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Training to Climb an Everest of Digital Data

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I saw this fascinating article on Monday in the NYT. It points to the simply mind-boggling crush of information available to us. When I was a senior in college, less than 15 years ago, you actually did research with books. I can remember driving 2 hours to UVA to do research in their library, spending $20 or more on photocopies. Today I manage a global sales force without ever leaving town.

Robert A. Heinlein wrote, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I generally agree with Heinlein, but how ultimately do you succeed in the ocean of data without some level of specialization? The world today is so astoundingly complex that you require experts to help you navigate. PassageMaker is indeed such a specialist. China is a virtual sea of humanity, it’s industrial centers so vast they take hours to drive across. How are you to find your way through this mess without a guide?

Mike Bellamy started PassageMaker to help foreign companies succeed in China. Give us a call and find out how we can be of assistance.

Why I don’t brew beer (anymore)

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20 years ago I wanted to be a brewmaster. The American microbrew movement was just taking off, and it was a good time to get in. I attended beer festivals, visited breweries, did research (in the days before the internet no less), etc. Ultimately I had two banker’s boxes full of information on techniques, equipment, business models, etc. Today this would occupy about 5% of the free flash drive you got for opening your checking account last year, but this was 1989, and paper was still state of the art. And I still have all this information, thank you very much.

I used this copious research to sell the idea of a brewpub to two entrepreneurs opening a new restaurant in a location I had long had my eye on. It was tremendously exciting being even obliquely involved with the start up and I enjoyed working there as an assistant brewer. As great learning experience all the way around, and should either of those entrepreneurs read this, thank you sincerely for the opportunity.

And what I ultimately learned from that experience was I did NOT want to be a brewer anymore. Beer from the store is just fine thanks.

Now, onto the tortured analogy section. Many of our clients are new to doing business in China. Many have done awesome amounts of research, days spent on sourcing websites like Global Sources, and they are totally jazzed about this new experience, much as I was 20 years ago. They want to travel, try new things, etc. Then they realize that the China trade is work, and the fun wears off quickly.

There are brewers who get up every day excited to go to work and make beer. I admire them and wish them well at their chosen craft. Thanks to them, I get to have a drink without all the scalding water, acids, caustic sodas, foul-smelling slime and general hard-work-nastiness that goes into making beer.

The PassageMaker Team and our friends at China Quality Focus are a collection of such dedicated “brewmasters”. I know I wake up every morning happy and enthusiastic about my chosen field. Our Sourcing Feasibility Study, Vendor Coordination and Assembly-Inspection-Packaging service offerings are all designed to help our clients have a successful experience in China. Most importantly, we want to take care of things on the ground in China so our clients can stay at home with their families, instead of spending $10k every other month traveling back and forth to visit vendors. When you do choose to come to China, we want you to come for a relaxing guanxi tour, not to fight fires. We’ll even help you with your travel arrangements and buy you a drink!

Our new partner in Brazil, Andrea Martins of OverChina

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I am thrilled to announce that PassageMaker now has sales representation in Brazil. Ms. Andrea Martins, co-founder of OverChina, has joined the team, representing PM, China Quality Focus and SafePassage.

Ms. Martins has more than 25 years experience living in China, and has an impressive academic and professional resume. Here she is discussing the 60th anniversary of the PRC on Brazilian television (in Portuguese). Thankfully for me, she also speaks fluent English.

The PassageMaker web team is working to update our website with bios for our global sales team, something I hope to have up within the next two weeks. Short post tonight – computer trouble. More later…

There’s no General Tso’s Chicken in China

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This is one of Mike Bellamy’s favorite sayings. And there really isn’t any General Tso’s Chicken in China. And conversely, KFC in the USA thankfully, wisely does NOT serve that weird breaded, fried ground shrimp burger thing with the chunks of pepper and kernels of corn with the sweet mayonnaise…ick. And this is an ick from the guy who really, truly loves Chongqing style Pig’s Brain Soup.

This points to the distorted lenses through which different cultures view each other. General Tso’s Chicken is as far from a Hunan dish* as you can get. Yet it is probably the most famous “Chinese” dish in America. Some years ago I was dining at the local “Chinese” restaurant (normally I avoid such places, but my Father enjoys the lunch buffet). This place is owned by a great family from Taiwan, my much beloved second home, and I know they cook the good authentic stuff for themselves, but like every “Chinese” restaurant in small town America, they play to (their perception of) local tastes. Which, sadly, means sweet sauces, deep fried everything, overcooked vegetables**, copious amounts of cornstarch to fatten you up, Uncle Ben’s grade “rice”, “hot” dishes that aren’t, etc. Not the worst stuff in the world, but when you know what the real thing tastes like, it’s always disappointing.

