Yesterday I shipped out an unusual number of internet orders. One of them was destined for Seattle and I almost delivered it myself, but I was busy enough that I thought better of it.

Today I was preparing a donation of candy for an event honoring minority women in business, which was a good way of using what little remains of my fall inventory; it's benefits a non-profit but has some potential marketing side effects as well.

I am also extremely short of the newer inventory in the Pacific Northwest stores, not counting big gift boxes, so I am desperately awaiting a shipment that is supposed to be here by Monday or Tuesday if all goes well. I expect it will be no problem to sell what I have in big gift boxes though...

These days I'm eating a little carelessly. I haven't been sleeping well, maybe due to subconscious distractions, and I'm sometimes skipping meals or substituting snacks for real food. I need to stop that. Yesterday I had a nice dinner though... I made okonomiyaki.

I was chatting with the owner/manager of a new vegetarian restaurant who is interested in marketing her soy and gluten products that she makes in her store. I think I will help her out with some sales work for her, and take a fair cut without any inventory risk on my part. I'll also research and consult on solutions for some of the foods she makes that she'd like to offer as easy-to-prepare healthy, vegetarian Chinese entrees.

I'm also trying to talk to some contract manufacturers for introducing some of my own private label products, so I started making some inquiries on that; this need should be compatible with the restaurant's needs as well.

Yesterday I moved my display out from my sales broker's showroom, since I've been doing a better job on sales than them so far. I also think that will free me up to sell some other products in the same manner, functioning as a sales broker rather than an importer or import merchant.

As for the dragon beard candy, I'm having some issues with a shortage of small gift boxes and sampler tubes of dragon beard candy, but I'm supposed to be getting a new shipment later this week. I'm trying to figure out how to accommodate some orders received in the last few days that requested some quantities of items of which I don't have enough stock.

I set out to Portland to do an in-store demo this morning, but neglected to check a weather or traffic report. Accordingly, about 15 minutes before hitting Portland I started driving through tremendous amounts of slush and sleet. Once I reached the bridge over the Columbia River I started to have second thoughts, and as I slid onto the I-405 ramp I decided I should probably make a quick call to Uwajimaya.

They said almost no one was in the store, and I told them I'd be turning back. When I saw the ice-covered junction for Highway 26, I realized why nobody wanted to be in Beaverton, so I continued along I-405 until it re-joined I-5. I stopped around the Portland Convention Center to grab some quick lunch, but many restaurants were shut, presumably due to the ice.

I headed back to Seattle after getting an extra dose of coffee. My day, and about a tank of gas, was mostly wasted. Next time I'll check the weather conditions before heading out of town.

The last few days I've been busy, but I wouldn't go so far as to say I've always been spending my time well. I have a lot of work to accomplish, including some tasks that should have been settled last month.

This was a pretty quiet weekend after two months of mostly good sales results from in-store demonstrations. It felt a little like summer only with less store traffic.

I want to get rid of a little bit more candy before Chinese New Year shopping kicks in, since a few items from the fall shipment are still in stores (though, thankfully, not much of it). Despite pretty good sales, I made the mistake of leaving about 4 cartons of candy back in Seattle during the tour to the Bay Area, so some of it was sitting around when it could have been sold to customers down there. Not much of that is left, but it's irritating that I had such good sales and still have the risk of a little expired inventory after everything, mostly due to my inability to move some items from one place to another while I was out of town.

Thankfully, the risk of expired inventory will decrease to a very small number one I get another 12-14 stores selling the candy. I won't have to order too far in advance of need at that point.

In other news, I really need to get myself some winter exercise gear. It's so cold that I have even more excuses for not jogging these days.

I spent a couple of days in Vancouver with Hiromi and came back late last night. In Vancouver, I took a look at a couple of Asian markets and along Robson Street to try to get a feel for what might be possible in the Vancouver market, and Hiromi and I visited with a couple of her friends from the time when she was on her working holiday program in Canada.

Today I fillled a couple of orders for Chinese New Year that cleared a whole lot of inventory, but I found out I have some more stock than I previously thought when I itemized my inventory more carefully. I will try to get some of that sold this weekend by doing some in-store promotions, most likely in the Seattle store.

I need to figure out how to get my candy in Los Angeles as well, so I think I'll focus on researching good venues for that. This week I also have to finalize my order for the next batch of candy as well, and I need to do an obscene amount of catchup work on bookkeeping.

This year, I took a leap of faith to leave an unfulfilling job and start something completely new. I didn't quite know what to expect, but I knew that most of what would happen next was up to me. My primary goal for the year was really just to get my bearings and not lose too much money. I was hoping to get a full web store up and running with my ceramics products, and I wanted to import several products over the course of the year and build customer bases for each of them.

