A new company???!!!

As Dad returned to LA this time, he brought back about 50+ diving accessories. What's the plan? He wants me to start a new online company! Therefore, he wants me to invest my money in there. So here we go.. I took the pictures of every product and photoshoped out the background. Some of the accessories look like sex toys. However, I registered scuba-choice.com from godaddy. That's it. My new company's name is Scuba Choice. Since next week is the DEMA show, I finished our excel catalog to show our customers. And next Saturday, I'll be attending Market America's Webcenter's seminar. Then we can start building my company's website!!

Social Network

I was being a little lazy to do more work than I'm supposed to because of my addiction to video games. Blame to gamefly and myself. Earlier this week, LZ sent me a blog post about motivations. I suddenly got so motivated and started doing more marketing research for my job. I joined a few scuba diving groups on facebook and subscribed divining newsletter. By doing that, I found out one of our products was the Tester's Choice for 2010. So proud of it. Also, I read an article about internet footprints (to make your company being more exposed to the world by using social network websites). Therefore, I created a company page on facebook and a twitter account. So far, I only have 9 people liking my company page :(

I need your support.. whoever is reading this blog. thank you.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Aqua-Edge-Inc/130434733678882

Visiting Customers Week

The schedule for this week is pretty tight.

Mon: Visiting a customer in Paramount to follow up the snorkel leak issue and present them new samples.

Tue: Visiting lawyer at Woodland Hills, CA

Wed: Visiting our biggest customer at El Cajon, CA.

It's fun to watch how Dad handle everything and respond customer's questions. And I observed it's very important to do the homework before you go visit a customer. For us, we need to know what size/measurement/size/price of the product before we go. Also, be really careful when choosing vendors in China. Because most of them don't take responsibility when there are defective items.

Crazy busy

A few days ago, we received our customer complained about the water leak for the 3,000 + snorkels we shipped them. So they had to check one by one. The problem is that they only have 3 people in their warehouse, and they're all busy working on something else. Dad sent me to their warehouse, and I hired two friends to help. I became crazy busy. Wake up at 7am, taking care of the email work part. Work in the warehouse from 10a-3:30pm. Take half an hour break, resume working on the email part, with my nephew harassing me . And then work on collecting documents for the lawsuit. Go back to the email part. Finish and sleep at 12am. So stressed out and so tired. But glad I did it.

What's up next

Dad said I've been doing a great job for whatever I'm currently doing now. So I'm going to move on to my next stage. I'll be going to Hawaii at the end of the next month to attend Wal-Mart meeting. Dad will be doing a presentation and show how he does marketing in front of the clients. In September, I will be sent to our factory in Xiamen to learn about quality control for our products. And most importantly, I'm starting my weight loss plan tomorrow. I'm now watching Transitions program DVD now. I want to lose 20lbs in 3 months. My goal weight will be about 100lbs, which I was still at that weight a few years ago. This time will be a success!!!!

Things are different

After taking this one month trip in Asia with LZ, I feel things are different at home. My sister and nephew came back home. I'm much more busy than before. I feel like my responsibility for this family became much heavier, I really feel like I need to be more involved. I'm busy. Busy for family business work, busy for watching nephew, busy for sharing some housework with Mom, busy for watching my brother's grades. Dad is not home, mom's ability is very limited. I feel like I have to take care of 3 children at home: Sister, nephew, and brother. I somehow feel pressured.

3D Class

The class went pretty well yesterday, yet pretty tired because of the standing and focusing for 4 hours. I had 2 classes: 3 hours of Maya class, 1 hour of PhotoShop class. There were 3 kids in my Maya class, two 18-year-olds, and one 13-year-old. And guess who is the best among the 3? It was the 13-year-old ABC. He seemed to have lots of knowledge of Maya, even knows about putting joints to make animation. I'm not good at animation, but good thing I still know something about it since I learned it from Academy of Art University. I printed out online tutorial for them to practice at first, and then assigned them different objects to model depends on their levels. The last PhotoShop class was really easy. I had 9-year-old triplets in that class. They already know what they're doing for the class, so I didn't have to teach them anything. I just needed to respond them some technical questions which were the only things I could answer. I learned a lot from these kids by watching them use Photoshop to paint. Awesome kids. However, I feel like teaching 3D is the easiest job I've had these years. Not much stress comparing with working for game company and trading company.