As I was making my way around the buffet the restaurant was suddenly overrun with school aged children, maybe 5th grade. I asked one of the chaperons what was going on. Turned out to be a field trip from one of the local public schools; they were studying China that week and this was part of their education. I reflexively said, “这菜不是中国菜，是美国菜”; she was quite taken aback to hear me speaking Chinese, but even more so when I translated, “this isn’t Chinese food, this is American food”.

These cases of cultural myopia are fun when discussing food, but they can be dangerous when you start throwing money around. I am astounded by some of the assumptions people have about China, ranging from charming naivete to stunning ignorance. I’ll be the first one to admit China is getting easier to work with all the time, but that’s only in comparison to how difficult it was in the past. It is still a very foreign place.

PassageMaker was founded to help foreign companies be successful in their dealings with China. I tell all my clients, if you can satisfy your customers by making the product in your home market, please do. If you don’t have to source in China, don’t. Doing business in China is difficult and slow and never as inexpensive as it is advertised. But the reality is, in many cases, China sourcing is required to succeed in the market. It is still the place where the “world price” gets set.

Our core services – Sourcing Feasibility Studies, Vendor Coordination and Assembly-Inspection-Packaging – are all designed to help our clients access the advantages of China without exposing their intellectual property or otherwise getting ripped off. Mike and I have been doing this a while and we’ve made the mistakes and learned the lessons for you. If your project requires China sourcing, leverage our experience to make it a successful venture.

Notes:

* Hunan cuisine is one of my favorites, and is hot and spicy without the horrendous, toxic heat of Sichuan cuisine. This is one the best Hunan dishes, chili shrimp skewers, and you eat the shells, much like soft-shelled crab. We typically go through 3-4 plates of these at a sitting. Perfect with a cold beer.

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**Vegetable dishes are what I miss most in China. I’ve become reasonably proficient in recreating my favorites at home. Here’s my recipe for Spinach with Garlic and Sesame Seed (it’s my blog and who said we had to talk business all the time?):

8-10 oz spinach leaves (1 big bunch washed and trimmed or 1 bag of baby spinach leaves in the salad section works perfectly)

6-8 cloves of garlic, smashed and chopped coarsely

3 tbsps peanut oil

2 tbsps toasted sesame seeds (toast yourself by dry frying in the wok or buy them pre-toasted at any Asian grocery store)

1/4 tsp kosher salt

Heat the oil in a wok, add salt and garlic when hot, stir fry quickly and don’t burn the garlic. Add spinach (best to rinse and dry as much as possible in a salad spinner) and stir fry until leaves are wilted. Add sesame seeds, toss to mix and serve immediately.

How to make a BLT

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Years ago I saw a cookbook in Taiwan, written in Chinese, that taught our intrepid Taiwanese housewives how to make such standard American fare as the BLT (that’s Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwiches for the non-Americans) and the PB&J (Peanut Butter & Jelly sandwiches). It had never occurred to me that anyone in Taiwan would (A) require instructions for such basic American fare or (B) want to cook it. I can’t really remember why I didn’t buy it – probably my student budget – but I regret that decision often.

Regular readers of this blog know I study food. Cuisine is the most basic cultural art form. Every culture, no matter how primitive, develops its own distinct cuisine. You learn a lot about someone by trying their food.

Asking an American how to make a BLT provokes a guffaw, but I’ve had exactly the same experience in reverse when I ask Chinese folks how to make the core dishes in their cuisine. BLT is every bit as literal as my favorite Chinese dish, 拍黄瓜, “banged up cucumbers”, which describes how you use the flat of the knife to lightly crush the cucumbers*.

Cultural assumptions greatly complicate international business. Foreign expectations of how things are in China are nearly always wrong. PassageMaker has studied the culture in China for more than an decade and our company exists to help our clients be successful in China.

We developed the Sourcing Feasibility Study to identify a wide range of capable vendors. Our Vendor Coordination services can be customized to support almost any task the client requires. Our Assembly Center was started to bring the critical Assembly-Inspection-Packaging functions in-house where they could be managed exactly to the client’s requirements, as documented in the Product Quality Manual.

While exploring foreign cultures – especially through cuisine – is one of the great adventures in life, it is a bad idea to try to learn the business culture of a foreign country on the fly. When your money is on the line, you need an experienced guide like PassageMaker.

* – Pai Huang Gua – “Banged Up Cucumbers”

4 small pickling cucumbers, washed and chilled – make sure to use fresh, crisp cucumbers

6 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1/4 tsp pickling salt

3 tbsps black vinegar (available at Asian markets, substitute white vinegar if unavailable)

2 tbsps sesame oil (3 tbsps if no hot sesame oil)

1 tbsps hot sesame oil (optional – available at Asian markets)

1tsp hot sauce, preferably Chili Garlic sauce or Sambal Oelek (optional – available at Asian markets)

Wrap cucumbers in plastic wrap and using fist, cutting board, rolling pin, flat of a cleaver, etc., smack the the cucumbers until they split. Unwrap and coarsely chop into large chunks. Salt the cucumbers and garlic in a bowl, drizzle liquid ingredients one at a time in order over the cucumbers and gently mix with a spoon. Do NOT cover and shake or otherwise try to completely blend liquid ingredients. You do not want to create an emulsion, but rather a layered sauce. Serve immediately as a cold appetizer.