I was perhaps a little optimistic about how much I could take on in the first year, but I think I'm off to an acceptable start. When I started, I thought I could concentrate on three or four products simultaneously, but the products I am interested in are so unusual and have too many different countries of origin for me to be able to handle the logistics, sales, promotions and marketing work all on my own. I'm also no longer able to effectively invest a lot of time and energy into building web software, since it distracts from more important wholesale sales and promotion work.

I could probably do everything I want to if I had more cash to throw around. But I hesitate to take on inventory risk without a likely destination customer for each product, and I also didn't want to invest too much in the web store until I had a foundation of wholesale customers.

So, by the end of the year, my goal morphed to be more about getting a reasonable number of retail outlets for the dragon beard candy and use it as a foundation for the next series of products. I now have 14-15 retail points of presence, and I think it's feasible to add another 12 or so stores by mid-February. If by fall of next year I've gotten my numbers up to about 60 stores, and get a little revenue trickle from some other products by summer, I'll actually start to have a healthy income.

Based on last month's in-store sales, January will probably be the first month where I actually start seeing enough revenue to cover most of my personal expenses. I've also minimized most of my advertising budget and switched to a more promotion-based approach, so the regular business expenses will start being properly covered by March or April. I am still nervous about three likely "irregular" business expenses related to travel and trade shows in January, March and July, but I think all three of those will pay off.

I learned that focus was the thing I needed most. Since I wear multiple hats, I really have to bet heavily on a small mix of products. I'm just starting to learn how to be a salesman. I'm incredibly naive as a marketer. I am not a genius at advertising. I'm not bad at promotions but I think I have a lot of work to do there as well. And I am not a great bookkeeper, though I am pretty conscious of where my money is going to and coming from. I'm relatively decent at planning, and even at accommodating dramatic changes on short notice. One thing I'm really good at, I think, is recognizing when a product is very distinctive and will bring something unique to the U.S. market. Of course, that's only a very small part of operating a business.

I need to be better organized and I need to make fewer dumb mistakes and miscalculations. I've made mistakes related to filling orders a few times (three, unfortunately all to the same customer). I've misplaced documents, which led at least once to a day-long distraction searching for an item. I underestimated the time it would take for an air freight order to leave the port of origin and to clear customs and FDA inspection. With varying degrees of severity, these have impacted the efficiency and momentum of my business.

When I was at Microsoft I often complained about being resource-constrained on very complex projects. But I never worked on anything as complex as operating all aspects of a business by myself, and I've never been more resource constrained in my life. I know how precarious my position is.

On the positive side, I'm starting to build momentum, and the long term key to my success is converting active sales work into passive revenue streams; I have to help my customers become successful with the products that I am selling them, so that people come to me and ask if they can start selling the products rather than mostly being the other way around.

I'm starting to see evidence of customer loyalty to the things that I sell; several people have become serious repeat customers, buying large quantities or with enough frequency that I have more confidence in the future of my products. Other than continued footwork, I don't know what it will take to transform my small business into a healthy, self-sustaining operation, but I think I'm mostly on the right track. I just need to be incredibly aggressive and execute my sales strategy in the next year.

Most people take Christmas Eve off, but I'll probably do a few hours of promotions at Uwajimaya Seattle before attending a family party.

The Hong Kong folks took off Wednesday, only a few hours after Hiromi arrived in Seattle for a two-week visit. Tuesday, our last full day, we ran around doing a few morning errands, although I dropped Mr. Wong's son Hong off at GameWorks, where he spent about 6 hours playing "Street Fighter 3."

Everyone else went shopping. We stopped at the Pike Place Market for a whirlwind tour and visited Bacco for lunch in their new "Bistro" location, where Mr. & Mrs. Wong and Lavina shared a crab sandwich and a lox bagel with some soup and salad. I had a panini of some sort suitable for vegetarians.

I think I added about 5 pounds to my waistline in the last two weeks due to constant restaurant eating, even though I tried to be more cautious about how much food I was putting down my throat. With no meaningful level of exercise and a plentiful supply of heavy food portions, I was feeling some serious stomach pressure by the end of the week.

We ate our last dinner together at Lark in Seattle, which roughly met expectations and was overall quite appealing to my supplier. The atmosphere is pleasant, the food is decent, the portions are just right for sharing between four or five people. Not counting alcohol, I think we spent about $23-24/person including a reasonable tip. (Keep in mind that none of us were starving). With the alcohol I think it was a little higher, as the wine list tended to be pricy. We had a modestly priced sparkling wine at about $32/bottle and a couple of other drinks, but I don't recall seeing a red wine under $50/bottle on their wine list.

