This interview is with Mimi Nguyen, Founder at Cafely.
Mimi Nguyen, Founder, Cafely
Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your diverse expertise in areas such as Human Resources, SEO, Health and Wellness, Personal Finance, Digital Marketing, and Investing?
Hello, my name is Mimi Nguyen, founder of Cafely, a multi-disciplined professional who has extensive knowledge in a lot of areas. My HR experience embraces talent acquisition, employee relations, and organizational development, through which I designed retention strategies that were responsible for a 27% decrease in turnover. As for digital marketing and SEO, I have the skills to craft content strategies, delivering 40-60% organic traffic growth to the customers.
I have transformed my passion for health and wellness to be able to acquire a certified nutrition coach and yoga instructor title, which has empowered me to be the one that brings the complete behavioral health part into corporate wellness programs. In terms of personal finance and investing, I have become the pioneer of creating workshops focusing on retirement planning, debt management, and sustainable investing.
I think that my diversified skill set not only brings a new perspective to the pool but it also enables me to interconnect talent management and the digital sphere of human resources, yet never forget about the holistic wellness of employees and the level of financial literacy in the company. This blending of disciplines, in particular, has been very effective in the case of my clients who were in need of problem-solving skills for multi-faceted challenges.
What inspired you to pursue such a varied career path, and how have these different fields complemented each other in your professional journey?
My varied work history is rooted in natural curiosity and a belief that professional growth is non-linear. Starting in HR, I discovered that digital marketing strategies could be used to make the hiring process easier, which was the beginning of my quest to get to know SEO and content marketing. The analytical skills which I developed there moved easily to personal finance and investing.
Health and wellness became important to me after experiencing burnout early in my career. This personal journey revealed how physical and mental well-being directly impact professional performance—knowledge I now integrate into HR policies and workplace wellness initiatives.
These industries are a good mix of each other. My HR knowledge is great for creating more emotionally intelligent marketing campaigns. My wellness field is good in the aspect of employee engagement strategies. And my financial one provides me with the capability to better business decision-making processes.
I’ve found that cross-disciplinary thinking creates unique solutions impossible to develop within siloed expertise. This integrated approach has become my professional signature and greatest strength when tackling complex organizational challenges.
Based on your experience in Human Resources, how have you seen employee wellness programs evolve, and can you share a specific initiative you implemented that had a significant positive impact on both employee health and company performance?
At the center of all these activities were employee wellness programs that went through a lot of changes: they evolved from fitness perks to well-being-oriented ones, taking care of physical, mental, emotional, and even financial health. Majorly, the pandemic played a huge role in making these changes happen, as it made mental health support and flexible working very crucial for not only the employers but the employees as well.
At one of my previous workplaces, I came up with an amazing and effective “Whole Person Wellness” program for a tech company with very high levels of burnout. The program was a combination of:
– Workshops on data-driven stress management led by the results of a quarterly well-being report
– Provision of a mental health stipend in addition to traditional healthcare
– Days off were set as meeting-free days, like “Free Fridays,” and it was mandatory
– Training about financial wellness
– Challenges that have a wellness target and that are team-based with the condition that they should also cause a positive impact on the community
The results were quite impressive: the time employees spent away from work due to illness went down by 22%, healthcare claims were 15% fewer, and the overall score of employee satisfaction increased by 31%. The statistic that probably summarizes all the described has to do with those teams which were most active and demonstrated a level of productivity that was 27% higher than that of their less engaged counterparts.
The success of the program demonstrated that the true wellness of a person and not isolated symptoms is the solution to well-being as well as business performance, thus completing the statement that employee well-being and business performance are not conflicting but are goals that complement each other.
As an SEO expert, what’s one unconventional strategy you’ve used to improve a website’s search engine rankings that other marketers might not be aware of, and what were the results?
On my SEO journey, I learned that if you update “orphaned content,” it yields a great ROI. This is kind of an unattended strategy that many people seem not to pay attention to. Orphaned content refers to the site’s pages that were abandoned, lost in the woods, by internal links, visible neither to the eyes of the users nor the search engines.
