Last few days have been working with operations on giving pearls more traction.   We are in the process of finalizing the details of the plan and firming out the smaller of details.

Our mind map of the activities is here. Lots of good things on the way – and nice to see some fresh things happening under new energy of a new GM.

The second front has been working out the numbers for Red Stores venture.   Getting much deeper into the numbers, execution, staging, funding requirements.  Its an iterative process, and every iteration things are getting better.  So, we are entering basically a huge market space that is now only covered by three players of significance Aliexpress.com, Dhgate.com and early starter lightinthebox.com.   Looking at the market space, there is a huge dissatisfaction with the above 3 transaction brokering platforms.   Our heritage, coming from the side of Pearlsonly.com, which has us focus on “Happy Customers” – I believe is a huge game changer. 

Gerry and I run off to OppositeHouse and spend a day working the numbers, business strategy, etc  What is really interesting is that it is only our own ambition now that decides how big we make it.   Having set the $125MM goal, is very helpful, since when the forecast shows $30-$40MM valuation, it becomes not acceptable – and so back to the drawing board we go.

So, few more details to work out – but the plan, investment levels and forecasts are coming well.

Lesson learned from here is that it takes time to do this – you think, plan, validate, look for issues, rethink.   Of course you don’t want to do this at nauseasum however the more we do this, the better and easier we are making the execution part.

And this game will be 20% creativity and plan, 80% execution.

Speaking of execution, TMX is moving at rapid pace  The backend is coming crazy fast, and so our platform is being build every day.