Always wanted to be mentioned in the same breath as "Car Talk" - now I can die happy

Been a long time since the last post -- just been preoccupied with other stuff.

We finally outgrew our shared space with fellow Green Building companies (two related companies) and found our own spot not more than a km away and still in Xujiahui in a lovely old lane house.  Our friends upstairs are a furniture design company but we haven't had too much interaction with them so far.  A housewarming BBQ is in the plans, but first the temperatures need to drop below 100!

Headcount is holding at 18, with one more joining at the end of the month.  Only three of these are part-timers, so at the end of the month, it is a rather traumatic event.  I finally hired a finance/book-keeper/HR person, which is freeing me up a lot, but handling salary payments while being tax efficient is a pretty major effort, so better someone else rather than me!

We continue to get pretty good press coverage -- was on Forbes and the Global Times (Chinese national language daily), but the big personal milestone was getting onto NPR!  A nice story along with the audio is posted here.

The cool thing is that a potential partner that I had been just in discussions with about becoming a distributor got a big credibility push from this when the US-based company's president caught the show and the next morning wrote me: "Small world.  I was driving home this evening, listening to NPR, and heard your voice.  You were interviewed in a clip on air pollution in China. "

We even had some folks write in with interest in investing in us:

Quick Contact Form
Your Name:	****
Your Email:	****@gmail.com
Your Phone Number:	****
Best time to contact you?:	8 am
Your Location:	Cincinnati
How did you hear about us?:	PRI Radio
Please describe: area of concern(air, water, lead, or mold), information needed and any health symptoms or problems.:	I am interested in investing in your company. How might I go about doing that?

The big change is that this accelerates our plan to put together a push for investment by the end of the year.  We can use the money to run the business more professionally (ie. get our Chinese name trademarked, get a Chinese website, do more paid advertising, etc).  But a lot to do between now and then...

I love my job

This week I pulled three all-nighters, got in only one workout, rode about 100 miles on my scooter crisscrossing Shanghai freezing my butt off, and never ate a single meal at a normal time, but I couldn’t be happier. Since I last updated you all, a few things have happened to us:

• Received our first bribe solicitation for passing test results (we politely declined) 
• Opened our Beijing office and found a great guy to be the GM -- after an exhausting but eye-opening three month search during which candidates were considered from: Germany, Italy, America, the Philippines, and China. 
• Started working with a bunch of international schools 
• Delivered our first paid training 
• Were selected as the exclusive indoor environmental testers for a major company that does theme parks and features animal characters with big black ears (will be testing all 300+ expat staff they relocate over here over the next two years) 
• Brought onboard a full-time mold consultant, a corporate sales guy, a long-term marketing intern and a structural engineer from the UK (who does remediations). 
• Website traffic has increased 30x over the past 2 months – from about 25 hits per day to about 750 partially because of the global attention to China’s crazy pollution to S’s marketing efforts. 

Why am I so happy? Mainly, because I feel like this business has grown in a healthy way, made our clients happier and able to live longer and healthier, gave our staff a meaningful way to develop, and because I feel like I’ve finally found something that I both like doing and am good at. The metric I’ve always used to decide if it was time to move on to the next thing in life was to ask myself at the end of the day: “Did I make a difference?” Now, most nights I don’t have to wonder.

This job lets me keep learning. Whether it’s about Chinese labor laws, how government deals happen (it is NOT a myth that lots of baijiu (wine liquor) is involved), a new way to stop mold growth, or what motivates a member of the team, I am never bored. I couldn’t imagine doing the same thing day after day. At the same time, there is something really nice about getting really good at your job so that learn how to handle problems and add value more quickly with less effort. I remember giving my first presentation about Shanghai air and water in Nov 2010 and being so nervous. Last week, I gave three presentations – one to a hostile crowd of schoolchildren’s parents, one with a doctor friend to a community group, and a third to a company’s HR and operations management team – without needing much preparation or anxiety. When I was in IBM, I used to envy the expert consultants, who were specialists in their field and could really help their clients see a problem through, without even seeming to break a sweat. Meanwhile, us general strategy consultants would be researching a new industry like crazy at night, then trying to impress the clients the next day with our newfound knowledge, all the while feeling like a sham. Finally, I think I’m “that guy”.

