Settling Back In Shenzhen (August 2021 Return)

What Mike Michelini is up to Now -Aug 8 – 14, 2021

Listen as audio here [2 minutes long] (or scroll down for text)

Download .mp3 here

We’re catching up on rest and recovering from an all-night flight / travel on Thursday night from Shenyang to Shenzhen.

And, I’m realizing I AM BACK IN SHENZHEN. Jeez, thought I was “done” with China back in 2018 when we went to Thailand with the family and enrolled Maggie and Miles in schools.

Life works in mysterious ways. And, I’m planning to make the most out of it (as we all should) under the current circumstances.

But you know what?

I’m leveraging the fact that IT IS HARD TO COME INTO CHINA NOW, and harder than ever to do cross border trade and business. I feel it is time to really multiply and scale up the efforts.

Do things that is hard for others to do.

Updates on the following:

• Factory / product development – Indigitus router is in final assembly this week
• Chinese Amazon seller brokering / deal flow – hard for ecommerce investment companies to enter China, so I’m making the most out of it
• Media / Online marketing – hard for Chinese to do English marketing, and we at Shadstone have an established team that is already experienced in working with Chinese companies (via Wechat groups mainly lol). Also, partnered up with a friend and GFAVIP member to buy out Shenzhen Party, the biggest and older English media site in this city.

So this is the push. Time to come out of this transition ten times better than before. Rather than complaining about the world changing, adjust to it and find a new strategy and deal with it.

Make the most of things. Do not just “get by” but come out better than ever.

For those who want to hear the full week plan for Shadstone Limited, Mike’s company (removing sensitive info) – here it is:

Week Plan Aug 8 – 14, 2021 Shadstone Limited

Hello from Shenzhen, China. Full circle for sure – left in the summer of 2018 and in the summer of 2021, I’m back. But, for how long? Who really knows, with these lockdowns and travel restrictions? A friend on the Hong Kong side picked up a friend at the HK/SZ border and it was a ghost town – totally empty, a far cry from the previous millions (or so it seemed) who crossed daily, this border.

It’s so hard to say when (if) it will ever go back to that way or not.

So we are getting settled this week . Last week, we were preparing for this – a nightmare travel (video blog coming soon) and last Friday, was a day at the factory for the Indigitus production.

I really want to say how happy I am with the team. We are getting things done, adjusting to the changing times (lockdowns, people in /out) and continually growing and improving. Please keep it up.

This week, some initiatives:

• Hiring an HR manager – Shadstone has never had a dedicated HR person. It was always kind of mixed between management and finance roles. But as we grow and prepare to grow even more, we feel having someone dedicated to the role of human resources will really help. We made an offer and hope to introduce this person to the team this coming week.
• Hiring more part time roles for various current positions – we want to strengthen the current departments and roles we have. Our core is content, SEO, web dev (wordpress/PHP). And, we want to add more people to these roles to back each other up and scale up more projects. (This is why we are hiring HR first)
• Amazon FBA broker work, meeting various sellers (who we have been talking to remotely from Shenyang for quite some time) about deal flow and business.
• Indigitus factory work – will be there at least once or more this coming week. Assembly is happening and hopefully we will be shipping things out.
• ShenzhenParty rebuild – I believe I mentioned last week (or not?) we are partnering with a friend/ GFAVIP member to buy out Shenzhen Party – the original English language website in Shenzhen. It is a massive site, as big or maybe bigger than Global From Asia. So we will need a lot of work to rebuild (web team – it is multiple wordpress sites) and we are planning to first keep things the same for a month or so (while improving it of course), and then do some significant improvements / optimizations.

And so much more, I am sure. But the summary:

1. Growing the team and preparing a “formal” HR department and policy.
2. Adding more projects and sticking to Shadstone’s core of content, SEO, website dev.

Thank you for reading this and being with us in this journey. I have a feeling that with my being in Shenzhen, more projects and deals will be coming out as well.