Find out how this Kiwi went to China as a butcher and ended up living the dream life

Hello and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson. Over the past 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and professor here in Asia. After nearly a quarter of a century in China, I'm now based here in Bali, Indonesia, the island of the gods.

Asia is my home now.

60% of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend 80% of the world's dynamism and opportunity is right here in the region. On the show, you'll hear candid and fun conversations with some of my friends and colleagues, people I've met along my journey, entrepreneurs, operators, experts that will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region and the entrepreneurial agility that actually defines it. This first season, season 1 of The Rich Robinson Show, is titled At the Speed of China. Like, wait for it, at the speed of light. Things happen fast in China, and in this season 1, we're gonna take a deeper look at that. The rapid economic development over the past few decades, as well as the speed and cycles of innovation taking place all day, every day, right now.

Let's go, Jai-O! Showtime! Jade Gray, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the pod, my Kiwi friend.

Good to see you, buddy. Good to be here. Wow, we're doing it.

We are doing it indeed. So I'm in Bali. You're down in New Zealand right now in your homeland. And we're both antipodean or antipodean. Man, I remember when we first met the very first TED event in Beijing, you came up to me on crutches after I was the MC and you said, everybody needs a rugged Kiwi in their life, mate. And I probably sounded more Aussie than Kiwi there, but I actually, my favorite Kiwi line of a friend of mine, Dan, who split time between New New Zealand and Beijing. I was like, what's it like to be back in Beijing? And he's like, it's a bit frenetic. And I was like, a bit frenetic? Oh, a bit frenetic. It's like the whole I and E switch. So anytime things get a little bit crazy, I'm like, it's a bit frenetic. And so we've known each other a long time, fellow long-suffering entrepreneurs in Beijing. I have always been the founder and president of the Jay Gray fan club. And before we dig into your entrepreneurial trials, tribulations, and triumphs in Beijing, let's go back to your origin story, please.

Wow.

How deep are we going here, Rich? Back to NZ days to China or kicking off entrepreneurship?

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, I'd love to hear a bit about your childhood as well too, right? And like how that China seed got planted in your brain.

Of course. Well, I mean, the rugged Kiwi that I had to coax you into liking Was born and bred below New Zealand's highest mountain in the Alps, out in Mount Aoraki. So grew up in the country of New Zealand and always loved adventure. You know, grew up skiing at the age of 2 and we'd just get amongst it and look after yourself as a kid and all those things. So always up for adventure. Ended up heading offshore to do some study when I was about 18, did my A-levels in England, and I can remember vividly And my economics teacher asked me, you know, what do you want to do when you leave school? And I said, well, I want to get into international trade and take on the world with commerce and come to Europe and make my fortune. And he just kind of looked at me and laughed and said, well, Europe doesn't really give a toss about New Zealand, including the UK. So go back and learn an Asian language because your future is Asia. And that was in 1992, '93.

So one small conversation changed the trajectory of your life. Same thing happened to me. It's amazing, right?

And it really was. And it just stuck to me. It was like, wow, he's totally got a point. So went back to uni. There was either Japanese or Chinese. Japan was all the rage in the early '90s. I kind of felt I'd missed the boat, to be honest. There was like 600 lined up for the China class, after the Japanese class. And there was about 60 in the Chinese class. And when I looked at kind of, I did a bit of reading and I just saw China was starting to make these murmurs about, hey, you know, Motorola just set up there and there was Ford was going in and it was like, okay, something's happening there. So I just thought it sounded a lot more adventurous and I signed up and I kind of laugh now, but I remember I got in the end of the first year, I was 60th out of about 62 students in my class.

Oh my God. Because your Chinese is so awesome. I love watching you speak Chinese.

At the time it wasn't. And then I remember the second year I was 16 out of 16. And the last year I was 6th. There's only 6 of us left by third year. I was 6th. I was 6th out of 6. I remember telling my father with joy as he always used to berate me that I was wasn't studying hard enough. I said, Dad, I technically got in the top 10 percentile of Chinese class. But what I did learn, Rich, was in between those studies, I actually grabbed a set of skis and a snowboard. I don't know why I took both. It was insanity looking back at it, along with a backpack. And I had snow boots, ski boots, skis, snowboard, and a backpack. And I just went to China midway through university because I knew I was failing Chinese miserably. And I knew that I'd learn if I just traveled. So I went up there, kicked around Northern China looking for a ski field. I heard there was a ski field. I found it, turned up the doorstep and said, hey, in broken Chinese, you're looking for an instructor. They couldn't believe their luck, mate. I mean, they had this foreigner who could speak a bit of Chinese. They knew that they could get 3 times the price on the hourly rate. And they signed me up on the spot. So I spent, you know, 8 weeks ski instructing up there, learned great Chinese with, you know, a dormitory of 8 guys in the size of a living room. And yeah, man, it was awesome. I came back really confident in my Chinese and it really gave me the taste that I needed to head back up.

Wow. That's excellent. I love that old saw of like 80% of success is just showing up and you're like, I'm just going, I don't even know, is there even a ski lift? Am I going to have to walk up the side of the hill?

Well, yeah, it was, we used to go up with a cow that would pull a sleigh and used to drag you up the hill and you'd ski right down.

That's excellent.

Wow.

And then make some hot chocolate from the cow after.

Yeah, it was heady days, but That was cool, man. And then it kind of gave me the bug. And then when I took my first job up there, I kind of knew what I was getting myself into. So it set me up well.

Fantastic. And then back to school and wrapped up your Chinese studying.

Finished up. And then I got a call up in my actually last semester from a friend who had invested in a New Zealand agricultural company, which was taking New Zealand cattle up to China. They were shipping them up, well, flying them up, set up a breeding operation at Angus feedlot up in Northern China to do a breeding stud. And they'd tried to teach Kiwi's father how to speak Chinese and failed miserably, as you can imagine. I mean, anybody would. So they changed tack and said, hey, let's find somebody who speaks Chinese and we'll teach them the basics of farming. So that was me. I did a crash course in New Zealand for about 6 months working with the cattle. And then when they finally were good to ship up, I flew up officially. And I can say I'm the only one that's ever flown cattle class up to China and We flew up with 300 Angus cattle, beautiful stud cattle, in a 747 Megatop, Singapore Airlines, which we chartered in the hull of it. And we had them in pens and we loaded them up. And I still remember the pilot calling us because we were in the top bubble, but you know, he called us through and said, hey, there's a lot of movement down the hull. We need somebody to go down and see what's going on down there. So we went down with the oxygen masks because there's so much ammonia you couldn't bloody breathe down there really. And go down there with a stun gun and tranquilizer gun. And there was a bull had got out and he was running around and he could have literally punched straight through the side of the aircraft if he decided to, you know? So we had to sedate him and we got up there in one piece. So yeah, it was quite an entry into China. Yeah. Landing with the beasts.

Man. Fascinating. Wow. That ammonia smell, I think I'm familiar with it in some long-distance flights too, just no cows, but wow. Fascinating. And you know, you have the cow and the sleigh. And then the cow on the flight, and then later you are using New Zealand cheese for some of your entrepreneurial pursuits. So I think there's a little bit of a theme.