It’s not all fun and games. Too many things still bottleneck at me and I’m really hesitant to let too much responsibility fall to other people, afraid that something will go wrong or that quality will suffer. I edit every single report that goes out and still do an average of 3-4 projects a week. It would be good to let people make more mistakes and I think I finally have a great core of people that I trust. We still have hardly scratched the surface. Maybe about 1% of the market that needs us knows about us, and probably only a tenth of that have reached out to us. But, we’re getting there and the business model is working and this baby is growing up. Last month, I was at a function and met someone who turned out to be the client sponsor of a project we had done and last week I did a mold inspection and found out that the client was the lead designer on the very same project. It’s a small world and it’s fascinating to connect the dots.

My former boss to whom I had to explain 3 years ago why I was quitting my very cushy and well-titled corporate job, just announced that he was leaving the company. I always assumed he would retire with the company, so I guess maybe it’s human nature to want to change things up or look for greener pastures. This may sound really corny, but if you there’s something that you want to do that will make you happy, take the risk.

One sign that your company is growing up

...is when you are offered a bribe to make the reports pass.  We'd always heard second-hand stories about air testing companies that would falsify reports or change them to whatever the paying client wanted.  But, it's one thing to hear rumors around the campfire and another to actually be offered money.

We were hired by a large multinational IT company to test one of their newly built facilities.  The construction company in charge of the fit-out told one of our consultants that the air had to pass standards and asked if we could help.  My response was, "Sure, we can definitely offer some advice."  This was not the sort of answer they wanted, so they clarified and told my consultant that they were prepared to offer money (didn't get into how much) to make sure they passed.  I dismissed it with some polite way, but was strangely flattered.  Is this what about the neighborhood bully feels like when he's offered lunch money for protection??

Throat's sore and head hurts after coming out of a workshop for  

a large corporate real estate management company.  This was a good way to hopefully get our name out to the folks who manage construction projects and are often on the hook to either test the air before occupation, or have to clean up a mess.  I foolishly agreed to delivery the training in Chinese.  Not a big deal until I got there and discovered that 20 of the 30 participants were dialling in on a conference call.  Hard to brief in Chinese to Chinese.  Even harder when you can't count on reading facial gestures.  Still, it went surprisingly well and we got a lot of  questions.  So, the lesson learned is that running a company in China is still the best way to learn Mandarin.

I'm currently in the middle of considering three candidates to become the next general manager of the Beijing branch.  It's tough.  Really tough.  One Italian, one German, and one American.  Sounds like a bad ethnic joke.  I've brought them down one at a time for a couple days each.  Looking for a sign... 

Who you gonna call?

If you're the Canadian Consul-General and you got mad mold problems, apparently me!

He has a really nice dog

Aren't we Mr. Fancypants?

Got a real fixed line installed today, after 2 years of being in business.  No more getting called in the middle of the night on my cell phone!

Ft. Dix sure ain't Hawaii

I've just finished up two pretty grueling weeks at Ft. Dix, NJ.  I've been here to finish up the third, and final phase of the Command and General Staff College or CGSC.  It's a requirement for all field grade Army officers to complete in order to be promoted to LtCol.  Basically, it's an advanced course for senior staff officers. The course teaches everything from military history to leadership principles to learning how to work with the other military services and agencies.  

I did the first phase resident at Ft. Shafter, Oahu, Hawaii -- that was great.  Good classmates and couldn't ask for a better outdoor classroom.  I stayed at the Hilton, ate great meals on the economy, and had a rental car.  Classes usually were done by 4pm and on the weekend, I even got a day's diving in.  The second phase was 140 hours of online, self-paced learning with about a half dozen written papers.  Pain in the butt, but not that bad and I was looking forward to meeting up again with my group for the third phase back in Hawaii.