One of my e-commerce clients had hundreds of product pages that needed my help. I created a procedure that could easily identify the content in need of update. After Screaming Frog was finished, I was very surprised to find out that 47% of their product catalog was invisible. In a change from the ordinary way, I came up with the idea of creating a friendly relationship-based linking strategy instead of adding internal links randomly:
– Created semantic clusters of related products
– Implemented contextual internal linking within these clusters
– Added custom “You might also like” sections with genuinely complementary products
In less than ninety days, the percentage of organic traffic raised by 64%, the conversion rates of previously dead pages increased by 41%, and the total product portfolio of the brand grew by 78% in terms of keywords. The main thing that contributed to the biggest success was a marked shift in how internal linking was done: from mere SEO strategy to UX; it was the most concrete proof of the fact that the most valuable content sometimes is already in the place we stored it—we just need to lay our hands on it.
In your work with personal finance, what’s the most common misconception you’ve encountered about investing, and how do you typically advise clients to overcome this barrier?
The biggest misconceptions in investing I come across is the false explanation that to be very good at it, you need to guess the right moment and choose the right stocks. This idea severely affects the new generation of potential investors as they falsely believe they need to be experts to start.
On this one, to direct the clients’ focus to good investment principles rather than on predictions, I usually suggest this course of action:
I had to walk them through:
– The magic in time and discipline possibly of long-term investment irrespective of the market situation
– Some historical data proving that the time invested in the stock market always wins (produces higher returns) in comparison with the people that time the market
– The main advantage that comes with reciprocal payments as a way of utilizing the power of habit instead of willpower
I show data that indicates that professional fund managers rarely beat the index funds over time consistently. This way, customers realize that complexity and effectiveness are not necessarily linked.
My method highlights the importance of constructing a strong portfolio that is based on personal goals and risk tolerance rather than making predictions about the market. By seeing investing as a show of consistency over time rather than of competing with one another’s skills, the clients take on the right mood to start their investment journey without being held back by perfection. According to the client, the change in mindset can take them further without a specific investment recommendation.
Drawing from your digital marketing background, can you describe a campaign you managed that successfully integrated multiple channels (like SEO, social media, and content marketing) and share the key factors that contributed to its success?
I led the effort creating a full-scale “Wellness Journey” campaign for a company that sells fitness products. The brand was not easily recognizable, and this was affecting their sales. The whole process was thought out and included:
SEO-wise, the guides on the usage of the different types of equipment and goals that the equipment is suitable for were at the top of the list. This approach enabled the brand to target the most valuable search and led to a significant increase in the findability of the articles.
The core of Content Marketing was a 12-week series of customer transformation videos with real stories of people who succeeded at scale. This content was reposted in different formats on different platforms.
As for the social media part, we introduced community challenges that were organized with our hashtags and carried out also by influencer partners. Their main goal was to bring users to build healthy habits and not to see immediate jump results.
Main success factors were:
– Unified and adjustable content in terms of its form to any particular platform
– Data-driven personalization that acts according to the customer’s journey
– Predominance of true-to-life conversion stories rather than product characteristics
– Transparency in attribution modeling in order to see how the channels interact with each other
Through these strategies:
Insights proved to be a 47% increase in organic traffic, a 3-fold increase in social engagement, and more importantly, a 62% improvement in conversion rates as the prospects not only stumbled on our brand one time but went back to it via various channels and touchpoints.
How do you see the intersection of health and wellness with workplace productivity? Can you share a personal anecdote of how prioritizing your own well-being has positively impacted your career?
I understand the health-productivity relationship as deeply symbiotic – by taking good care of our bodies and brains, we can actually influence our cognitive functions, creativity, and resilience. Those companies that give priority to their employees’ wellness are subsequently awarded with higher performance levels, lower absenteeism rates, and better staff retention.
A significant personal event happened to me at the beginning of my career when I had to oversee several high-profile marketing campaigns. I was happy to be the “one who can do anything and everything.” I worked a 70-hour week and had no time for sleep, nutrition, and sports. Consequently, this led to stage burnout and a health crisis that took two weeks of absence.
