Small businesses are getting tougher

My dad needed to buy a light bulb and he went to a local store this afternoon which he has been going for the past 20+ year. I would go to Ikea or a big supermarket instead. Don’t think a 20 years old would even know there is a small shop there. Eventually, less and less people will go to this shop and the owner has no choice but to close the business.

It’s less difficult to run your own businesses in the past. If you worked hard and smart enough, you would have no problem to make some money. It is getting a lot more difficult, I truly believe that now.

Trading Billy at the factory floor

Met the supplier at lunch with a few new faces from the same industry. The new faces are from Beijing, that’s why we had many common topics to discuss. Discussion went well with the supplier in the afternoon and I was pretty excited. Went back to the factory and checked on the products. I was thinking that I just needed to work on 30 of them and it would take around 30 mins. God, finally, with 5 other people help, we spent 5.5 hours to fix everything. As usual, I just skipped dinner, no water, no toilet break until I was done. When I sat down at the restaurant, it was 12:15a.m. Reminded me of the time I had in Dong Guan.

I have been telling my people, it is not possible to have zero issue in a single project, no matter it is a big or small project. The major objective is to minimize the problems and correct them in the shortest timeframe. And more important, we learn from those stupid mistakes and tell ourselves not to do them again the next time.