Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

Business Is Built One Job at a Time

The system I built for Mr. PrintMan brought other work to me.  I went on to build the first mobile print price quote application and several other applications for Mr. PrintMan, and we became friends.  In my small circle of people, Mr. PrintMan was the only person I knew doing his own business.  When I was growing up, I'd been told over and over to look up to people with high-paying, salaried jobs.  My dad used to tell me "Look at Cousin Pamela. She is an occupational therapist. What a great and stable job to have.” Or, “Look at cousin Jason. He is a research scientist, and your sisters are nurses; why don’t you go into medicine?"  My dad had worked at the hospital for a long time, first in the kitchen, and then as a cleaner, both very stable, union jobs. But Mr. PrintMan was so different; he was like a thorn sticking out in my world. Everyone, including me, was grinding day to day, working for somebody, and here was this shark that was just so passionate and driven, willing to pay whatever cost to make his vision a reality.  He was able to rebuild his fortune in six years.

Mr. PrintMan's story is even more interesting. He was once a millionaire. Six years before building ERP systems, all he’d succeeding in developing came crashing down when a man in his company who had a mental disorder decided to turn on Mr. PrintMan, causing him financial ruin.  When I met him, he was living in his car.  After a few false starts, he discovered that gang-run printing, which basically means group purchase of a printer’s time, was very profitable.

Week after week, he gathered together people who needed to do print runs, making a small profit each run.  He worked his way up to multiple runs a week, then multiple runs a day.  He soon realized he could organize his print jobs more efficiently and get even more profit from his runs.  To do this, he would need his own print shop.

He managed to raise enough cash to buy his print shop.  Through luck and cunning, he was able to buy a large building to house not only the print shop, but also to lease to dozens of commercial tenants.

All this happened in only six years. Now, he’s one of the industrial leaders of print in Canada.

The lesson is this: “overnight success” is usually years in the making.  To build a successful business, you must do it one job at a time.