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.