3D is my excitement

When I was at our CPA's office today, someone called me. A little art school in Rowland Heights needs a Maya Instructor urgently because their instructor is in a hospital now. I left my information to this school a few years ago, I almost forgot about this. The lady told me I will need to teach 6 kids (from 9-year-old to 18-year-old) from 1-5p every Sunday. Even though I've never taught 3D before, I thought I would be able to make some extra cash for my Asia trip, so I took the job. I headed to the school directly after I finished my errants at CPA's office. Looked at some 3D works the students did, some of them are actually pretty good. Those 18-year-old kids can model a high-poly machine gun. Only 1.5 days to prepare. I went home and prepared some materials for the kids to work on. I looked through some concept art from Warhammer, I got excited. I so want to 3D model them! And then I looked at my online portfolio, I felt like it's time to update it. When I was about to forget my passion for 3D, it just came back like that without a sign.

Terms for Import/Export

Learned many abbreviations/terms I've never heard before by doing this business. I would like to share them:

- B/L: Bill of Lading; a document issued by shipping forwarder, showing that the goods have been received on board.

- CL: Commercial Invoice; a document shows the value of each products, needed to do customs declaration.

- CO: Certificate of Origin/ Country of Origin; a document states where the goods were made, needed it to clear customs for international trading.

- FOB: Freight on Board; goods are placed on board of ship/flight

- ISF: Importer Security Filing; a document states information for the goods being sent, only required for USA shipments.

- MOQ: Minimum Order Quantity.

- PI: Pro-Forma Invoice; a document that us broker issued to customer to show the items and the prices customers are buying from us.

- PL: Packing List; a document states where the goods are contained in certain container.

- PO: Purchase Order; a document that us broker issued to manufacturer to show the items and the prices we're buying.

Tools

Since Dad started to use Gmail. We started to share some tips with each other on how we can use google's free tools to make our work more efficient. Dad came across to Google Calendar, where we can get to know each other's schedule by simply just clicking on the "Calendar" button on the top of the gmail interface. I started to upload some files onto Google Documents. These free tools come in very handy. Labels and Tasks are good things to have in Gmail as well. Also, some Gmail Labs are nice plug-ins to have. I have the following Gmail Labs plug-ins that I found it very handy:

-Create a Document: This allows me to create a word/excel file from Google Documents interface.

-Google Docs previewed in mail: No need to download the file to view the docs anymore.

-Inserting Images: I haven't really used this one yet, but this lets you to have an image in the email body.

- Mark as Read Button: Yeah, sometimes I don't like to read emails that have nothing to do with me. (This is a bad habit though, I might want to remove this function.)

- Signature Tweaks: I like my signature on the top of the attached emails.

- Undo Send: This saves my life a lot, but too bad we can only undo it within a few seconds.

- Default "Reply to All"

Good Luck

I had a really bad week this week. Got into a car accident this Monday, and I had to postpone my Asia trip for one month. Good thing I don't have to pay extra for the flight ticket. On Wednesday, my dog Tyson died. He's almost 15 years old. I sent him to an animal hospital to give him an euthanasia shot. It was a pain to watch Tyson suffering, and it was more painful to sign the euthanasia contract. Therefore, I went to Hsia Lai Temple to pray for good luck and releasing souls from purgatory for Tyson. Although I'm not a Buddhist, I have to believe in Buddha will wash my bad luck for me.

Traumatized

LZ and myself were going to eat dinner. On the way, we stopped for a signal line. There were many cars in front of us waiting for the signal light as well, I was the last one in the line. All of the sudden, I heard a huge sound of tire scratching the ground. I thought "Where?" And then I saw a car approaching me in a very high speed from my rear mirror. I had a thought of moving my car to somewhere else. Maybe just a little bit to the right. Before my brain could give my arms the command, I yelled "Shit." And then my world became black for a second. I opened my eyes slowly, and asked LZ to see if she's okay. She shaked her head. I parked my car on the side of the street. I smelled the smoke. I tried to unbuckle my seatbelt and realized it was broken. My electronic systems were broken too. I called the police. And then I walked out and checked out the cars. My rear bumper was damaged really badly. The airbags of the other driver's car are already hanging there. Holy crap, my poor car. What was the driver doing? How could he hit a stopped car. I guess he wasn't paying attention while driving, perhaps he was making phone calls, texting, or something.

After doing the police report and exchanging the information with the other driver, we went to change a car at home, heading to lawyer's office. I acted really calm like nothing happened for the whole time. To be honest, half of my mind was gone already because I was traumatized. It took a few hours to recover. That was scary and very bad luck. I couldn't find of any ways to avoid the accident. So people, please always pay attention while driving. Always always.

Sisterhood

I've been worrying about my younger sister since last night. I couldn't fall in sleep, I dreamed about it, I woke up with tears. I didn't know what happened to my sister hurts me so much as well. I still remember, I told her that I will always support her no matter what happens when she got married in 2008. She got nobody to tell but me because she doesn't want our parents to worry. She thinks I'm the only one who can help. I didn't know I care about her so much until this point. No matter how old we are, my younger sister is always a little kid to me. I have to find a way to help her.

