If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

It seems at times overwhelming to think about starting a business. From the outside looking in, there’s no doubt you might have wondered what it took for some people to take the plunge into creating the products they’ve always dreamed of having, and getting others to like them too.

In Kellie Caust’s case, it came almost naturally. With her knack for marketing and sales, it was not long before she decided that her ultimate fulfillment came from developing a product out of her own creativity and resourcefulness, running her own business, and pursuing her desire to spend more time with her family. Getting the best of “all” worlds, so to speak.

Armed with just a passion for creating a unique product and an instinct for sensing a niche in the market, Kellie saw inspiration in one of ChinaDirect’s annual guided tours to China’s biggest trade show, the Canton Fair. Tired of the corporate life and wanting to spend more time with her 3 children, Kellie drew inspiration from Lindy Chen to take the next step to realizing the product she had in mind. At the Canton Fair she found just the right material that would fit.

In hindsight, it all started when Kellie was shopping for a laptop bag for her 14 year old daughter. The choices she found were not colorful and iPad cases were similarly unexciting and did not even have handles. Now, imagine a bag to hold and protect your kid’s precious gadget that not only looks young and cool, but is also easy to clean, able to carry other stuff, like an iPhone, and have handles! Precisely what Kellie had in mind!

The rest of it came very easily. With ChinaDirect as her project manager, she was able to start her own importing business with little trouble. Here’s what she had to say about ChinaDirect, “I used ChinaDirect through all of the different stages and my product was delivered to me with no hassles at all. I now have an online business and I am also selling wholesale to retailers around Australia.”

So are you afraid to go into importing because you have no experience, no idea where to start, and speak no Chinese? No problem! You can start by getting a glimpse of what importing is all about this May. Just like Kellie, ChinaDirect’s Doing Business in China Seminar could be the inspiration that you need. Let ChinaDirect help you find the right supplier, facilitate your shipment, and speak to your Chinese suppliers, and you’re on your way to getting that business that you had always thought you could.

Maybe it’s time that you, like Kellie, get Outcased!

How about $5? Ludicrous? Now if you were asked if you would pay $5 for your favorite cup of joe, would your answer be different? I guess by now, you would know where this is leading up to. Starbucks has been serving up coffee at prices we would normally pay for anything but java. What is the magic of Starbucks?

“In a sense, we were on this magical carpet ride – everything we touched, everything we did, turned to gold. Everything worked. Growth became a strategy, as opposed to an outcome.” Howard Schultz

Its CEO and Chairman Howard Schultz has been seen in countless interviews talking about the company that has become a fixture in many countries around the world. Schultz has been credited for turning the company around after an overexpansion that threatened its viability. Faced with a recession and growing competition that offered cheaper alternatives, Starbucks’ profit and stock price plunged, and painful decisions had to be made.

There is another man though, also named Howard, who joined Starbucks when it was just a small regional company in the US. His last name is Behar. He joined the company in 1989 and was largely credited for growing Starbucks from 28 to 400 stores by 1995. He was also able to help the company open its first store in Tokyo.

In his book, “It’s Not About The Coffee: Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks,” Behar talks about the importance of people over product. His oft-repeated quote is, “We’re in the people business serving coffee, not the coffee business serving people.”

Ironically, Starbucks had to close many of its branches and layoff a significant portion of its labor force in the aftermath of the recession. However, these guiding principles of putting people first continue to be the secret recipe of a company that now has ambitions of turning 1 billion tea drinking Chinese into coffee lovers.

Here’s a quote from Behar’s website:

“It is my humble but firm belief that it is people—in the best of times, and especially in the hardest times—who will inspire you, sustain and grow your organization, and get you through. As I’ve learned throughout my career, and my own trials and tribulations in leading myself and others, the easy high-flying times are guaranteed not to last. Ups and downs, even severe ones, are part of both the economic and human cycles.

But our values do last, and the impact of our actions last, too. I’ve seen that the values and actions of showing you care, building trust, holding yourself accountable, knowing who you are and what you stand for—of putting people first—can provide stability and a lifeline on a personal level and for a whole organization or community.”
(Italics added)

History has never seen hundreds of millions of people emancipated from poverty, rapid industrialization and urbanization, the way China has. China did this by doubling its GDP three times in three decades, with an annual growth rate of about 8%. What took the West a hundred years to accomplish, China did in about half the time. If you can imagine it, think about a farmer who turns into a factory manager and turns his land into ownership of multiple rental apartments that pays for his pension. And imagine him seeing his children come from a peasant lifestyle to become highly skilled and educated yuppies whose time has arrived.

In a stunning and epic documentary shot over four years, the BBC showed us how China did it in the transformation of a small sleepy town to a busy commercial district. It was all part of China’s plan to develop the Western part of the country and to decongest the East. Wuxi County is part of the city of Chongqing, which owns a population of 32 million and perhaps now according to some estimates, the biggest city in the world. The Three Gorges project will bring commerce to this rising new city. White Horse Village is in midst of three large cities, Chongqing, Wuhan, and Xian. This verdant land of rice fields sat in the way of progress.

Now imagine, everything you had built in your lifetime being swallowed up by the tide of progress. In the words of Carrie Gracie, “Like many other nameless villages before it, White Horse Village must make the necessary sacrifice. All of its emerald rice fields are disappearing under concrete. The houses the farmers built themselves, houses they were married in, houses their children were born in, are being demolished…Even the ancestors have to go. Their very graves are being moved.”

In the end, White Horse Village remains another bitter sweet story of a country in flux, a country that looks to the sacrifices of its people to collectively achieve their goal of progress.