In the process of recovery, I started practicing some health-related habits in my everyday life: physical activity carried out every day, a technology-free environment in the evenings, and a well-thought-out meal plan. After a few months, the difference that I noticed was not only evident in my physical condition but also in my strategic planning and people management skills. The team collaboration became much better, and I could complete the most complex tasks more quickly despite working fewer hours.
This experience not only deeply affected my outlook on the issue of HR and marketing but also permanently changed it. Nowadays, I support the idea of long-term high performance instead of burst productivity, knowing that effectiveness in one’s career comes from the fact of being healthy in the first place.
In the rapidly evolving field of HR, what’s one emerging trend you’re particularly excited about, and how are you preparing to leverage it in your organization?
A trend that is really interesting in HR that I am looking at is the emergence of AI-supported skills intelligence systems, which enable the mapping of real-time workforce skills. These tools not only enable the conventional skills matrices but, by constantly analyzing employee work products, learning behaviors, and collaborative networks, they also recognize new capabilities that are still emerging as well as the skill gaps before they create any problems in the business.
My plan is to harness the power of this trend by setting up a small project that will connect skills intelligence data with our learning management system. Our first steps have been taken by:
1) Developing comprehensive capability taxonomies referring to our field only
2) Spotting adjacent skills to make more sensible career pathing
3) Packing the opt-in work pattern analysis tools with the best privacy features
What makes it particularly impressive is that it changes talent development from a process of periodical review to a continuously dynamic optimization.
Thanks to the preliminary testing phase, we have already discovered that our workforce can do something they did not even know they could and that cross-departmental projects’ time to productivity has been reduced by 34%.
I am convinced that the companies who reach the skills intelligence summit will achieve significant competitive advantages due to the additional agility to workforce planning and development of a now genuinely personalized employee experience.
Considering your diverse expertise, what’s one piece of unconventional advice you would give to someone looking to build a well-rounded financial portfolio that balances traditional investments with newer opportunities in the digital space?
In order to create a financial portfolio that complements traditional investments with the digital sector, I would like to offer a piece of unconventional advice that no one has heard of: make a conscious decision to take an asymmetry balance of 80-15-5.
The very first step is to allocate 80% that you can rely on to index funds and dividend stocks, basically, those stocks that have made you rich so far. Next, you must allocate 15% to the so-called “adjacent innovations,” mature companies that are adapting to the digital revolution instead of investing in start-ups. These companies are the ones that realize their industry deeply while they are clearly moving their business in a digital way.
The other remaining 5% is allocated to “asymmetric opportunity,” which presents you the possibility of somewhat high-risk digital investments, but there’s a condition of understanding and use only in technologies that you will personally do. This could be the case of fractional real estate platforms or creator economy marketplaces that you can control with your skills and knowledge.
The fundamental point that one doesn’t understand is that information asymmetry is what makes your edge. Your professional direction not only enables you to understand more particular sectors but also assists you in having insights that regular investors don’t. This knowledge should be the primary tool, not following other investors in trending investments where you don’t have a unique perception.
This strategy in combination with the sureness of the current situation provides the needed exposure for the areas of potential growth where your competitive advantage arises from your unique skills and knowledge.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Thank you for the opportunity to share my perspectives! One final thought I’d add is that professional versatility isn’t about mastering every domain equally, but rather about identifying the connective threads between seemingly disparate fields.
I’ve found that the most valuable insights often emerge at these intersections, like how behavioral economics principles can transform both marketing campaigns and financial wellness programs, or how data visualization techniques apply equally to SEO analytics and investment portfolio analysis.
For professionals seeking to develop similar versatility, I recommend focusing on transferable skills that create bridges between specialties rather than trying to become an expert in everything. This approach has allowed me to maintain depth while expanding breadth, creating unique value in each new professional context.
The future belongs to interdisciplinary thinkers who can translate knowledge across traditional boundaries; something I continue to embrace in my own ongoing development journey.