And we can touch on what I'm doing now, but it comes back to the cow in a different form. But no, man, it really was. But I think the speed thing, I mean, you know, we always talk about China speed and, you know, it was a classic case of just, you know, we could have shipped the cattle up there. We could have taken, you know, 8 months to get them up there on a boat and then quarantined and all those things that would've happened. But Yeah, we did it in about 36 hours. We paid close to $1 million to do it, but yeah, that was all about, hey, we're doing this, get up there and let's just get this show happening. Wow.

Fascinating. What year was that?

That was '97. '97. Wow.

So that's when I would just got into Hong Kong. There was a year of the, you know, handover. So China was still definitely closer to Mao than to now. Right. It's still really in this sort of infrastructure building phase. So then after your stint as a nongmin farmer in China, what was in the cards for you next?

Well, I kind of, I tapped out of that venture. It was a classic case of the old, you know, Chinese foreign JV turned to custard in the '90s. Just what do they say? You know, the same bed with different dreams. And it was very much the case. So I got stung pretty hard by that. And to be honest, it was tough. It was a tough year, man. I was up there by myself. I was the only foreigner. I was, you know, in charge of looking after these cattle, which were, you know, all worth over $100,000 each. And it was pretty full on. But what I came away with, A, I actually swore I'd never go back to China. I was that kind of beaten up by the experience. I went back to New Zealand and I was done with China. I was like, nah, this is just too hardcore. And I'm just going to, you know, just find an easier way. But I ended up getting a call up from the company that supplies McDonald's, OSI. And they said, hey, We've got a bunch of feedlots up in China and we'd love you to come and run it. We hear you're the feedlot man. And I was like, forget about it. And then I was also struggling, 2-year-old financially. And they said, oh, we'd offer you X. And I was like, sorry, what? And they're like, we'll offer you X. I was like, let's do this. So I went up and I actually got off the plane and got picked up by the GM of the company. And on the way back to the airport, he's turning to me and says, there's a guy from Chicago. And he said, Jade, tell me, what else can you do outside of feedlots? And I said, well, I actually last night had a meeting with our partner. We decided not to do the feedlots. So what else can you do? And I just picked up my whole life and I was like, you've got to be kidding me, Lo. Oh no. You know, like after throwing everything in for it. So I ended up with Costco to run their butcheries. So I jumped into that. I came from a grocery family. I kind of had a bit of a comfort zone in the supermarket world. So I ended up running their butcheries, but the craziness, Rich, was that their butcheries were actually, should be defined as more of a a butchery meets zoo because about a third of our products were alive. So we had an aviary, we had like a 30 square meter aviary with peacocks and guinea fowl. We had snakes, turtles, frogs, you know, and it was full noise, man. Like again, kind of walking into that butchery going, this is not what a butchery looks like back home. Wow.

And then on top of that, how many other lawai or foreigners were there?

In the butchery, I was the only one, but in the OSI, there was 3 of us, the GM, the the deputy GM and myself. So it was, you know, it was a company of probably about 300, 400 staff on the ground. So yeah, it was cool.

But then like in that experience, like you're not just like somebody once told me, oh, actually I had him on the podcast, a guy named Justin Mallon who lives in Hangzhou. He's like, you don't necessarily have to understand Chinese, but you have to understand Chinese. And I think of course it helps if you understand the language too, but being in that environment, you know, Working in the Chinese language all the time and understanding the contextual nature of the language and the cultural nuances. And it felt like you were failing, but what you were really doing was like getting covered in scabs and calluses and scar tissue, like armor. So that by the time you got to a place like Beijing, you were like, oh, wait a second. This is tough and competitive, but it's not this butchery environment.

Right? Totally, man. And especially I think out in the sticks and you're out in the, out in the hinterlands of China. And you're doing exactly that. You're immersing yourself in the culture. There's no foreign expat pub down the road. There's no, you know, Sunday footy where you go watch your favorite football team. I mean, I could hardly get internet to send a fax. I mean, it was, you know, in terms of any type of comms. So no, you're right. And I've always said that, you know, if you're going to specialize in anything, specialize in Chinese culture and feel comfortable with Chinese, feel comfortable with you. And I've seen it before, farmers come from New Zealand. They're great with people and they've got no Chinese, but by the end of it, they are just connecting. They're bonding. There's trust. There's all those things. And other guys come up with amazing Chinese. They just can't connect and there's no trust formed, you know?

Yeah. I observed so many times just watching you deal with your staff in your awesome pizza empire that I love to frequent. And I could tell that it wasn't like sometimes it's maybe the case with me, right? Where I try to connect with Chinese people and I think I, Can maybe through humor, but maybe my Chinese skills, you know, not nearly as good as yours. And people are coming to me. People are like, you know what, I'll split the difference and I'll come over to you. And I kind of understand what you mean. And yeah, you said that in a clunky way and oh wow, that was kind of a little bit, you know, maybe sound like you're tone deaf and maybe the way you should have said that, but I'll come to you anyway. But then I saw your staff, basically they were wildly inspired by you. Like you were so in sync with them and they really, really responded to the culture that you set there. And now I understand more clearly. I never really got that much of a backstory from you, but you were really like your entire career, basically. Like you weren't like, quote unquote, polluted by the West in a way. You weren't trying to like change your Western, you know, style to fit in China. You were like, I'm learning as I go.

Right.

Yeah, it's cool. I think, you know, because I, my first 3 jobs were all based out in the sticks where I was living in little peasant towns. You know, I've always said to people like, spend some time with the peasants and that's not a derogatory term. That's just, you know, what we'd call farmers or whatever you want to call it. But when you spend time with the peasants, you gain the roots of China. You know, this is what the essence of China, the calendar, the moon cycles, the farming cycles, all those things, which all the depth of Chinese culture is built on. It sure is not built on Shanghai or Shenzhen, you know, like this is thousands of years of history, which is in these traditions, which, you know, and by living in it kind of 24/7, I started tuning into what are the essence of the values and what really drives them, especially that class of society, not necessarily the urban class. So when we started the restaurants, which was, you know, pretty much after this farming gig and butcheries, you know, 95% of my employees were not from Beijing. They were from what we would say waidi, you know, and they were from the outskirts and different provinces. So I knew straight away what their home looked like. I knew what their family needs were. I knew what their parents wore on their clothes. I mean, I understood where they came from, right? And so when we started talking to them about engaging in our dream, I knew where they'd come from. And I think a lot of the triggers and a lot of the needs of their parents, because we forget that in a single child policy, which most of these kids were at that point, their whole family's wellbeing and pension and social security relies on the income of their child. And that was the pressures that they carry with them. And so when you're talking about the things, you're not talking about, hey, what do you want to do when you're grown up? It's like, what do you need to do to meet the expectations of your aging parents? Yeah, that's the conversation.

Yeah, that's fascinating because, you know, I often heard entrepreneurs, both local and lawaai, lamenting how challenging it was to deal with some employees who were coming, you know, like why dear aunt, right? Because they were Uncultured, like they don't even know what service is because they didn't, you know, or hygiene in the urban context.

