Starting a business is an extremely difficult process. How entrepreneurs are the best self on the road to entrepreneurship, this article introduces the insights of two successful entrepreneurs.
adhere to professional ethics
20 years ago, Peng Yunjuan and his younger brother ran a shop selling essential oil fragrance in the small commodity market in Fumin Street, Yuyuan. By chance, they smelled the fragrance of agarwood . Peng Yunjuan, who had been in the fragrance business for many years, exclaimed: "How could it smell so good!" So, in 2012, Peng Yunjuan began to transform into traditional Chinese fragrance.
Learning to make traditional Chinese incense is not an easy task, because there has never been a unified incense ratio standard in China. Even with the same materials and the same ratio, the fragrance taste may be very different. Peng Yunjuan decided to look for teachers all over the country to learn this knowledge; at the same time, she found many books about fragrant culture to learn. For example, " Fragrance ", "Hong Chu Fragrance Chart" and "Chen Fragrance Chart" are reference books she has read and pondered repeatedly. In addition, she has also read some ancient books related to traditional Chinese medicine, such as " Treatise on Febrile Diseases " and " Yi Jing ", etc., to find relevant knowledge about traditional fragrance. Over the past ten years, the more than ten boxes of books that Peng Yunjuan has saved at her home have been purchased to learn Chinese traditional fragrance.
From the books, Peng Yunjuan got inspiration to make incense and also caused a lot of trouble. The ancients called spices very different from the present. For example, they placed some spices in the library to drive away the borers. This fragrance is recorded in the book as rue , but what material is it synthesized? Peng Yunjuan studied it for a long time before she replicated it. Unremitting efforts have made Peng Yunjuan’s knowledge of Xiang better. However, Peng Yunjuan did not stop and continued to study and looked for ways to develop new fragrances from books.
Listening to classes, learning to do fragrance and running a business are two different things. When he first entered the industry, Peng Yunjuan suffered a lot of inexperienced losses. The important thing in making incense is to find good materials, but a bunch of materials is placed in front of the incense makers, which tests the incense makers' discernment ability. For example, the distinction between high-quality agarwood - if it is a submerged agarwood, it has good quality and high price; if it is not submerged, the quality difference will be low. Sometimes the prices of these two different agarwoods will be 10 times different. Some bad merchants see that novices have no experience in identifying physical objects, and add something to the unsinkable agarwood to imitate it and sell it in a submerged manner. This happens from time to time. Some merchants also glue small pieces of agarwood with glue and brush a layer of pigment. They look good in color and are sold in a whole piece at a high price; some illegal merchants even sell fake materials directly. Peng Yunjuan bought fakes when she bought rhubarb for the first time. She didn't react until she smelled the real dark yellow later. Nowadays, the more than 30 commonly used materials Peng Yunjuan can basically distinguish between true and false at a glance.
Ten years ago, when online shopping was not yet on the rise, most of Peng Yunjuan's surroundings were shops that wholesale stationery, bedding, and clothes, and customers were shoulder to shoulder every day. This correspondingly brought a lot of passenger flow to Peng Yunjuan. When passing by the fragrance shop, you will come in and buy it when you smell the fragrance you like. But when online shopping emerged, business was worse than before. The surrounding stores changed batch after batch, and the customer flow was getting smaller and smaller, so it was difficult for Peng Yunjuan to attract new customers.
Fortunately, Peng Yunjuan's products are of high quality and are deeply trusted by a group of old customers. During the interview, Ms. Xu, who is doing traditional Chinese incense business in the UK, was ordering the order with Peng Yunjuan. Ms. Xu said: "I have been ordering in this store for more than ten years. Her goods are very pure and the best I have encountered at the moment. I often bring these goods to the UK to let customers there see the fragrance culture in China." The outbreak of the epidemic in early 2020 put Peng Yunjuan in trouble. Seeing Peng Yunjuan in trouble, the Entrepreneurship Department of the Huangpu District Human Resources and Social Security Bureau extended a helping hand to her and invited her to participate in the 2021 "Haina Bai Chuang·Chuangchao Show" held by the Huangpu District Human Resources and Social Security Bureau. During the live broadcast, Peng Yunjuan introduced Hui'an agarwood in detail to everyone.