There’s a lotta stuff you can’t learn from a textbook, because no one ever wrote the textbook

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When Mike Bellamy started PassageMaker, it was a typical trading company. Mike had a relationship with a particular set of factories, and sold their services to customers (like me) at a mark-up, taking ownership of the parts and assuming warranty risk. It worked well for a while, but soon enough, despite all our efforts, things began to falter because if you don’t fully own the factory, you can’t fully control the quality, delivery dates, pricing and services. It only proved to both of us that there was a better way. It was Mike who had the epiphany on the better way.

That better way became The PassageMaker Model of Trust & Transparency. Being honest became the core product. De-coupling the services from the vendors was the eureka moment. The services are inspection and final assembly. The vendors provide the bill of material. In this new method, the inspection and final assembly center is 100% owned by PassageMaker so the customer and PassageMaker are no longer at the mercy of the suppliers to get the quality right at ship it on time.

There was no guidebook for this new way of doing business. We didn’t learn it in school. We were truly working without a net.

Plenty of folks have offered snickering criticism over the years. We don’t charge enough. We should be marking up the product’s BOM with a margin hidden to the client, rather than just invoicing for our services. We should finance our customers. We can’t possibly be serious.

Well, to all our critics, we tried the traditional trading model a few times back in the day and lost our shirt, socks and underwear because the Chinese suppliers let us down, not because of something we did or did not do. We’ve watched our friends do the same thing over and over in their trading companies. They all failed because they left it up to the factories to hold the price, ship on time and manage the quality. If you don’t believe me, put five years of trading in China under your belt and then let’s talk. Running a trading company means assuming astounding risk with minuscule net margins, and because you don’t own the means of production, you are totally at the mercy of your suppliers. It is a great business model in theory; wretched in practice.

There was no textbook for The PassageMaker Model, because no one had gotten around to writing it, because no one had ever even thought of it. Mike is now (quite literally) working on the textbook , but our Sourcing Feasibility Studies, Vendor Coordination and Assembly-Inspection-Packaging services are our philosophy in practice. They are the controlled evolution of an idea.

There are lessons in life you have to learn by doing. Mike and I have the scars to prove we went through the fire, but the critical point is what we did with that learning experience. Anybody can learn from their own mistakes, by a wise person learns from the mistakes of others. We didn’t just learn; we innovated. And now we leverage this knowledge to the benefit of our customers. PassageMaker is unlike any company you will encounter in China, because simply we are unlike any other company in China.

I hope you will give us a chance to show you how different we are.

80% of success is just showing up

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A famous quote from Woody Allen, and 100% true.

When Mike Bellamy started PassageMaker, he was working out of his living room. He had no work force, no infrastructure, just his own willingness to work and work and work until the job was done. He showed up, plain and simple.

PassageMaker made plenty of mistakes in those early days. But Mike kept showing up, over and over, and he learned from his mistakes. He listened when a client (like me) told him what he was doing wrong and how to do it right.

And I listened and learned as well. Mike’s great innovation was to separate the service offerings from a set base of vendors. It was not an easy sell in a world dominated by the trading company model. It took real guts and vision to chart a new path and stick to it.

Since that epiphany, PassageMaker has added our Assembly Center in Buji, including the precision Medical Assembly Center, and has grown from 3-4 people working in the founder’s living room to a company with around 150 employees worldwide. Still small enough to care about the success of each of our clients, but big enough to provide the depth of services our diverse customer base requires.

Mike and I and the rest of the PassageMaker Team showed up and the success of the PassageMaker Model of Trust & Transparency speaks for itself.

Texas Tavern Wisdom

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“WE DON’T CASH CHECKS OR PLAY WITH BUMBLE BEES”, so says the sign next to the cash register at the Roanoke, VA landmark Texas Tavern. It’s been open every day, 24/7 (except Christmas) since 1930. No credit, no checks, all cash. A true money-making machine. I’ll have two small cheeseburgers all the way, a bowl with and a sweet milk, thanks.*

Now, anyone who knows the Texas Tavern might infer that my analogy implies that dealing with PassageMaker will leave a foul taste in your mouth, give you gas and make you reach for the antacids. Not so, though if you choose to visit us in China and have a desire to stretch your culinary boundaries to say, Sichuan cuisine, I am not responsible for the results.