Right.

But, you know, that's fine. Like, you know, of course that's something that can be learned. And I think that your churn rate and your loyalty and the way that people performed on your team, like it just threw all that out the window. But it was like, well, wait a second. If everybody else is struggling, why are you just crushing it? Right. And it's because You know, you really gave the time and effort to be able to connect. And I think your training and the way people were like wildly inspired by you, like I could see it like in their eyes when they came in. Right. I mean, like it was, you know, culture that you set and the example that you modeled. I think that's like a big part of your success as an entrepreneur, right? Yeah.

Cheers, man. I got probably the biggest kicks out of in China was just seeing the development of these, and I call them kids and They were probably anywhere from 16 to kind of 22. But, you know, in terms of maturity, they're probably more like a 13 to 18-year-old, you know, in the West, just because of the experiences they'd been exposed to. And I really enjoyed, that was the most rewarding part by far, was seeing these guys develop. And then, you know, probably the ultimate was when I did leave China, you know, kind of like 20 years later, the management buyout of both the companies, those employees, they bought me out and they didn't have to you know, stopped the job because the law left and their whole world was turned upside down. They just continued their legacy and made it their own. And I just got off a call today with Lucy, who, you know, she's smashing it. You know, they've survived the whole COVID, which is the end of the day, that was the only mark of success, right? Because most didn't, at least small businesses and food and beverage.

Sure.

All right. And then I was speaking to Tina who bought the other company and you'll be pleased to hear that they're opening up a new Gum Ho right now. And they're looking at the whole franchising model again and So, you know, it's just that to me is probably the coolest part is that.

It's a great legacy.

There's impact there, you know, and it's a few people, but it's impact. So it's fun.

Love it. So then from there you ended up coming to Beijing. Was that the next hop?

Yeah. So after Kunming and I was left on a bit of a lull, I was running an abattoir in Kunming and I won't scare you with those stories, but I used to turn up to work at 10:00 PM at night because in China there was no cold chain down in Kunming. It was all Cut fresh, you know, killed, cut up, put on a bike at, you know, 4 or 5 AM. Somebody would come pick all the meat up and then take it to the wet market for 6 AM, you know, opening. And so I would do a 10 PM to 6 AM shift and it was just brutal. It was just soul destroying. And, you know, I was already getting pretty dismayed with the whole meat sector. So yeah, that was the kicker. And then I got a call up from a friend who picked up a gym business in Beijing in Wudao Kou, which as you know, is the foreign student hangout. At the Sea Jiao Bingguan, which you know I'm sure intimately, and he picked up literally this gym, what you describe as a game of cards. So Tip was German. He said, "Hey, I've got no idea how to run this. Do you want to come up and run it?" And you know, I went out there, had a look, and was surrounded by you know twenty thousand foreign students from Russia and like Hawaii and like you know Europe. And there's all these like beautiful young women walking around. I was like a twenty four at that stage. All I'd seen was been out with you know a few toothless peasants.

We're not in Kunming anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it was a pretty easy sell. And then I went up there and took over this fitness center and yeah, made a go of it, man. It was cool. Bought in and that was my first venture. I was 50% partner and it was just, yeah, game on. Yeah.

So that's interesting. So at that point in my life, I'd gotten married to a local woman and I was about to become like a dad. Right. So I had like detached from that social scene and I think the amount of foreign students had Like sharply increased in China. So Wudao Co. went from like, you know, kind of like a backwater way out in the West to like a really hip, like thriving. Like I remember the first time going there and before I even knew you and going to some of the other things that you started being like, wow, like this has really changed so rapidly. So from there you started a nightclub, right?

Well, first started the cafe. So we got the gym was going really well. We started the gym. We had that for 3 years. And we just started our second gym, which is beautiful fit out. And then SARS came and we got shut down by the government. They ordered us to shut because we were, you know, high sweating, high breathing. And they shut us for about 6 months with no rent relief. And it basically just crushed us. And I kind of tapped out of that. I was a bit lost as to what to do, but I noticed that all this great real estate in Woodlawn beside the new subway, all these places were closing down because a lot of Koreans who had gotten in earlier, Japanese were fleeing back to career in Japan, right? And all these landlords were left stranded with all this real estate. And it was like, I could see it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to find good real estate. So I ended up getting this, you know, I'd frequent this cafe that was struggling, having a coffee, working out my own life. And because the gym was closed and not looking that great. And then I started speaking to the boss and he was saying he was struggling and I taught him how to make coffee and we started chatting. And before I knew it, I was running this cafe and I said, look, let me take the lease. So I took the lease at a steal. It was right on the corner, as you know, where Lush was and kicked off Lush, the cafe. And when SARS finally got over and the students came back, we kind of had the cool kids on the block because we were the only guys that had hot coffee and a cold beer to kind of Western standards. And we just ran with it, man. And yeah, right off the back of that, we built Zub, which is a nightclub, Pyro Pizza, which is a pizzeria. And then, you know, later on we rolled them out and Gung Ho on the back of that. So yeah, it was kind of the start of the F&B group.

Indeed. And I think, yeah, your Pyro Pizza was really, you know, another sort of backbone to the community. And I think you learned some lessons from there and then you were able to take that and start GungHo. Like what was it that inspired you specifically to go more all in on GungHo and maybe explain the whole kind of concept and sensibility of what GungHo was?

Yeah, I think up until then I'd be kind of stumbling around and You know, we kind of joked, we're kind of stumbling away to success, you know, just very organically. And it wasn't pretty, but we got to a point where actually we started to understand China. We understand the market and you gotta remember, this is kind of, you know, pre-Olympics. China's just fizzing, man. Like it's just the sky's the limit. And it was the center of the universe, that kind of 2008. And so we were just riding that high and we said, okay, let's stand back. We've kind of had enough fun and games of, you know, raised the Great Wall with 4,000 guys partying the Great Wall. to nightclubs and basements and cafes, it was like, how do we actually do something a bit more meaningful, more scaled, and something which would be a lifestyle, which was a bit more, you know, kind of sustainable. So we looked at the whole F&B model. We saw pizza and in particular delivery having a real gap in the market. So yeah, I teamed up with my co-founder at the time, John O'Loughlin, who was managing, or he was the franchise manager for Asia for Domino's. He really understood the whole— Yeah. Franchise model understood the kind of nuts and bolts of running an operation in China, and we teamed up and founded Gung Ho Pizza. And the premise was let's do delivery. You know, lean model, low foot small footprint, low rent, low overheads online food was just starting to creep into KFC and McDonald's and a couple of Annie's. You remember Annie's, which were just smashing it with delivery. So we got in there at the time. There's only about six options in Beijing. Yeah, there was literally the guys I mentioned and Domino's and Papa John's. That was about it. So we got in there and we were smashing it, man. Like we had this. lean model. And the other key takeaway was we decided to do a pizza, which was, you know, our style of pizza, which was this kind of Antipodean, which was an Italian kind of thin crust that would— these really creative ingredients. And you remember we chose the color pink because we want to move as far away from Italy as possible. You know, we were not trying to be traditional. We were innovative, creative, and not bound by tradition. So that was our selling point.