Attitude that matters

I was feeling very upset 2 days ago since I got yelled by my dad with sharp words again. I had a thought that I wanted to quit again, and went for my 3d gaming career. This wasn't the first time. After I started taking care of more of the company stuff, he yelled at me with sharp words every time. I felt like I couldn't stand to work with only negative energy. Yesterday, I took my mom to have lunch in San Gabriel after dropping off our family tax return documents at our CPA's office. We had a great talk. And I figured... It's my attitude that matters. It's my attitude that makes my dad mad all the time. Working in my dad's company, they get a feeling that I don't care and I don't want to be involved. My heart is at somewhere else. On the other hand, I don't have the enthusiasm. That's right, I've been always thinking about what I did before in game companies. Working for others and working for your business are totally different stories. When I was working at other's companies, even though I had enthusiasm, I still care myself the most. When I want to take days off, I do that; when I don't want to work, I don't. Especially when I was working at EA, I struggled about my work occupies my whole life. Working in my dad's company, I have to consider work is the top priority like my dad does with the idea that I'm going to be the only one who's going to take over the whole company after my dad retires, perhaps in 5 years. There are a lot of things to learn. As for now, what I need to do is to move on my mind. I have the responsibility to make this company work for the rest of my life. This is a huge responsibility, and I have to adjust my attitude towards it. Be more detailed, be more passionate, be more responsible for every little thing. Not just working 7 hours per day and I'm done. It's never done.

Newton's Cradle

Every company is like a tiny ball in a Newton's Cradle, it's chained together with the balls next to it. We deal with many different customers, we deal with many vendors. If one vendor screws, we screw, customer screw; if one customer screw, we screw, vendor screw. To vendor, we're customer; to customer, we're vendor. Everything is hooked up with layers of relationship. What it matters? Money and time.

Gmail, FedEx, Quickbook, Excel, PDF......

Been super crazy because of Gmail, FedEx, Quickbook, Excel, and PDF. This is everything I deal with for this business.

1. Check Gmail everyday and respond to customers and factories.

2. Go to FedEx to ship some samples to customers

3. Use Quickbook to generate:

(a) Pro-Forma Invoices when customers email me a Purchase Order

(b) Our version of Purchase Order and email it to factories.

(c) Commercial Invoices and Packing List to customers once the goods are ready to ship.

(d) Record and Track payments from customers (checks and wire)

4. Use Excel to generate:

(a) Order status for each month (to get an idea if the factory is over product capacity.

(b) Shipping status monthly report (to let customers know where their orders are)

(c) My master sheet of Purchase Order reference (to let myself know which files are associated with what.

5. Save all the PDF's I received from customers and factories and arrange them into my own folder.

Those jobs itself are okay, the hardest part is how not to make tiny mistakes (that includes typo and how to respond to customers correctly) and make pretty Excel sheet. Dad is pretty strict about this. He even cares about the spaces between paragraphs in email. I now read 5 times before I sent out an e-mail. And most of the time, he insults me for any of the above reasons.

After Asia

I just realized I haven't updated my blog for a while. It has been two weeks since I came back from Asia. And I was in Miami for 4 days for Market America World Conference. I was in LA for 10 days in January. What a great start.

Talking about my business trip to Hong Kong, Dongguan, Xiamen, and Taipei, it was great. Seeing the factory in Dongguan makes me feel being lucky to live in USA. The living and working environments there are horrible. And the factory employee there make only 700-800RMB per month. Xiamen factory employee make more than Dongguan's, they make 1400-2000RMB. It was nice to see how things were made at factories. I now understand the workflow of our products. From a bag of plastic material to a nice package of fins. Amazing. But I don't like the city at all. People there lack of civilization because they are mostly from countryside.

At Xiamen, I got more motivated by working with the employees there. I felt much more involved and being clear about what my job duty is. Besides work, I like Xiamen because people there are nice and food there is very similar to Taiwanese food. And most importantly, I see civilization in this city.

At Hong Kong, I helped our HK office setting up the booth at Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre. That was my first time setting up a booth at a convention, very handful experience. Didn't really do much after that, just wandering and shopping around in the city.

I visited a metal factory in Taipei. Dad had a nice conversation with the owner of the factory. I learned a lot from it. About how to talk to your prospect and get additional information of our competitors from them.

Had a lot of nice food in Asia, including Dog meat but it wasn't tasty than I thought. I'll never eat it again.