Another reason why business is not going well is that Peng Yunjuan is "too serious". She has insisted on using pure natural materials since she made essential oil fragrances, and even the best natural materials. In this way, the factory "dislikes" her too much, and customers will think she is too serious.In the fragrance of goose pear tent made by Peng Yunjuan, the honey used does not come from ordinary supermarkets, but is the honey collected by the elderly who were entrusted to collect honey in the mountains. So it is also the fragrance of goose pears. The small bottle is sold for 9 yuan and 9 cents on the outside market. Peng Yunjuan sells it in grams, and the price per gram is 15 yuan to 35 yuan. The high requirements for material quality also made Peng Yunjuan feel more and more powerless. She could only barely make the store "live" in doing business, but she did not want to give up the ethics she had always insisted on - using good materials and not selling fake goods.
How to support the store while sticking to its own ethics? Peng Yunjuan was looking for the answer. What she is thinking about is to transform and popularize Chinese traditional incense culture, to take everyone to experience the incense cutting and popularize incense culture, and to work hard to study ancient incense recipes, to promote our traditional incense culture through popular science, and to reverse the wrong perceptions that some false advertisements have brought to people. Peng Yunjuan's efforts have been recognized by consumers.
Follow the ideal in your heart
Zhou Xiaoxu, when he was 5 years old, he fell in love with it after seeing racing on TV. From then on, his life revolved around racing. In 2017, Zhou Xiaoxu founded a professional racing consulting management company - Zhenghe Racing. He has experienced twists and hardships in the past decade.
Zhou Xiaoxu's first job was to work as an aerodynamic engineer in the F1 team in the UK, and this job occupies a very important position in his heart. Being able to work in F1 not only fulfilled his dream, but also accumulated wealth for his future entrepreneurship. The professional racing atmosphere cultivated Zhou Xiaoxu's professional qualities, including work habits, work methods and work attitudes, all of which were set from then on. Zhou Xiaoxu said: "The development of the F1 team is very fast, forcing industry personnel to constantly update themselves, quickly learn new knowledge and skills, and continuously improve their learning ability. This ability has always helped me in entrepreneurship."
Zhenghe Racing is a company that provides racing services, facing niche customers; but Zhou Xiaoxu has always maintained a sensitivity to new things: "We should not be out of touch with the entire society, because racing is just a carrier. In order to make the company better show in the market, we need to have enough understanding of the market." Zhou Xiaoxu reads industry information every day to understand hot topics on social software and relevant knowledge at home and abroad. He treats himself as a sponge, and he tries to get fresh things from people from all industries and backgrounds.
In the process of starting a business, Zhou Xiaoxu completed the transformation from a science and engineering man to an entrepreneur. This change allowed Zhou Xiaoxu to make rational decisions and helped him overcome the difficulties of the epidemic. Building a world-class champion team is Zhou Xiaoxu's always dream, so in the early stages of his business, he couldn't wait to plan and build his own team. After experiencing the ups and downs of the epidemic, Zhou Xiaoxu has become more stable. He realized that talking about the development of new businesses on the basis of firmly grasping the company's core business and strengthening team output efficiency is a longer-term approach.
Zhou Xiaoxu often said: "Entrepreneurship is to break yourself up and then form it." He used to like to pursue speed, fast, and would do whatever he wanted to do immediately. But after starting a business, he gradually understood that different stages need to have different rhythms, especially during the epidemic, Zhou Xiaoxu realized the importance of increasing revenue and reducing expenditure and flexible ability. Zhou Xiaoxu is very optimistic about China's racing market in the future, because China's demographic dividend and new energy advantages are narrowing the gap with the European market. At present, although the sequelae of the epidemic have not yet dissipated, Zhou Xiaoxu is still full of confidence in this. He has never thought of giving up starting a business, nor has he changed his original aspiration and goals.