Yeah. You know, you had the artisanal pizza.

Yeah.

And all the different You know, options, Peking duck and barbecue chicken. And, you know, it was definitely a premium pizza. And yeah, that pink was everywhere because you had your own fleet of scooters and those were extremely visible in the early days with the boxes and all the gear. So yeah, you guys made a very, very strong splash. And the 2 things that I loved about what you were doing was that you had put in all of these SOPs. Standard operating procedures and your training and your sort of ability to open up a new location, the turnkey ability, like that kind of discipline, like that was already kind of like world-class, like probably so much farther down the path than say somebody like Papa John's in the early days. Like you guys were extremely, you know, professional from the get-go. Was that something that you leveraged from Domino's or? How did you customize that for China? What were some of the challenges around that?

I think, yeah, I've always been pretty systems orientated. You know, my father was a grocer. I kind of came through that whole model of, you know, systems and procedures and whatnot. And then while I was working with Costco and McDonald's on that meat gig, you know, I was obviously given world-class insight into, you know, SOPs and how they run their operation, especially the McDonald's side. And so I really realized if you want to scale, you've got to make the experience consistent. We all know McDonald's is not the best tasting burger, but it sure as hell is the most consistent burger. So I really got into the idea of consistency, read a couple of books like, you know, The E-Myth Revisited, and then got into the Verne Harnish with the gazelles and whatnot, with Rockefeller Habits. That just kind of played into my logical structured mind. And then the other big impact is when I was out in the country in China on those farm gigs, I would see all the schools. It was very much run like cadets. You know, it was a very military school operation and the kids marching and singing national anthems and they got all the uniforms. And so I understood that how the Chinese children were brought up and how that military impact is their way of learning. So we made our training very cadet driven in terms of uniform and marching. And that's what you had to do with delivery. It was like a military operation. You know, we had 30 minutes to get the pizza to the door in 30 minutes. How do you do that? Well, it's like a military approach. It was. Just go, go, go. And that was our catchphrase, right? And that was what we were known for. And we had a great thing, which on the streets, and we tied the marketing in, but if you yelled out, go, go, go to one of our delivery drivers, they would have a voucher and they'd have one a day and they could stop and give it to you for a free pizza, right? And so we would have, you know, we would have engaged people on the street to give our guys the juice to go, go, go, knowing that they may get a free pizza if they were the lucky one, you know? So. It was cool. We had this great culture built around speed and, you know, that military thing you're talking about.

Yeah.

So if somebody's sitting inside, you know, I would go to the San Leituan location, wasn't far from my office. Like, what would you hear? Like if you were sitting in there, one of the drivers came in every time somebody came in.

Yeah. So we tied everything to performance and results. It wasn't just like, you've got a pizza guy. It's like, no, you've got a KPI to hit. And if you hit it, your bonus goes up and simple as that. So on the way, when they took an order, they'd get it in the hot bag. Before they ran out, they'd yell out where they were going to. And the guys waiting, there'd be about 6, 7 guys waiting for their order, would yell out, go, go, go, right, in English. And so they would run out the door. And the whole idea is that when you left, you had to run. There was no walking because up until then, including Annie's, everybody else is just walking to the bike and they'd put the thing in, they'd drive off. They'd walk through the compound. And our whole culture is that you run because we needed to get this hot. You know, we're the best service operators. So they would run and the go, go, go is kind of that, you know, bit of a 加油 in China. And then they would run everywhere. And so we'd want to take that go, go, go onto the street, which is what happened. And then when they'd come back in, they would yell out because they'd have to time themselves and they would yell, they'd come through the door, they'd yell out where they went and the time of the delivery. And everybody would either yell out, you know, if they did a good time or if they Failed and had a terrible time because they maybe got stuck in traffic or they got a puncture. They would get yelled back, "Jaiyo," which basically means you know try better next time.

So it was great. You could feel that energy like every time you were sitting there. It was like you know adding electricity to the whole restaurant. Like everybody was engaged.

Yeah, and we'd get customers who would sit there eating that they just get into it. Yeah, if you're sitting having a pizza and the guy would yell out, "Go, go, go!" You know.

Yeah.

How quick ah! Wow,非常好。 You know, and a big shout out to our boy, Scott Taylor, who, you know, and who's a master at company culture. And I brought Scott in to help structure and he was coming from a theater training background. So he was very animated and it was all about fun and games was the way he would train. And so we made it fun, you know, it was all about having a laugh and we really brought that in, you know, and every Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights were big. That was when we made our money, right? So every Friday after our culture training. We would go out, we'd play games in the street for half an hour. We'd always have these crazy games we'd play as a team. There'd be 30 of us in pink tops and, you know, we used to get people come and stop and just watch us because we were absolutely mad, you know, but again, awesome marketing. The logo was there. People would join in. And by the time these guys walk into that shift at 6:00 PM, yeah, they're just chomping at the bit, man. Like bring it on, you know? And that was what we're trying to build. This was more than a job. And yeah, a lot of the stuff you talk about, it was giving purpose. And how do you create purpose in the mundane?

Yeah. And some community too, because I think also like a waidearen, like somebody from the hinterlands coming into Beijing was almost not that far from like being like an immigrant in the US, right? Because you're socioeconomically different and it's such a challenge and you're so kind of cast adrift, so to speak. Right. So, you know, to be able to offer that community and belonging and purpose, right. It was really important.

I think with Everidge, that whole dormitory culture as well, because people forget you're actually housing You know, you become basically their guardians on behalf of their family when they're in Beijing. So you, yeah, we'd house them, feed them, you know, washing machines, showers, everything was us, right? And actually a mate, Dominic Johnson-Hill, who understands China as well as any laowai, he once gave me great insight and said, Jade, you got to remember, you can always connect with the waidiren because we're also waigoran. We're both wai. Yeah, we're wairan. We're not from Beijing. We're outsiders. And they had as much in common the way they were engaging with Beijing locals with us more than they had in common with Beijing people because they were not Beijing, right?

