3.
Our plan for the future is built around our children, who are the center of our lives. The first part of the plan was for me to go to beauty school to get a manicurist’s license, like my wife. It required 400 hours of training and cost about $600. It was a huge change from doing mechanical work with all the guys in a welding company!
I quit my job and began working with my wife at her nail studio the day I got my license.
My aunt on my father’s side owns the nail studio where Amy worked. She planned to step down after 15 years. She offered Amy and I the chance to run the business until we had the money to buy her out. That will cost between $20,000 and $30,000. We make roughly $50,000 a year with both of us working 60 hours a week, six to seven days.
I went back to Vietnam in 1997 to visit my family. Vietnamese here and in Hue had told me how much better it was since the war, but compared to my life in Los Angeles, I thought it was terrible. It was a hard journey to come here, and it sounds like an old story, but until you have experienced the life there, you can’t appreciate what a city like L.A. has to offer.
You may have to work six or seven days a week to make your business successful, but at least it is your business. At least you have the freedom and chance to raise your family as you see best.
David Geffner
Bobby L. Smith
Occupation: Consultant, UCLA’s Office of Gift Planning
Background: The 65-year-old former pro football player is married with three adult children and two grandchildren. He has undergraduate and law degrees from UCLA.
Agenda: To retire by summer’s end and focus on charity and foundational board work, coach and teach athletics, and re-take bar exam concurrent with youngest daughter.
I was born in Plain Dealing, La., where my father made railroad ties. He moved to California when I was four, and I lived with both sets of grandparents until I was almost seven. They were sharecroppers who hunted and fished on their own land. My siblings and I picked and hoed cotton.
We moved to a housing project in San Pedro to join my parents. I was good in athletics and graduated from Compton High School, where I was all-league in football and basketball. UCLA offered me a football scholarship as a sophomore. I played in the Rose Bowl my senior year. I played five years of pro football with the Los Angeles Rams and the Detroit Lions.
After the NFL, I finished law school at UCLA, but never passed the bar. I took a job as director of Upward Bound and Talent Search, UCLA programs that provide support services for low-income students from Watts, Inglewood, Compton and East L.A. In 1984, I entered fundraising as an assistant director of UCLA’s Annual Fund. I moved over to major gifts and planned giving and eventually became senior associate director of UCLA’s Office of Gift Planning.
I considered early retirement in the ’90s, began reducing my debt, paying off various bills. Given the recent state budget cutbacks, I thought the time was right. I retired in December ’03, and was rehired in March on a six-month contract as a consultant. I will take full retirement in August.
In retirement, I will increase my work with charities like the Penny Lane Foundation, the Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the NFL Alumni Association. I will also consult for non-profits that want to implement gift-planning programs. Athletics has been a big part of my life I still have the damaged knees from football to remind me of the intensity of competition.
My youngest daughter is preparing to take the California bar exam and my hope is to study and retake the bar with her in February.
Los Angeles has been my city of choice. Growing up in San Pedro, going to UCLA and then playing for the Rams, I always felt connected to the city and impressed by the opportunities here.
When I began my career, as the director of Upward Bound, I was focused entirely on helping low-income kids from parts of the city that still need repair 30 years later Compton, East L.A., Watts and Inglewood. When I think about the next phase of my life, retirement, I couldn’t imagine being in another city. From football to fundraising to family, it’s been a part of me.
David Geffner
David Davidson
Occupation: Web designer, information technologies consultant
Background: Westlake Village native, 33, is married and lives in Culver City. Has an undergraduate degree in music from the University of Pennsylvania and a graduate certificate from the USC School of Music.
Agenda: To be a full-time composer in 10 years.
I began studying and playing music in elementary school, and by the end of high school I was proficient on 14 instruments. In my freshman year of college, I won a Billboard Magazine national songwriting contest. I also became immersed in computers and desktop publishing in high school, and learned to integrate music and computers.
One teacher, who wrote music for television, helped me sell one of my songs to the soap opera “Santa Barbara.” I joined BMI when I was a teenager. I’ve earned tens of thousands over the years from that one composition, thanks to syndication.
At the University of Pennsylvania, I earned a B.A. in music, but reached a crossroads: Did I want to perform or compose?
After the one-year advanced studies program at USC, I realized there were two roads to becoming a film composer: plunge headlong and possibly starve to death, or serve multiple internships with established composers and hope they pass work to you. I chose to create my own third option, which takes longer: using my computer design skills to fuel a career as a composer. In 1996, I scored my first feature film, “Listen.”
When I began my publishing business, I had very moderate needs. I was single and lived in a studio off Venice Boulevard. I earned around $30,000 and the business took up 80 percent of my time.
Gradually, Web design and consulting overshadowed my print work. Now I service 350 Web sites and earn $100,000 per year: 70 percent of that comes from Web design, and the rest from music.
My plan is to flip that ratio in five years, and be a full time composer in 10 years.
Film scoring is harder than being an actor. An average Hollywood film employs hundreds of people for months, but only one composer for three weeks. We’re the only craft without a union, so every job is a work-for-hire that must be negotiated, just like my Web design business.
My plan is built upon patience: outlasting the attrition that’s overcome my peers from music school. The frustrations of maintaining dual careers for another five or 10 years pale compared to those moments when I hear something I’ve written transformed into emotions that affect people. It’s a feeling that’s just indescribable.
David Geffner
Kate Coombs
Occupation: Teacher, Los Angeles Unified School District’s Carlson Home Instructional Program for hospitalized and homebound students.
Background: Single, 41, Camarillo native, B.A., Brigham Young University; M.A., Cal State Northridge. A former book editor, she’s a newly published children’s author.
Agenda: To start a consulting business for parents and academics that would reform children’s teaching methods.
I come from a Mormon family of seven adopted kids. My father teaches medical sociology at UCLA. I graduated from BYU and went on an 18-month mission in Argentina, where I became fluent in Spanish. I came back to L.A. to get my master’s at CSUN.
I planned to follow my father into academia, but after graduate school I became interested in publishing. I came back to Los Angeles to teach for LAUSD, K-3, in Koreatown. It was there that I sold my first children’s picture book, due out in 2005. I was paid $4,500, and will earn more if sales surpass my advance. To make a living as a children’s book author is highly competitive we call it a “bunny-eat-bunny world.”
The Carlson program has two components: they run schools in the children’s wards of hospitals and they send teachers into homes, which is what I do. They assign us a region, and my area is South Central. Five kids is a full load, with each kid getting five hours per week. They run the gamut from broken legs to terminal illnesses. One boy, who passed away last year, inspired my book, “The Dog of Death.”
The program has been very rewarding. It’s been a better gauge of what is lacking in the system, and has helped me to target the learning gaps. When you work with a large class, as I did in Koreatown, it’s harder to tell why some children don’t learn. One-on-one teaching in the Carlson program has helped me crystallize the plan I’ve put together for this new business. I can see how and why kids aren’t learning whether it’s due to rote methods, or other factors because of the individualized approach.
Making an impact, not monetary gain, has motivated my career in education. Yet I need to earn a good living. I’m planning to start a new business in the next five years that would combine my years teaching and writing. I took a recent career test, which indicated I was most qualified to be a “mentor.” My new business plan is essentially that: mentoring parents, teachers, and administrators on how they can change the ways children learn.
David Geffner
