The OverTime Express

I’m not sure if anyone really takes weekends off in Shanghai, but folks starting their own businesses, like yours truly, almost never refrain from working for two straight days. We are in a hurry. We have places to go. Things that need accomplishing.

I have always been one of the worst of these overachieving types. When we launched the magazine that was the core of my previous company, we did it by working a lot of overtime and getting the first issue out ten weeks after all of us had left our old jobs.

So it was in another one of these overtime sessions on Saturday that I made an important strategic decision about RightSite — the decision to take it easy. We previously planned to launch our sales effort for October 1 this year, which meant that we would need bring on additional staff to build up the critical mass of property listings necessary to drive traffic to the site. And getting all of these staff online meant finding a new office that could accomodate more folks. The basic formula was something like:

• Build site, and build databases of industrial zones and agents, then…
• Hire data entry staff, then…
• Compile property listings, then…
• Hire marketing team to make us famous, then….
• Have a site with lots of contents and heavy user traffic, then…
• Hire sales team to sell premium listings to interested buyers, then…
• Make money

However, over the last few months we have faced a number of challenges. Nothing catastrophic, but enough to delay our schedule a bit

• Web development delays — phase one of the site is taking about 25% longer than we originally projected, so I am now foreseeing a September 1st launch, rather than an August 1st launch
• Scarcity of qualified managers — hiring data-entry staff to build listings is pretty easy, but someone needs to supervise these kids, and finding a manager to take on this task for a website that doesn’t really exist yet, was not proving to be easy.
• Expensive office space — we were looking at spending at least 25% more than our budget for office space

From what I know of business in China, another factor that we have to consider is the selling season. There are some pretty strong business cycles. We had been aiming to launch our sales for October 1st, so that we could make some hay during the fourth quarter — usually the strongest time for sales. But with the delays we are experiencing, mid-November seems like the earliest date we could achieve.

With this in mind, on Saturday we decided to readjust our overall plan so that our sales would be launched in mid-February. This means…

• We will delay moving into an office until Chinese New Year (January 26th, 2009 — mark your calendars now)
• Building up the volume of listings will have to wait until the first phase of the site is launched around September 1st.
• Recruitment can wait until Chinese New Year as well — with the additional time we have available, we should be able to accomplish our goals with our existing team.

We may take on some risk of losing our first-to-market advantage, but we are giving ourselves more time to get our site launched in a professional manner, and avoiding taking on a lot of fixed costs at a time when the start of our revenues is still in doubt.

So here’s the new project plan as it looks today, in case you’re interested. And you can compare it to the earlier plan that I posted in April.

Now if only this extra time would mean that I would have a day or two free for some golf!