Yes. And our Aiyi for the last 6 years, you know, from Anhui, she's, you know, she was definitely, she struggled, right? Like we got to look at things through her eyes, like as a non-native Beijinger, right? And it's tough, right? But you know, China in general, it can be a challenging place, right? But we all love it. Right. Like I said, sometimes like my wife, she loves me. I know she loves me. I'm not sure why. She very often doesn't like me and I can understand that. Right. So it's like China, I love you. I love you. I love you. I don't like you sometimes. Right. It's kind of a pretty tough place, right? Like the traffic, the weather, the pollution, whatever. It's a challenge. So one other thing I'd love to peel back is, you know, you and I got to participate in the Entrepreneurs Organization, right? World's largest entrepreneur group started by Verne Harnish. Who kind of did his legacy first. He started this, you know, 1987 entrepreneur organization because somebody had committed suicide and they, you know, their buddies who knew the entrepreneur didn't even really fully understand how tough it was for them. So it was something set up for personal, family, and professional. So we know each other through forum, through that. And, you know, lots of intimate, deep sharing in those forums and very, very powerful, you know, pure coaching. And that's great. But then Vern went from that to starting Gazelles and Rockefeller Habits based on J.D. Rockefeller's, you know, WONT habit of walking to work with his lieutenants and then having lunch with his lieutenants and then walking home with them and being fully aligned on goals and metrics and rhythm and communication rhythm. And that now he's since called that Scaling Up and his company is called Scaling Up. And, you know, 40,000 companies have used that. And I think our Beijing chapter Was one of the best, you know, EO chapters, I think, in adopting that. But of all the, you know, people that adopted scaling up and that discipline where quote unquote structure sets you free, I think you were far and away the one who did it best. And you were even featured in his book and you had a war room for scaling up, up in your top floor there. And I remember picking up Vern from your location in Lido and driving him to the airport. I just wanted a little bit of Vern time. But like share for some of the podcast listeners out here, like what Scaling Up meant for you and how it impacted your business and what you did to really infuse it into your company.

I'm always, yeah, in the EO group, which is awesome. And it was such a brother sisterhood, you know, for us when we're all trying to do it on their own. What I found was that you're learning so much, right? And you're coming across so many great books and resources and slowly podcasts. And all those, you know, great access to learnings, but it can also get quite overwhelming. And my methodology was like scan across a bunch of stuff and then choose one that really talks to you and just nail it and just forget about everything else. Like don't try and do it all or pick 5. And I basically set the task of every year I wanted to implement one learning resource. So I went about it and what that year was the, you know, it was Rockefeller Habits then, and which we learned, we had come across during EO. And it just talked to me, especially in F&B where I was trying to build a franchise and it was all about You know, rhythm and how do you get message to the frontline team and get the messages back and, you know, it's about structure. So it just talked to me and I think the challenge was about how do you implement it in China? Because only new science is relevant. I learned the hard way that not all great technology is relevant to China or wants to be taken on by the Chinese. And at the farm, I remember vividly the feedlot, we had this beautiful mixing machine for feed, which was a $100,000 machine from Ireland. with computer screens that would mix everything up. And, you know, we were taking that to China and we were feeding their cattle the most amazing breakfast, which even, you know, you and me would probably eat. And what I discovered is that after about 2 months, the Chinese wouldn't use it. They ended up just getting there with picks and shovels. And they thought it was a great fine box where they could stick all their stuff in, you know, to mix their feed. They'd never used the software or the rotisserie arms or whatever, but it was a good place to hold their feed while they'd gone there with their pitchforks, you know? So it was a bloody expensive, you know, metal box. But what I learned is that, hey, we could have built that metal box for probably $2,000 and had the same impact. So by using Verne Harnish's tools, I stripped it right back to what I thought was valuable in China and what was blessings. And I just tried to suck the essence out of it. And the big takeaway really was, you know, of all the things that I got out of that book was this idea of rhythm. And it tied back to that kind of military cadet approach to team trainings. And it was all about rhythm. You know, if you look at military training, it's all about rhythm. And it was that routine. And these kids needed routine. They'd come to a city, they had no family, no friends. They wanted structure. They wanted to know at 7 o'clock we do this, at 10 o'clock we do this. And it gave them a sense of security. They were performing. And then the structure set us free because once we had that structure and we knew we were delivering hot pizza in 30 minutes and the top line was smashing it, hey, we'd go on these crazy adventures. We'd do this, like we had an urban farm on top of the roof where we flew them to Malaysia and went to the beaches. And because we had the structure, we couldn't do that crazy unstructured stuff without that rhythm, you know? And so I used to push back people saying, oh, it's too structured and I feel too constrained by it. It's like, dude, this is what gives you freedom because you've ticked all the essential bits of the business. You've really identified on your one-page plan, there's 5 things you worry about. And because we're military about those 5 things, everything else is, as he'd say, sand and we just wouldn't lose sleep over it. We're just here to go to the beach and play in the sand and worry about the bloody, you know, what he'd call the sand, the small stuff. Right. So yeah, that was probably the biggest learning for me.

That's great. You know, you talk about our mutual friend, Dominic Johnson-Hill, you know, fellow EO member and, you know, old China hand who, you know, really like cracked China in a way that's just, you know, extraordinary.

Right.

He's like, he's so well known in China because of his TV appearances. One time in Suzhou, one time in Shanghai, and one time in Toronto. Three people, three different people came up to me and go, "Oh, orangey." 你住在北京对不对？你住在斯里兰卡。And I was just like, "Oh, wait a second. You think I'm Dominic because I have a big nose and I'm bald, right?" But people in Beijing would never do that because they actually knew him. He was on TV so much that they were like, "Oh, that's definitely not the guy," right? And he's a paint outside the lines kind of guy, very paint outside the lines, creative, amazing guy.

But he has.

Implemented scaling up for fun and profit in a very meaningful way. And I think it's something that really brought Vern out. I want to say in like, you know, '07, '08, and then he came back out again. But, you know, there's been a few people like Mirko and yourself and, you know, Mike Wester and a few others that really implemented, you know, scaling up along with Don. But I was just always super impressed. And it's something that your team to this day is maybe some of the top experts in scaling up implementation in Chinese. And I think it's something that is overlooked and I think More companies need that to fill that chasm because there really isn't, there's a few other alternatives, but it's not something that's taught in school and not something you can just figure out intuitively necessarily.

The beauty of it is that, you know, it's all about simplicity, right? I mean, he's trying to simplify everything. That was the whole idea of the one-page plan. And we were pretty draconian about using that. But the beauty of that is that the chaos of China, the chaos of Asia, where everything's just in constant flux. To have something which didn't move for 90 days was such a relief. It was like when I sit on my meditation mat, you know, yoga mat meditating, I get that little piece of quiet where I just put my mind off and I can grounding.

Grounding.

That was what it was like when we'd sit in a meeting for 90 minutes and go through the one-page plan and just forget about all the noise happening. It was like, okay, how are these 5 priorities working this 90 days? Are we on track? Because we already spent the time to identify these 5 things were the key things and everything else is relevant. In these 90 minutes and you'd come out just feeling like you just meditated for an hour and a half. It's like, okay, all that chaos is just noise. Like, this is where we need to be worried about. And you know what? We're smashing it. So I'd just walk out and if somebody came up to me and gave me this crazy problem or the police walked through the door and wanted to shut me down because I had a bike parked down the street, I'm just like, whatever. It's not in my 5 priorities. It's not going to kill the business. Hey, let's deal with it. I just didn't stress it because I knew it wasn't Essential. And so it gave you that peace of mind. And that's something which I used for years and that was my kind of sanity in the business, if anything.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, startups in general, right, the default setting is failure and the journey along the way is usually so up and down and unpredictable that it can border on miserable. Right. So you have to have something. And then to put that in the China context makes it even more challenging. So I think, yeah, that's great. It's a great way to frame it. So let's talk about, you know, the unpredictability and the speed of change in China. I remember you were one of the first guys to be able to like crack China in that you were like, you know what? I'm going to optimize for lifestyle. I have a business in China, but I'm going to go spend time. You moved to Bondi Beach in Australia. Is that right? Is that where you're living?

