Dilemma

I just went and met with the director of finance of Desjardins. I am now torn between RBC and Desjardins. I like both of them, RBC were the first once I approached but Desjardins were the the ones pursuing our business. RBC knows our product, but Desjardins is a neighbor and a potential source of revenue for our new venture.

I like the guy at RBC, but the girl at Desjardins seems to be much more knowledgeable.

What to do, what to do? Time for a decision, sometimes decisions aren't easy, actually no one has ever said it would be easy, they actually warn you that things would be hard. But decisions, is what you must make. All our future postions are decided by our present decisions.

Business Taboo!

Today I went to the CLD. The CLD is a non-profit organization implemented for the sole purpose of helping the development of entrepreneurs and the local economies. And in our case, we are assigned an adviser, someone who can help us develop a sound business plan and be a sounding board for our ideas. So today, I had my second interview with this adviser.

He brought many good points and has shed good lights on some of the many discrepancies of my business plan. However, during our conversation he asked a simple question: "what guarantees do you have to insure the sale numbers in your business plan?". I had to think about it for a few moments and I started to blurt a bunch of random thoughts on how we came up with the numbers and how sound they were according to "our" experience. Truth be told, I didn't have any guarantees, all I have is confidence, but the question took me a little by surprise.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make in this blog. Confidence, where does it stem from? I think it comes from a concept that we don't usually associate to business. I think it comes from something we don't like to talk about because it is almost a taboo subject in our society, yet that subject is the driving motor for what we do and how we engage in all parts of our life, whether it be personal, professional or anything for that matter. Confidence stem from FAITH...I know, I know, I know don't roll your eyes yet, or shake your fingers at me or stop reading just yet. Allow me to make my point.

Faith is an important part of starting a business and if I dare say it, it is the basis of what we should start a company. Without it, it would be completely absurd to tackle a project like starting your own company or investing in a company. Why start anything if you don't have faith in the good outcome of your endeavors?

Anyway, I am stating a fact. Every part of our life we exercise faith, sometime at lesser degree than others but we all in some sort of way do. Whether we sit on the dentist chair "trusting" that the dentist knows what she or he is doing to getting in an elevator "hoping" the mechanic did his maintenance job on the wires. We all exercise faith and in business we often hide the word or the feeling with sentences like, "my educated guess" or "in my experience" or "the data suggest"....We all trust a 6th sense. That "6th" sense is simply faith.

So to get back to what my boy the adviser asked: "what guarantees do you have to insure the sale numbers in your business plan?". I don't have any guarantees, all I have is a faith that I did my job and will be doing my job to the best of my abilities and that "Someone" is going to provide.

I am not suggesting that faith is the ONLY thing in business, what I am saying is that without faith there is no point in beginning a business or a project for that matter.

Guilty

I had a little altercation with one of the cooks this week at my parent restaurant. Let me set it up for you.

The cook is in charged of all that is fried and grilled and one of the item that was to be served was an imperial roll, those are fried rolls that some of our Caucasian friends mistakenly refer to as egg rolls. Anyway, the rolls were, that day, consistently overcooked. At which point I told the cook to PLEASE ensure the quality of the rolls. She responded by saying that it was not her fault and that the oil needed to be changed for the past couple of days etc... I abruptly interrupted her, by "shusshing" her, emphatically, may I add. What you have to understand, is that the lady was older than I am and in the Asian culture, a younger person giving his "emphatic" opinion to someone older is not well reguarded. At that point I couldn't care less, I just wanted the damn rolls.

So let's fast forward a little bit, to Friday. My mom, upon hearing the altercation asked me to give her an explanation of the situation. After listening to me, she asked me to go apologize to the lady about being curt. Honestly, I couldn't care less if I did or if I did not. So I did, or at least I thought I did.

Apologizing is not an easy thing for me to do. I don't like apologizing especially when I believe in the truthfulness of what I have done. However we have to ask ourselves a bigger question than "are we right or are we wrong?" Because being right and being wrong is just human rationalization, so we can swing both ways. The questions is more along the line of "what is the right thing to do?" See we should always strive to do the right thing, but too often we get stuck on just being right.

I hate being wrong, more importantly I hate when my nose is being rubbed in when I am wrong. There are 2 kinds of criticism we receive, the first one are just plain wrong and the second are just plain right ON. And it is never the criticism that are false that hurt the most,nope it is those damn right ON criticism that come in and pierce right through our heart, sould and mind, those are the one that are just.....well...right.

In the end I had to apologize. Not because I was wrong, as a matter of fact, I was right, the quality of the product was poor and completely unacceptable. No instead, I had to apologize because I did not give her the respect she deserved. We all need respect, we all asked to be respected, I do and I did not follow the golden rule: "Do unto others as I would have them do unto you"

I know it is easier said than done and many will crucify us for our wrong doings. But listen, those who criticize you are either your enemy or your friend and if they are your friends, you should take heed of their criticism. Listen-Learn and Grow.

And to those who have an easy way of pointing the faults of others, you should remember that a velvet glove is always better than a slap in the face. Sometime, just sometime, it is better to let the fire settle and than use a gentle blow to take out the rest.