From refugee beginnings to rebuilding again and again: the Rachel Do story

Since arriving as a refugee and growing up in public housing in Kensington, Rachel Do has built a property portfolio as well as a successful business. Now the mother-of-three is launching a book about her dramatic ups and downs.

Rachel Do has had experiences many Australians could barely imagine.

As a seven-year-old whose family had links to the former South Vietnam government, she made the desperate journey away from her homeland by fishing boat.

During the escape the family was split up, and Rachel ended up spending three years in Indonesia with her father while her mother waited in the Philippines with her brothers.

Arriving in Australia in 1992 aged 10, Rachel found herself in a country “where we had to learn everything [including English] from scratch”.

Her parents soon separated and the time she had spent apart from her mother made their relationship difficult.

“Somehow we were never able to reconnect,” she says.

While her mum worked incredibly hard to support and educate the kids Rachel and her siblings had little in the way of extended family, community or financial resources in Melbourne.

“Books were the first thing that I had access to, and self-help books, books about finance, motivated me to work really hard,” she says.

The significance of that early influence has stayed with her and helped convince her to put together her own written story, complete with self-help elements.

As a teenager Rachel attended St Aloysius then Mt Alexander High and finished her VCE.

After being thwarted in her ambition to become a flight attendant on account of her height – she was 4cm too short – she enrolled in then dropped out of tourism management at La Trobe University and did a short marketing course.

She had been working in various hospitality jobs when she decided to join a friend who was doing some training in the beauty industry.

“I just did the course and I loved it, and I’ve been doing that work now for the past 20-plus years,” she says.

Driven and extremely hard-working, the newly-minted beautician opened her first salon when she was 23.

Around this time, she also sold her Mitsubishi Lancer for a deposit and bought her first apartment, a purchase that would lead to others.

Rachel’s first salon turned out to be too small and she got out, next buying into a franchise which evolved into another bad situation.

That resulted in her taking the dramatic step of walking away with nothing but a large debt.

But then, after identifying a gap in the market for an eyelash specialist, she started Holy Lashes in North Melbourne.

Within a short space of time Rachel had two more of the salons and another three were opened by other operators.

Then COVID struck.

The lockdowns were initially “terrible” and incredibly stressful for the busy businesswoman but after experiencing an initial “meltdown” she realised that her fixation on building a future had caused her to miss out on a lot, particularly her kids’ lives.

“I was never fully a mum until COVID, when I put aside all that financial stress [I was under] and enjoyed that time with the girls,” she says.

Rachel’s story has some other big highs – like her second marriage to an old friend who had been adopted by her young daughters.

And the fact that instead of serving drinks on planes, as she once hoped to do, she is now learning to fly them.

But in her book, Not Rich Yet but Getting There, she doesn’t shy away from the lows either.

Among other things, her at-times harrowing life’s journey has included a series of miscarriages and serious family violence.

She writes also about business and investment decisions that didn’t work out.

“In the memoir I share all my failures, I don't just talk about the success,” she tells North West City News.

“Once you've read it, [you’ll see that] it wasn't one time that I had to rebuild. I had to rebuild many times.”

She talks also about the “mindset” behind her achievements – essentially to be prepared to try, fail and “move on to the next thing”, to “just get up get on with life!”

“What separates people who have achieved any form of success from those who haven't is the mindset and the determination and all the hard work behind that,” she says.

Rachel Do’s self-published book Not Rich Yet but Getting There: A Refugee’s Journey from Debt and Loss to Financial Freedom will be launched at Willows & Wine in West Melbourne on Sunday, August 30.

It is available on Amazon. •