I don't know if I cracked it, Rich, but sure as good as goes anybody.

Well, yeah, everybody else that was in China was like, that's pretty terrific because you actually did. How long was it that you and John were Tag teaming and like, what was the structure and how did you, where were you living?

Yeah, it was 2013. You remember the air apocalypse day?

Peak pollution.

Yes. 13th of January and we hit over 1,000 AQI and it was like, you know what, this is insanity. Like, I'm outta here, man. Like, and as much as I love my team and my business, it's like, I just didn't think it was worth the sacrifice in what was my health. So yeah, I made a decision that day. I'm gonna restructure the business where I can be remote and come and go and Yeah. Later that, I guess about 3 months later, I shot down to Aussie. I always had a lot of mates over there in Bondi. I wanted to change the scene. I wasn't ready to go home. And yeah, set up the business around that. And we did that for about 3 years before, you know, I had to come back and I could talk about the reasons for that. But the good time was that I think the thing allowed it, at least those 3 years, was that structure. You know, I had 4 Bibles that our whole business was built on and, you know, there was Rockefeller Habits, there was Good to Great, there was Top Grading, and there was the 4th was And it'll come to me. I should write a fellow have it. Anyway, I'll put that in the notes. But there was four. Oh, sorry, the Emyth and those four books basically tapped off every piece from strategy, your HR recruitment, your management, and you know then around the whole you know kind of I guess culture and whatnot. So that basically gave us the framework which we allowed to build the business remotely and tie into that SOPs obviously. And that was three years, and it was awesome, man. I mean, the dream was to run a business in China, not be there, and. One of the mantras I built from day one, and it was taken, I think, from EMAS, which is whether the founder, the boss is there or not, should have no impact on the customer experience. And that was something we built from day one. And that was an IVF, I think, takeaway, which when they did systems and just saying, hey, it's systems that deliver the experience, not people in terms of that consistency of experience. So yeah, man, we did that and loved it until the business got shaken by that speed of China and I just had to come back.

Yeah. So thanks for sharing. I remember reading once that, you know, culture is what happens when nobody's watching.

Right.

And I think you really infused that in there. And what was the structure like? You were in Bondi. Where was John at the time?

So John was doing half as well. He was moving himself down to Australia. His wife is Australian. And yeah, at about, I think 2015, John tapped out to head down under. So we kind of, yeah, we—

John's now running Alibaba for Australia and New Zealand. Is that right? Is he still in that role?

Yeah, he was. And then he moved across to AntCamp. Capital now is doing FX. So yeah, but still the same group.

Excellent. So still under the Alibaba umbrella. Excellent. So you guys were doing something where it was like 4 weeks away and then he'd come for 2 weeks and there'd be a 2-week gap. How did you actually, because you're still coming back and forth a bit, right?

So we were doing kind of tag team in country with probably me and the third John. And we'd try and get a crossover so we could have a bit of time on the ground, the business together, and the team could see us, you know. the founders together and take them out for drinks and dinners and all that kind of, you know, culture building stuff. But generally that was it. So we kind of, you know, a bit of ships in the night. But it was good because each time we're there, everybody brought their strength to it. I was, you know, John would bring his game, I'd bring mine. He didn't have to negotiate with your founder, your co-founder, you just get on and do what you wanted to do with the business. So that was definitely an upside of it. And yeah, a lot of companies only have one founder, so having 2 bits of energy coming in was good energy for the culture. And so I would then obviously take, you know, I was on, on WeChat pretty much 24/7 in New Zealand. We would do all of that same rhythm. Nothing changed. You know, daily huddles, I'd be on daily huddle from New Zealand every day. We'd do our weeklies, we'd do our monthlies, our quarterlies, go back to China for the quarterlies, you know, religiously, because that was a 2-day offsite retreat, as well as all the company kind of culture building, fun and games. So. No, we would keep the structure. And then obviously we had an awesome Chinese local team that had been with me, been with me since '98 and others since 2000. So, you know, we had 15 years together, you know, and it was just, they knew what I, my expectations and I knew their abilities and their strengths. So it worked well.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

And I think around 2015, that's when Beijing became more serious about the pollution. And in the last 6 years, every year it's gotten better and better, but of course it took a couple, 3 years until You can really, really feel it. I think 17, 18, 19, it became, you know, better. But I think all of our mutual friends and fellow entrepreneurs in Beijing would often talk about you behind your back in the most positive way. That son of a bitch did it. He's living the dream, right? He got out and like everybody was like, ah, like in this kind of weird codependent relationship. You know, I talk about it sometimes where it's like, everybody's like, you should divorce. Beijing and like, you should totally marry Singapore. Like your parents would love Singapore or even Hong Kong. Right. And you know, and I would say, but no, but, but Beijing, I love Beijing. And Beijing said that she was going to change and then, you know, horrible pollution and then bad traffic and then the weather and then something happens crazy. And you're like, you promised you were going to change. And then, then a couple of days later, blue sky. You're eating amazing food and like everything is just, you get some crazy opportunity. Then you have like angry makeup sex with Beijing. I love you.

I love you too.

Right.

And then the cycle continues. Right. But you were able to crack it. And like what happened was the pollution started to really decrease, but then this is one of the core tenets of this book is that things started to ramp up. Like there was already this speed in China. It was just starting from a very low base.

Yeah.

And it was just compounding, but it took a while. Most of the time in China that I spent there, 24 years or 20 in Beijing, I was just like, ah, you know, I love Beijing, but I'd go to Stockholm or Tokyo or New York and I'd be like, ah, this is the future. Like there's so much happening here and I can feel, you know, the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. And then I'd go back to China and it would be kind of lagging. And then I guess around that time, like 2013 to 2016, that's when it felt like it caught up. Like in some ways, like there was a lot of things that were, you know, the same as the West in some ways. And then in the last 5 years, it's just catapulted into the future. And I think for you, the way you had cracked your business, if you had done that, say, all right, I cracked New Zealand and now I'm going to go live in, say, Bali where I am, like probably, you know, without COVID or other things, the business probably would've continued to thrive and even grow. Right. But in China, Like the tectonic plates were shifting in real time, like that house, like that building in Harry Potter where the stairwells are moving. Right. So then things started changing dramatically and quickly in real estate, in delivery, in F&B, in all of these other areas. So then you needed to come back to China to kind of right the ship. Am I getting that right?

