Ran across 5 Reasons Why Every Entrepreneur Should Workout and I was immediately reminded that I hasn’t been working out regularly over the past 2 years.
Scary. When things get busy, exercising is often the first thing to be put aside.
Exercising is like a long term investment with compound interest. If started young, you put in a small effort and reap immense return over time. The immediate return though is not too apparent. However if started too late, it could be expensive or even impossible to achieve the same return.
As pretty active sportperson before (having competed in the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games when I was younger), I can attest to the benefits of exercising.
Now I what I need to work the exercising routine into my life again.
Many pundits claimed that without a business plan, you are planning to fail. Yet others ignored business plan. Those walking down the middle avocate a short plan.
Over the years I had learnt to stop worrying about details but to let the details work their way out.
It is not to say planning isn’t important, it is. It is about not getting bogged down by details, unknowns, over planning. All these can actually lead to inactivity. Oftentime things will work the details out itself but only if you get it started in the first place.
Take the recent example of our new office. We had wanted to have a bigger office because the current one is pretty cramp and we would also like to have a meeting room. At the same time it is an option to expand, we had moved offices many time as a result of space and it would be nice to preempt that.
Well, chance has it that the floor above us became available and presented itself to us. We went wildly excited but at the same time went through our accounts and worried about the sustainability. There were many unknowns and we started discussing many “what-if” scenarios figured our current cash can only sustain another 2 months.
It is a good thing that the property is hot and we had to act fast. There isn’t enough time for us to figure out every possible scenarios. So we decided to go ahead and rent it.
The deposit was paid on Friday. Making that decision had actually led us to focus on how to make it happen instead of worrying about why it would not happen.
We are talking to a few entrepreneurs that are interested to share the office with us and use the meeting room facilities (In fact we now have plenty of space because we decided to keep the existing office as well). We are also planning ahead when the office is ready so that we can expand and grow our business.
All these activities would not happen if we just stood there and worry.
Quality - you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is.
Was Quality something that you “just see” or might it be something more subtle than that, so that you wouldn’t see it at all immediately, but only after a long period of time?
This was the question, If everyone knows what quality is, why is there such a disagreement about it?
- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Quality, something that had occupied my thoughts recently.
How do you describe quality to your staff? Is it as subjective as “the boss likes it” or can an objective standard be applied?
Does culture play a part in the perception of quality. For example, many people still harbour the notion that “Made in China = Inferior Quality”. How can a company in China tackle this issue, both internally and externally?
As usual I was surfing around and clicked on a blogspot blog. The usual drill is,
- open the blogspot blog in another Firefox tab,
- copy the URL into a proxy,
- browse the site through a proxy.
A few minutes ago, something extraordinary happened, the blogspot sites loads!
Has China unblock all blogspot sites?
A quick check on WordPress.com, it is still blocked.
We had our first vision meeting yesterday evening. The outcome of the meeting was not clear but from the look of what the guys are working on today, I say they got a sense of where we are heading.
Which is a good thing. The past few months has been very exciting. After numerous stumbles and falls over the past 2 years, things are finally starting to take shape.
Few things happening over the next few months:
- getting a new office
- putting in place remote teams
- ICP permit is in the process
- starting development of 2 ideas we want to incubate
Yet again we are expanding office (again but a good news!). This time we want to be sure we have room for expansion so we are going to get a bigger office.
We found an ideal location however there are more space than we need. So we decide to share the space with another company or even help entrepreneurs.
If you are starting (or planning to start) business in Shanghai and do not want to commit to rental and furniture, this is an option.
We will/can provide
- an official office address
- table
- meeting room
- computer
- admin support
- local knowledge and expertise
Please contact me in private if you are interested.
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