Following the unblocking of Blogspot, Wikipedia is now also unblocked and accessible from within China. Seems like China is becoming more “open”.
Now if they would just unblock Technorati and Wordpress.com.
Being an entrepreneur certainly means wearing different hats. It could be the financial hat, marketing hat, operation hat or the sales hat. Unlike working on a job, wearing a few hats at the same time is commonplace.
Wearing the accountant hat, I worked out the account for the company so far over a few nights. Previously we did not keep good account (I can hear accountants scream). We did keep record but it as not in the proper Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss kind of way. How many entrepreneur know all these anyway. There are still figures to fill up, so this hat will stay on for a while.
With the HR hat on I started thinking about how we could recruit more people - more sales, more developers, more designers. How to attract, motivate, retain. We got our recruitment drive underway - word of mouth, internet ads. Should see some result in the next few weeks.
With the operation/technical hat on I led a training session this afternoon to brush up the knowledge of the technical people. Plan project schedule, check quality of work, fulfill orders, strategize development direction, innovate products. All in a day’s work.
With the sales hat on we discussed about how to target and go after customers. How to best maximise our effort and put deploy sales guy (yes guy, not guys). So far results had been encouraging. We are following on several leads since the sales guy joined this month.
Not to mention there is also the cleaner hat. We spent the last weekend cleaning up the new office. Arranging the furnitures, carrying stuffs from home to office, office to home, old office to new office. It is not done yet. This weekend we are rearranging the layout of the old office where the production and development team will be.
You think that is tough? Wearing one hat at a time is nothing. It is static. Transiting from one hat to another is the key. It is dynamic.
I like the technical hat alot but I shouldn’t wear it all the time. I need to take it off, sometimes when I least wanted to. The HR hat is the toughest to wear right so I had to spend more time.
Isn’t it excting when the sales hat is doing great? But better switch swiftly to the HR hat so that there are enough people to work on orders. More people means more mouth to feed. Better put back the sales hat least everyone starves. In between, alternate often with the operation hat to ensure production are running seamlessly.
The art, as you see, is not just waering hats but in wearing the right hat at the right time while not mess up the hair.
Although eBay is not doing well in China, and by proxy PayPal (è´å®)， this is something to cheer about.
This has been a long time in the waiting. A big boost to ecommerce in Singapore no doubt.
Singapore badly need a payment system to complete with those pricey solution from eNETs and WorldPay. If PayPal get their way, more people would be opening online stores from their bedroom.
We stepped-up our pace after the 1 week China National Day holiday in order to get our new office ready.
Here are some photos taken over the weekend with the desks in place. (The photos are stitched from multiple photos so they look somewhat distorted. )
The main office area. 6 partitioned cubicles with plenty of empty spaces for expansion.
Meeting Room 1. The larger of the 2 meeting rooms.
Meeting Room 2. Smaller meeting room next to the windows. Plan is to double it as a photo-shooting room.
Floor plan. A simple floor plan that I drew to plan and arrange the furnitures.
My partner will be moving up to the new office to start a sales team.
A friend’s company has taken up one of the desk at the corner. We are still looking for another one or two entrepreneurs/startup to share our resources and lower our overheads.
So far I had been to the driving range 2 times. Out of a 3 boxes of practice balls each session, a few did fly. 150m with a 7-iron. It was pretty exciting.
I’m picking up golf.
Many people think that when you start playing golf, you are either getting old or getting somewhere. Neither is anywhere near the truth since I saw kids hitting the ball better than me and I’m not quite anywhere near successful.
Since moving to China, I hardly exercise. Last week I finally signed up for a year’s membership at the gym AND went to the driving range twice. A pat on my back. All work and no play make a dull entrepreneur.
Never did I imagine golf could be tiring. The beginner’s excitement is all over me. I’m seeking out all kinds of information to learn more. Should I go for lesson? Get training video? Read books? Practice, practice, practice?
Stay tuned for more of my golf adventure so I go along.
Came across this article that eBay is getting out of China. The report indicate that eBay is planning to sell the eBay and PayPal business in China to Tom.com.
Those following online business in China may recall that eBay brought Eachnet about 2 years ago making the founder (forgotten his name) one of the riches guy in China.
Yahoo also sold their operation to Alibaba last year. And Alibaba again is behind the site Taobao which is eating eBay’s pie in China.
Reading the comment that follows the article, I have to agree that eBay do not know how the fine art of doing business in China.
Also mentioned, the undercurrent of protectionism is very real. Certain policies are unwritten but through execution can legally create barriers. In the offline arena, Walmart is also feeling similar heat.
It is worth noting that there are incentives to grow local (ie Chinese) business that can compete with their foreign, especially US, counterpart.
For the intrepid entrepreneur, it means there are still plenty to do in China.
This may sounds familiar.
You did everything right and was expecting to deliver a job well done to the customer. Then out of nowhere problem came. What’s worst part is that the problem was not caused by you and there is no way you would have anticipated that.
Just this shit happened to me last week and the aftermath dragged on to this week.
We did a job for a client, exceed their expectation, below budget and well within schedule. How perfect can it get? We were going to surprise the customer. But alas, we were suprised instead.
The first sign of storm came when the customer emailed us to say that they did no received the goods at the specified time. We called the shipper and was told it was in the custom processing. That was before the weekend so everyone happily put it at the back of the mind.
Last Wednesday, another email. This time the warning sounded.
Countless calls later we dugged up a whole can of worms. How the whole thing could happen still baffles me. Some might say “Well, it is China.”
Suffice to say some heads rolled but that isn’t going to save us. The goods that was supposed to be in the customer’s hand is now sitting somewhere held ransom! It wasn’t our problem but we got dragged in nevertheless.
More calls and negotiation later, the boxes of goods returned back to our office. By now we are now a week late. Digging into our pocket we sent some of the goods via UPS so that the customer could use them immediately. That arrived today. The rest of the goods is leaving office tomorrow.
Hopefully no surprises this time. But who know, touch wood.
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.
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