Absolutely. I mean, what we managed to do really well was maintain our standards when I was away, which really was the goal. You know, that was kind of the goal is can you keep the same standards with the founder not being there or the co-founders? And we did it. But what I failed to take account for was the amount of influence that the founders have on innovation. And whilst we were maintaining our standards, everybody else is just starting to just do laps, right? They were getting crazier and more technologically driven and more innovative. And unfortunately, the team that I had, their strengths were about consistency and reliability and all the things that we had focused on for so long. That innovation had always been taken for granted because I guess I didn't realize for the impact that we had on that. And I overlooked that. And so as the competitors started to catch us and then eventually passed us, and I'd go back each time and just start to see it and feel it. And I tried to engage the team to innovate. I realized it wasn't who they were. And I couldn't take that away from them because I had built this team that was about a great consistent experience. So that was when I had the tipping point and it's kind of epiphany at the time. It's like, you know what, if we're going to stay in this game, we need to innovate. And right now we don't have that capacity in the team at the level we need. And we couldn't afford to bring in, you know, big guns to kind of do that at the time. So we decided that, you know, the best route was for me to head back and just, you know, reinvigorate the innovation of the company. And that was the kicker. You know, along with the fact that we were now competing, you know, when we first kicked off and you remember, you know, Annie's and us were the 2 kind of big boys on the block with delivery in terms of artisanal product, or at least non-fast food product. And then, you know, when Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu came into the game with their delivery platforms and services, we went from having about 6 options in Beijing delivery that was reliable to around about 3,000 in about 6 months. You know, you can imagine. And I remember as their sales dropped, speaking to customers ringing up pretty frankly saying, hey, what's up? What are we doing wrong? You know, what can we do better? And they're like, Jay, you're doing nothing wrong. Like when I order pizza, I order Gung Ho. It's just that now I order Thai, I've got Indian, I do a bit of Sichuan. I'm like, pizza, I still order from you. Now we've got options. And it was when it hit me, it was like, wow, we're in trouble here. You know, like we can't compete against this in terms of that platform. So we ended up going to a restaurant model, a hybrid delivery restaurant model to try and bring a service element, play back to our strength of company culture and service, which was getting diluted pretty quick in the delivery space where it was all about price and speed.

Fascinating. Yeah. And I think also you're operating your own delivery service, right? Which you think of all these other players, they're like, you know what, I'm going to use a ghost kitchen. I mean, that's what Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, is focusing on now. Right. I think he was really inspired by China, which is Let's just set something up in the basement, maybe an old parking lot or maybe a commissary or a cafeteria. And, you know, I think you were telling me the cost to set up one of your locations versus a cost to get set up there. Did you remember the ratio?

The cost versus the West or—

I mean, like for instance, your location in Vidu or Sanlitun or wherever versus, you know, setting it up somewhere else. It was like the time to market and the cost was Fraction, right?

It was great. We ended up actually going with one of these cloud kitchens as part of our journey. And when we started, you know, the beauty of the delivery model is that, yeah, you don't need the A-grade real estate. So we were around about offering it on terms of coming in at about a third of what we'd pay at a good location for a sit-down. And when that's your biggest overhead, that was epic, you know? So, and we ended up getting down to, you know, as our ghost kitchen, we got down to a 15 square meter operation and, you know, banging out the kind of in excess of probably, you know, $150,000 to $200,000 a month in sales. Yeah. You do the profit per square meter. It was pretty cool. The challenge there is really around the whole model with the competition piece and the price. It had become a bit of a race to the bottom with pricing. And so whilst it was cool for the first year or two, because it was quite, as more people got into that space and worked out, you know, you're never undercut the locals in price and cost structure. And so they just basically, you know, we end up selling pizzas at about a third of the price that we would be willing to sell it for because of the quality ingredients we were using and the wages and the dormitories that we were providing our employees. So yeah, that was a tough learning as well. But I think that speed piece, Rich, I mean, I saw that cloud kitchen roll out across China because we were one of their earlier clients. At the one we went, an outfit called Panda Kitchens, which actually Travis bought out as part of his kind of bought it out. And what we saw was, yeah, I know Facebook has this, you know, one of the cultural things is done, not perfect, but shit, China takes that to a new level, man. They have this incredible ability and I mentioned it with the feedlot to strip out the core value out of any offering and everything else is just thrown to the heap. You know, like they just strip out the absolute MVP out of everything and that's the way they reduce their costs and they've got an incredible I think understanding that intuition about what the market wants, which foreigners will never have at that level, that sixth sense that, you know, so many entrepreneurs rely on. And I think that's the toughest thing about entrepreneurship in China. You don't have an intuition built in because you don't, we're built up in that culture. And so these guys have this intuition to know what the market really needs, not what they want, what they're willing to pay for, and how to strip things back to the basics costs to provide that need. So I saw that with their rollout and shit, the speed these guys, I mean, they're opening up these kitchens. I think it was up to about 3 a week. And this is a 2,000 square meter, probably 50 operators in Simon's kitchen. He's opening up at, you know, multiple ones a week. It was just mind-boggling, you know? And, but I know when I went to ask for service, you wouldn't get the service, but you'd get your power, you get your water, you'd get your fire permit. That was it, man. If you wanted any frills on top of that, like—

Figure it out.

Yeah.

You have to pull some crazy guanxi game, you know?

Fascinating. Wow.

Yeah.

When you're really on the front lines of something like that with lower margins and such peak red ocean competition, then yeah, you're seeing the flywheel or you're seeing just things just spin so much faster.

Yeah.

And I think you're right. Yeah. Just like stripping it down.

Yeah.

Keep going, please.

And with that speed thing, like that tech piece, I mean, I think what people— there's an oversight and a couple of key drivers I see which drive this and a really primal fundamental level. The first is that, you know, the majority of these companies are still run on a daily micromanaged way by the founders, right? And these are multi-billion dollar businesses, right? We're not talking startups, you know, Tencent and recently Alibaba and the like. And so they have this founder entrepreneurial mentality, even though they're a multinational multi-billion dollar organization, right? They're not into the 3rd, 6th planning of the CEO or You know, even an Apple with Tim Cook at the helm, this is the founder who still literally runs it like it's his first day at the office, you know, first day on the venture. So I think there's energy and a culture and a mindset, which you just can't emulate by culture books or trainings. You know, this is the beauty of having a core team that was there from day one. Secondly, I think this is for China, this whole technological leap, it's a state of national security importance. And this is not about business or speed of business, or this is a Communist Party that's realized that China got completely trodden on by the West because they missed the Industrial Revolution. And they closed off to the West. They thought they were superior potentially. And the barbarians developed, you know, this kind of steam technology and whatnot. And when the gunships came in and, and all the advancements in the industrial age, you could argue. Or early on with the Opium War, with all those elements of, of the technology that they'd mastered, China got left behind. Right. And they got left behind and their own ills obviously on top of that, to the point where basically 150 years, China was basically struggling to get back to its glory. I'm absolutely certain of this. You know, the Communist Party see the technology getting left behind was one of the key causes of that. And they've made it an absolute national importance to be world-leading and putting rovers on Mars because they are not gonna be left behind ever again.

Yeah.

And they realized the weakness of that. So this is not just some entrepreneurial game. This is a whole nation that's funded. I mean, we were up at Tsinghua together and walking around Wudoukou back in the day, looking at these kinds of science parks and, you know, PKUs to you. And yeah, there's massive funding going on behind the scenes, government money into these startups, which you never get anywhere else in the world because it's been identified as a national security. And look at Huawei as a good example. I mean, this is where it's heading.

Yeah.

So yeah, this is more than just, you know, entrepreneurs moving fast.

