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.