Two weeks before shipping out, however, I was informed that the Army had yanked my school slot, having decided that it would be more cost-expedient to send me to Ft. Dix, NJ.  I decided to make the best of things and at least see some friends and family in NYC, NJ, and Philly.

I was able to catch up with I and my roommate Jaime for a day before heading to Ft. Dix.  Ft. Dix, built pre WWII, is basically kind of a dump.  Billets are per person with shared bathroom, but the humidity is high, facilities rarely cleaned, and the power went out every several days.  Ironic that I had to come from a third world country to find unreliable electricity...

My class was 13, with two instructors.  Good group, almost all majors, with one captain.  We dove right into things.  We would be looking at the orders process.  How to analyze a mission, develop courses of action, select the right one, and brief it.  After the first day, I got pulled out of class and told that I had a problem with my academic eligibility.  Since I'm in China, .mil access is blocked, so I could not check my AKO email.  So, two of my essays had very minor changes needed.  When the graders didn't hear back from me, they just marked it an as failure and this came back to haunt me.

Without going into the details, I spent a lot of time there in a sort of limbo befor common sense finally prevailed and the cleared

The two weeks were especially hard because I would usually get up at 5 or 5:30am, spend an hour catching up on emails before everyone left for the day in China, then go grab breakfast and start class by 0700.  Class ran until 7pm at night.  Between homework and then doing my other FT job, I was often up to 3 or 4 in the morning. 

Throw in jet lag and I was feeling super crunchy by the end of our two weeks.  Just happy it's done.

Doing business with Chinese suppliers

Everyone hears about how easily it is to get cheated in China by shady suppliers.  My experience, however, is that it isn't so much the out and out cheating that makes dealing with suppliers frustrating, but how resistant they are to change, even if it benefits them.  Here's a typical example:

We work with a dehumidifier distributor for TCL to supply our clients dehumidifiers.   We do all the upfront sales and tell the distributor what amount to collect and when to deliver.  They just take the money and fulfill the order.  Pretty easy for them, we get the difference between the wholesale price and retail and everyone's happy.

About 8 months ago, a client reported that a defective unit was delivered to him.  Turned out to be a small faulty door, and we fixed the problem pretty quickly.  A short while later, another client complained that her unit had problems upon delivery and the company swore she had caused the damage.  I told my supplier that it would be best if the deliveryperson could unbox the units and check them onsite just to make sure they worked.  This would save a lot of problems for both of us.  My supplier contact agreed to this.

Two months ago, another problem, same door issue.  Today, a unit was delivered apparently completely defective.  The product quality problems are a problem, but not the biggest problem because the warranty is the longest in the industry and they have door-to-door service.  What gets me most frustrated is that we had worked out a solution that was little effort (maybe 5 minutes extra effort?) and benefitted both the supplier and us.  And then, still the supplier is unable to or unwilling to put this into action and we keep having the problem.  It's extremely annoying that most Chinese suppliers won't get in front of a problem, but would rather deal with the problems once they happen.  And that process change doesn't occur unless you chase it down and micromanage that it happens.  Finally, that the only way you can enforce that is to threaten something bad if they don't (in this case, if this happens again, we will switch distributors).

Thanks for letting me vent.  Is this just Chinese vendors or do you all run into the same things back home?

Lost my top guy

It was too good to be true. My life has been improved immensely for the past 4 months ever since LB joined the company as our operations manager. Interestingly, he was originally our client and brought us on for a testing project. He must have liked what he saw because he started asking me a lot of questions, we had tea a few times, and then he offered to join us for a 3 month trial period.

LB is one of those do-it-all guys. Dedicated, hard-working, resourceful... despite not having any indoor air quality or environmental background (he's a facilities manager by trade), he managed to take care of any task put in front of him.

Unfortunately, he just couldn't find the passion for this job and when we sat down to talk after his probationary period, he said he didn't feel that there was anything special he was adding that a strong administrator could not do. I told him that he was a valuable member and offered him both equity, revenue sharing, and a bump up in pay, but he gave notice a few days ago.

