I’m writing this now on Thursday (although its reflection of Tuesday events).
Tuesday was a very busy day. Feel a bit overloaded with a lot of new things on the go. The day started with the weekly team meeting and review. The review went excellent – I haven’t seen everyone since I left for Thailand, so it was great to see everyone fired up, working well, hard and smart. Lot of the initiatives moved forward and I felt very good energy from everyone.
The highlight of Tuesday was a meeting with Andy, Chinese Auditors and Mossy – the meeting was to figure out the new CN based structure. Andy was pure gold – he owns a trading company – so lots of experience with IMPEX things. He is also fluent in Chinese. In less than 1 hour, we confirmed with our auditors that our plans for the CN side where valid, that everything was 100% legal within China and we would not be breaking any rules by setting up the planned structures. Further, we had a Japan import issue that has been causing us grief for a very long time, and again, with Andy’s help, in less than 30 minutes, we had an SOP on how to handle that. This has been a pain in our butt for nearly 3 years – and here with the right guy, right people we nailed it in 30 minutes. Bloody amazing. On top of this, some of the suggestions from Andy (I will code this since this is fairly confidential, FF and CCA) have a potential of saving us perhaps up to 50% further on our shipping costs. Wow!
Anyways, to pitch Andy a bit here, Andy Clayton at Andy.Clayton [at] lnpchina.com. British guy, Stanford educated (I believe), extremely (and I repeat that) bright! His company website is here: LNPChina.com
Andy and I, afterwards had a coffee and discussed some of the issues facing him and challenges ahead of him. It always seems so easy to look at someone else’s issues and see things so clearly – yet when inside of the things – the answer is not ever so clear. So, just as Andy did for me with my business, I offered some of my stories and growing pains with my own Leadership journey. It was nice to share and I think Andy benefited as well. Another case of EO folks helping each other out – very cool. Points to the power of networking (the right kind) – and the power of knowing people with skills outside of those that you have yourself.