Starting work at Shijia

My new boss, Mr. Wang was in Shanghai for the day, so I only spent a few hours at the office that afternoon meeting most of the surprisingly small office staff for a company having over 600 employees. I was taken to my temporary hotel home (I'll post a picture later). My room is tiny, costing 50yuan/day, but has a western toilet, a nice view etc. I'm moving into a larger room tonight, it will cost 65/night. The town is small indeed. I hear "lao wai" and "wai guo" (kinda like "white honky" literally "old foreigner" and "foreigner" few times walking to work every day.

I was pretty frustrated my first whole day of work, I was expecting to get right to work, but didn't get to meet Mr. Wang until late yesterday afternoon. We had a large meeting about me from 4-6. It dispelled my concerns after sitting idle all day, I hate to be bored.

I was pleased to see my huge new office. It has a glass wall and a nice view of the city and mountains on the other end. I feel privileged having my own office, I think only 3 others in the building do.

I will have a secretary, and an engineer working for me. I'll be working closely with the domestic sales manager (sorry no names). It's pretty tough remembering all the names. My primary job objective is to increase domestic sales. I was surprised to see many of the products I had purchased in the U.S. came from this company. I knew Shijia made Quickie, but I didn't know we(not them anymore) also make Oxo, and several other high quality American brands. I'm going to Ningbo Monday to meet with the sales group there and do some market research, then to Shangai Tuesday and Wednesday to meet with the sales group there. My deliverable is one new product every month, including finished CAD geometry, ROI etc and approval from all the managers - quite an undertaking. I told I would need an engineer if I was going to be tooling ready within a month. It's still going to be tough to stay innovative with that schedule even with help. We will be buying a rapid prototyping machine and I will be responsible for running. This is quite an expensive machine, something that Marshalltown has talked about for a while, but never bought one, so this is pretty exciting. I was glad to be able to surprise them with my expertise in this area. I told them I would not be working on Saturdays. I wasn't sure about that, when they're under pressure to get an order in, most of the office personnel do production work for a few hours after dinner. I'm sticking to 40 hours as well as I can. This country is full of cheap workers, good example of why working smarter, not longer is the only thing that's going to get me ahead.