I know we'll leave on good terms, but I am still very sorry to see him go. I have made it his priority to find his replacement. So, if any of you know of someone Chinese who is any of these things, please let me know!

Lessons learned as a construction foreman

Happy Chinese New Year's everyone!

For the past week, I've been soaking in the sun in the beach in Thailand, and amazingly, the phone has rung only a few times (I ignored it).  In China, during the New Year's holiday, business really does come to a standstill and for that I'm so grateful.

In the previous 3 weeks, though, we've been working 7 days a week -- because of one mega project.  The project is removing asbestos material from a pharmaceutical plant for a German pharma company.  The way we landed this deal was kind of cool.  The overall head honcho on the project for the general contractor was a former residential client of ours and when they discovered asbestos in the air ducts, he gave me a call.  Initially, my response was, "You sure you have the right guy?  I have no experience with asbestos" But, I offered to at least ask around and quickly found that there was no one in China who did asbestos removal professionally.  Asbestos is not even prohibited in the way it is in many other countries.  So, I did some homework, and brought in a colleague from HK who had some experience, and next thing I knew, we were doing the assessment.  Learning on the fly is always scary, but the best advice a manager gave me once was to learn or prototype off the back of a customer.  

So, only a couple weeks after the first phone call, I was pitching a project for the total removal of the asbestos material, replacement, cleanup, and testing.  My contact with the general contractor advised me that the client had deep pockets, so I ended up charging about 3x more than I originally estimated (looking back, it's a good thing I did).  The single project had a value of more than our entire first year's revenue.  Now it was time to make it happen.  I traded my computer for a hard hat, safety vest, and work boots and have been putting most everything else on hold to get this job done right over the past few weeks.

It's been only a month since we kicked off the project, but I've already learned a lot of lessons the hard way and took advantage of the holidays to jot some of them down.  I thought I'd share them with you all -- they probably won't make sense to you, but if you're curious, or ever have to do construction in China or manage subcontractors, give me a shout.

Lessons learned:

1.      Do not plan to get anything done around CNY holidays.  Chinese manual laborers are accustomed to working long hours – 12 hrs a day, 7 days a week.  But CNY is sacred and there is almost no money you can pay them to stay and work instead of going home to their province.  Even if the holiday officially starts on the 22^nd and ends on the 29^th ,  laborers start vanishing by the 16^th and don't return until the 2^nd.  Us management ended up having to finish off a phase of work ourselves, turning wrenches, removing gaskets, and lifting steel scaffolding because we didn't plan correctly

2.      Managing Chinese laborers is like managing a class of junior high schoolers on a field trip.  Assume that they will not listen to the uniform requirements and insist on removing their masks while doing asbestos work.  Assume that they will not be doing what you expect them to do.  Assume that they will smoke where they want and pee on the side of the building.  The key to managing them is having positive control – having one reliable person with each team, NOT a site manager managing multiple teams.

3.      What you don't check doesn't get done to standard.  We were embarrassed when the general contractor pointed out to us that one team was not removing asbestos material – they had simply shoved in the replacement material.  They also damaged the existing ductwork unnecessarily.  It looked like someone entirely untrained had been working there.  Insist that the specialist manager has checked the work before your subcontractor manager has checked it and then do spot checks yourself.  Show everyone exactly how you are inspecting but then do the checks at unexpected locations.   Hold everyone responsible and make one single example (both positive and negative).  We ended up firing the entire ductwork team.

4.      German clients suck.  They are exacting (do not recognize the difficulties of working to European standards in China), difficult to work with, and will ask for more when you bust ass to go the extra mile.  To get them to compromise, you have to build in padding, cite a lot of standards, and then also create pain on their side – otherwise, if you just complain that it will be a lot of work on your end, they won't care.  It's your problem.

5.      Site managers must be bilingual.  Our subcontractor prided themselves on European management.  What this meant though was that they sent a young Swedish guy to manage a team.  He couldn't speak a word of Chinese and confusion ensued.  A foreign manager is a good idea but he must have a translator and have authority.