Whether hot dogs, Cheesy Westerns** and chili are to your liking or not, the Texas Tavern serves good honest fair quickly and efficiently, available all hours of the day and night, for affordable prices. The food is cooked directly in front of you, nothing fancy, and all transactions occur at the time of sale, in cash.

This is in fact a perfect analogy for The PassageMaker Model of Trust & Transparency in China. There are no smoke and mirrors and our success is dependent on our performance in full view of the client. Our three basic service offerings – Sourcing Feasibility Studies, Vendor Coordination and Assembly-Inspection-Packaging – were formulated to provide a simple honest solution to the typical problems people faced doing business in China.

“Now if it’s so darned honest, why demand all payments in advance? Don’t you trust me?”, you ask.

Whether I trust you or not is immaterial. We insist on cash-for-services for very simple two reasons:

Reason #1 is that China as a whole operates on cash. You want me to be open tomorrow? Then pay me cash today. Chinese vendors actually use your deposit to buy the raw material for your order. It is the credit trap that contributed mightily to the death spiral of the US automotive industry – when you have to finance your customers for 3-6 months, the system is broken and the relationships are poisoned. PassageMaker, like all China vendors, requires at least partial payment in advance. Having seen both systems up close and personal, cash in advance is far more direct and far more honest an approach.

So Reason #2 is to maintain the honesty. If we don’t allow the moral hazard of credit, everyone stays happy. Expectations are clearly defined and can be easily met. The debtor is not slave to the lender. And I’m not up at night angry because you owe me money.

PassageMaker can introduce you to banks, to venture capitalists, or to angel investors. But we’ve found that being the low cost source of China services does not mix with playing the deep pockets. It crosses the streams, if you will. Just like the Texas Tavern will not alter its menu or offer credit, we offer our simple and elegant service, take it or leave it. And if you want ketchup with that, please get out now.***

Translations for the uninitiated:

* Two small (biscuit sized patties) cheeseburgers with raw white onions, pickle relish and mustard, a bowl of chili (beans mostly) with (chopped raw onions) and a sweet milk (as opposed to the default buttermilk). Heaven for around $5 (and for around 30 minutes before you need the aforementioned antacid).

** Cheesy Western = large cheeseburger with fried egg, over easy on top, all the way of course. Health food is wildly overrated.

*** No ketchup is ever served at the Texas Tavern. May it always be thus.

Brett Favre = It’s Awesome Time

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Short post tonight.

I am a Packers stockholder. I love the Packers and I hate the way the divorce with Brett Favre went down two years ago.

Tonight, in his 19th season in the NFL, he put the smackdown on his old team. One week from his 40th birthday, he showed the whole world how it’s done.

Brett Favre on a football field = Awesome Time. Aaron Rodgers and the Packers played one hell of a game, and but for a bogus “interference” call in the 1st half that cost them a touchdown, it would have been a game. But at the end of it all, there is nothing to say but that Favre schooled them.

I hope that 9 years from now, Mike Bellamy and I can look back on our career and say we were even half as good.

At this point, I’m supposed to give you a bunch of links on how PassageMaker can help you with your project. Tonight, I won’t. You can find them on the website if you want. Instead, let me just say congratulations to Brett Favre. He’s beaten all 32 teams in the NFL, something no one in the entire history of the NFL has done.

A legend walking the earth deserves nothing less than my complete respect.

BRETT FAVRE IS THE MAN.

Who Dares Wins

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This is the motto of the British Special Air Service. It is also great advice for any entrepreneur.

I had my first job at 14 running a lathe in a machine shop. I am sure I did a horrible job that first summer. I’ve worked in factories many times since then, and all those experiences taught me two major lessons:

  1. Respect the people who work in the factories, farms, restaurants and shops around you. If you can’t show respect and honor to the person serving you food, you don’t deserve any respect yourself.
  2. I was not cut out for corporate life.

Now #1 above needs no explanation. Or it shouldn’t. Shame on you if it does.

But #2…I never really considered going to work for anyone else after those summers in the factory. As I write this, it is 2:24 AM EDT, I’ve been at work since 7:30 AM EDT the previous morning. I should be burned out, but instead I am energized. This is my company and my passion.

What I love most about being in charge of global sales for PassageMaker and China Quality Focus are the entrepreneurs I meet. It is a huge misconception that creativity is confined to “the arts”. These are fiercely creative people who bring astounding ideas to the world. They deserve the support that PassageMaker provides through our Sourcing Feasibility Studies, Vendor Coordination and Assembly-Inspection-Packaging services.

Through our network of Endorsed Service Providers, we strive to offer service at every stage of a project’s life. Mike and I are entrepreneurs; we have taken these risks and we believe in the motto “Who Dares Wins”. More than anything we want to see our clients win.