Today I ran around like a madman in the afternoon but it was mostly in search of food for the next few days. I fulfilled a wholesale order in the morning. Hiromi was driving tonight's dinner plan, featuring a tofu gnocchi and a gobo soup from a Japanese macrobiotic magazine I picked up on my last trip, and I prepared something for tomorrow's family gathering, basically filo cups filled with a savory cheesecake, upon which I will place some sauteed chanterelles with sage pesto and shallots, or probably some lox and capers for the non-vegetarians.

I need to eat more judiciously the next few weeks so that the holidays don't lead me back to my early Microsoft expansion...

We had our last demo today, in Milpitas, which attracted record crowds and pretty respectable sales. Saturday was surprisingly calm in Foster City, but the 99 Ranch store there is beautiful and well-suited for presenting the candy.

We had a few issues with proper display of the product in one store yesterday, and today we discovered one store had mislaid our cardboard display stand since signing for delivery. I am hoping to properly resolve these in the next couple of days.

I'm expecting good results overall in the Bay Area as word spreads, and we had a healthy launch for the area this week.

Tonight I learned one of the stores in Seattle has gone through a lot of inventory in the last two weeks, so I'm trying to decide whether to pull some inventory from other stores or to sacrifice some of my inventory meant for internet orders. I wasn't expecting to need another shipment this quickly, and the Hong Kong side had some unexpected orders, so I had not budgeted for a new order, and the Hong Kong office doesn't have much capacity to spare as they ramp up for Chinese New Year.

We ended up eating at a really horrible Japanese restaurant tonight after a tour of Macy's in San Francisco. I knew it was trouble before walking in, but my preference was overridden. I ate some not so freshly boiled edamame, a strange squash-filled roll, and some oddly prepared firm agedashi-doufu. I couldn't eat two full pieces of the agedashi-doufu because it was so mediocre. The staff didn't understand Japanese, and as far as I can tell from the misspellings on the menu and the waitstaff interactions, everybody working there was Korean. I left at the suggestion of Lavina to hunt down something I might enjoy more, and walked around aimlessly looking for a snack.

Last night we had a good meal in North Beach though, so I think that makes up for it.

Our TV appearance in Portland got canceled due to the feature reporter and some part of his crew getting very sick... we got a call from the station at 5:45, about 30 minutes before we were supposed to go on. We just chose to drive to San Francisco around 7:30 on Tuesday morning.

However, a Chinese TV station and a Chinese newspaper visited us during our first demo in Daly City in the Bay Area. We saw the newspaper today, though I'm not sure when the TV feature will appear. It's likely to be on the SF market Cantonese station, TVB. A mainstream newspaper photographer also took some photos.

The Daly City demo went pretty well. Enough of the customers were from Hong Kong or Cantonese speaking areas that I didn't have to talk very much, and some people aready knew the brand. Our demo today was a little quieter, as the store traffic at the Cupertino 99 Ranch location wasn't quite as dense.

We made a brief stop at the Asian Art Museum today, where I could see their presentation of both the ceramics and the candy. We also showed the video to some of the volunteer staff and Mr. Wong greeted everyone. We ended up behind schedule, arriving at almost exactly noon at the Cupertino store. I think we were lucky everyone else on I-280 considered the speed limits a mere suggestion because we might have otherwise been about 15 minutes later.

We made our move from Seattle to Portland last night. Saturday involved rushing around maniacally to get a rental car before the agency's noon closing time. Enterprise apparently doesn't "pick you up" on Saturdays if you live in Seattle, so I needed to extract Mr. Wong from his hotel a little early and have him drive my car back to my home.

The demo in Seattle went reasonably well; apparently the publicity from the Seattle P-I, Seattle Weekly, Northwest Asian Weekly (twice), Seattle Chinese Post, and even some internal Microsoft message boards brought in a few people. We definitely attracted crowds, especially at the Seattle store. I hope that this event translates into a long-term boost in sales and also helps build the brand image in the US.

Originally we planned to return from Portland to Seattle tonight, but on Friday the Portland Fox affiliate asked us to be available for a morning TV show this Tuesday, so we decided it would be simpler just to stay in Portland and continue directly on to San Francisco from there.

We are traveling in a small van, but the amount of luggage needed for supplies, personal effects, display material, and so on makes the space pretty crowded. I almost think we would have been better off dragging a small trailer behind my Camry. I feel comfortable, but the passengers themselves must feel pretty cramped.

Tomorrow is our first relatively unstructured day. I'll be taking the Wongs around Portland to do some market research, the specific mode of which most people simply call "shopping." We'll go to downtown Portland again and maybe a few other areas. I'm not looking forward to waking up at 5am on Tuesday or driving for 10-12 hours afterward, but I think it will be interesting to see what happens in the Bay Area.