6.      Chinese workers can either work tremendously fast or horribly slow.  One Sat, I got a call from our site manager that workers were barely moving.  A scaffolding tower that normally would take one hour to construct had taken five hours and we were way behind in the schedule.  It was a combination of having worked late the night before, fatigue, but mostly, that the workers had just been told that they were going to have to stay several days late for Chinese New Year's and their morale was low.  We bought them lunch, promised them a bonus, but that didn't do much.  But the next day, Lao Yang, the grizzled old Chinese team manager, came to me and proposed that the workers were going to skip dinner and just get all the gaskets removed and replaced in two rooms we had targeted.  They would get it done and when it was done, they would go home.  This was what we had wanted.  Instead of reaching for more, I agreed, and was dumbfounded to watch absolute silence as these guys started working like machines.  Not only that, the work quality was still up to par.  So, give these guys a realistic goal, insist on quality, and let them go when they achieve it to break the "work to the clock" mentality.

7.      Work weekends and after-hours.  Seems like this would suck, but we were most productive when the client and the general contractor weren't hovering overhead to pounce on every uniform violation or distract us with meetings and requests for updates.

8.      Good practice is morning briefing and end of day site hygiene and cleanup.  This keeps safety and the day's tasks fresh in everyone's minds, and also keeps the work site looking tidy.  Although it has little to do with work progress, if the site looks like doodoo, the client will assume it's reflective of your work.  Also, it's a good chance to inventory equipment and supplies and replenish overnight before it pops up and stops up work the next day.

9.      In the contract, be very specific about roles and responsibilities.  Limit your scope precisely.  We procured some material that turned out to have a significant defect.  Although all we did was to order the material that the general contractor had specified, we shouldered a good amount of the blame and ate a lot of costs.  Fortunately, in the contract, I had included a matrix that spelled out specifically that it was the GC's duty, not ours, to purchase this. 

10.   Document every change and agreement.  I thought it was excessive, but unfortunately, covering your ass is a big part of this game.  I thought it was strange that the GC always put down every complaint in an email to us, when I would just mention their shortfalls in person, but I've since learned that they are keeping ammunition in case they ever need to terminate us.

11.   Pad the contract time and cost big.  The more risk and uncertainty, the more you should pad.  My subcontractor's initial proposal was to be done in 21 days.  We'll be lucky to do it in 60 days, with delays and the holidays.  Also, I would propose a bonus for the sub to finish on time and a penalty if they are late.  Our subcontractor did not have much skin in the game to bear the costs of screwing up or finishing late and I found that I was driving a lot harder and picking up the pieces a lot more than if I had built in a carrot and stick into the arrangement.

12.   Plan for worksite basics before the project even starts: PPE, access badges and building keys, workspace, work order and overtime paperwork requirements, secure storage area, how to get paid, and any communications/status update rhythms.

13.   Demand a project advance – we incurred easily 100k in costs without seeing a dime from the client.  This is both risky (if things went south and the client terminated the engagement) and a cash-flow burden.  Testing fees, equipment, gear, labor costs, rental fees, all add up.  I built in a 25% advance to be paid within 7 days of the project start and they agreed, but procedurally, this was a nutroll, so push hard on this before signing to make sure they do carry through.  The GC should help support you on this, not be an obstacle.

14.   During an assessment phase, the GC is your buddy.  Once you get into execution/remediation, the GC becomes a slavedriver.  For this project, the GC was super supportive in bringing us into the project so we could help them provide a way forward for the client and look good.  Once we moved into execution, however, they were all about appearances and cracked the whip frequently without helping much to fix joint problems. 

15.   Beware the phrase, "We're all in this together."  It usually means – I might have screwed up, but you're going to be picking up the pieces for my fault.  We pulled long hours and extra costs for a week for the GC's fault, but they kept coming back to this phrase and everytime I wanted to discuss cost recovery, I kept getting pushed off.