Absolutely right. Yeah. It starts, you know, from the core, it's multivariate, right? I mean, the government of course is, you know, Xi had his, you know, 100th anniversary speech yesterday. I'm dating this podcast. It'll come out much later, but, you know, he talked about science and technology, you know, dozens of times in his talk. Right. And I think for us, I mean, like we love, you know, Chinese culture and Chinese people and just the time that we have in China. And I think, you know, we're not shills for The Chinese government, right? I mean, like that's not the purpose of this podcast, right? I think the whole purpose of this podcast is for people to understand that even if you don't want to be in China, China speed is going to impact you because Chinese companies are aggressively expanding outside of China, right? And there's a lot to be learned from how things are done. Some of the takeaways and lessons and this sort of Sputnik moment that you know the U.S. had in the '60s where it's like wow the. Russia's going to space, like we better really invest in NASA and, you know, be more competitive. And I think that's what, you know, one of the core purposes of this book and podcast so people can really understand and also best compete and learn from what's actually happening in China, you know, for better or worse, right? Because not all the lessons of speed are ones that want to be emulated, right? There's pushback on this JoJo Leo, 9 AM, 9 PM, you know, 6 days a week work culture and Yeah, I mean, not every country can, you know, have the resources or the governmental will to be able to prioritize technology, but I think, you know, many, many countries can. And I think there needs to be more intentionality about that. Right. And so many lessons to be learned. So let's wrap up with a little bit about what you're working on now and how you've kind of distilled your China experience and learnings and entrepreneurial chops.

Yeah, I mean, I guess in summary, the venture I'm working on right now is a plant-based meat company. We're developing plant-based meats down here in New Zealand, very much with an eye on the Asian market. And in the last couple of years at GungHo, before we sold the business, we were developing a pretty substantial plant-based menu because we saw what was happening and we developed our own meats and cheeses. And we were up to about 30% of our products with vegan by the time we, of sales, by the time we left. That business. And so, you know, that's moving at an incredible rate in China as well. And, you know, Beyond Meat just opened up their massive plant in Tianjin, the world's largest plant-based meat operation behind border in China. You know, that's how they, how gung-ho they are on that market. So yeah, we've come down here and setting this up. We launch in about October. We've been working with New Zealand's top food tech university, Massey University, for the last 6 months. And we've just gone to production trials with the help of some government support to really develop the sector. Because you gotta remember, New Zealand is very much driven by meat and dairy. So this is a bit of a scary one for a lot of vested interests in New Zealand. And I'm just trying to bring them along for the ride and say, hey, this is not a threat. This is an opportunity.

It's a good hedge.

Yeah. Right. And that's where it's heading. So I think the China piece down here, it's been really fascinating. And I've come to realize actually just the pace that I probably now default operate at is probably a bit faster than a lot of my peers down here, just because, you know, I spent 20+ years forging my skills in that market. And just naturally come down. That's how you operate. So I've noticed it's given us a little bit of an edge in terms of speed to market and innovation. And you know, the guys I'm surrounding myself with are the same. And we just did our fundraise, which Rich, you were instrumental in helping me. And I'm happy to announce to you here, we closed our fundraise within 3 hours of launching it. So we got oversubscribed in 3 hours. I put the email out at 3:20 AM and we oversubscribed at 6:30 AM. So it's awesome, man.

That's definitely not the norm. So yeah, that speaks a lot about you.

Well, it speaks a lot about the space and I think the timing and the people we had warmed up on the bench to go, who we knew we wanted to move fast. So we've got investors behind us that don't muck around either. So yeah, it's cool. So we kind of, one of our cultural traits is China speed. That's how we refer to our speed of innovation. We call it actually China speed. And it's, you know, we've got no investors who are Chinese, got no employees who are Chinese. It's just, we know that that's the speed that we need to operate globally. And I think that there's another great analogy that we use.

That's going in the book. Now you're in another book.

Totally, totally. But there was a great, something we're proud of in New Zealand, which is the America's Cup. And if you guys have ever watched America's Cup boats and how fast these things move, and something New Zealand's very proud of was how we managed to beat Oracle and Larry Ellison and all his amazing tech and know-how. Deep Pockets with some really good innovation. And there was a great quote from the founder of that, the syndicate chairman of that New Zealand campaign that beat Oracle. And that was, you know, there's this great thing that if the boat's not shaking, we're not moving fast enough. And the whole analogy was that a lot of these campaigns are trying to get the boat to feel good. Like, hey, it's got to feel stable and good. And it's designed perfectly. And they're saying, nah, we want this thing to be shaking around and like scary as shit. Like it's about to flip over because if it's not doing that, we're not going fast enough, you know? And that's the place we need to live in. And I think it's that whole culture that we learned in China that one thing I always learned was it's not about feeling comfortable. It's about feeling comfortable being uncomfortable. And you gotta be zen in a state of things being completely chaos and uncomfortable and awkward and all those anxieties that we live in on a constant state in China. Because when things are moving fast, you've gotta be okay with that sense. And so we've already built into the culture where we've gotta feel comfortable feeling uncomfortable. And when you can build that culture, then when the boat starts shaking, you love it. It's like, woo. Yeah, this is what it should feel like. You know?

Excellent. Yeah. I think actually, you know, you probably, if you're feeling comfortable, then you're not just like feeling comfortable being uncomfortable. You're feeling uncomfortable being comfortable because then you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. I have to seek out discomfort. And I think that's the challenge that, you know, everybody faces is, okay, we are all gonna go back to just this sort of center point where it's like, okay, now this is easy. This is comfortable. Well, we found it. Let's lean into this. And it's like, nope. You have to just like working out at the gym, right? You know, how was your workout? Oh, it was great. My heart rate was flask. Didn't breathe heavy, no sweating. And it's like, it's not a workout, right? But, but it's really difficult to do.

We don't always do it. And I think that the way you do it is you've got to celebrate the wins. You know, you've got to have a culture where when you have been pushing it hard and you've been shaking, you've achieved the goal. You've got to be able to stand back and say, guys, let's just take time out. Let's celebrate. Let's go to the beach. Let's relax. Let's be comfortable and watch videos for a week and just chill out and remember what it feels like. You've got to balance it. And once you start saying, okay, we're resting on our laurels for a day or a week or whatever it is. Okay. Let's get back to feeling uncomfortable.

Love it.

That's great.

Excellent. Wow. Congratulations. Tell everybody the name of your company.

So the company's Plant Tech Nation. So they can find out from the time this goes to launch, we would've launched the brand, which is Off-Piste Provisions. So we plan to go off-piste, which is a ski term for going on uncharted snow and slopes where nobody's been before. So that's how we plan to operate.

Fantastic. Love it. Jay Gray, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, my friend. For sharing your journey. Beautiful.

Yeah. You're one of your own, Rich. And I'm just glad the world gets to hear you on this podcast and throw in your wisdoms because yeah, man, we used to always talk about Rich Rob caught me in the street the other day for 10 minutes. He had this new idea and he blasted me with it. And I've been thinking about it for weeks and you know what? He's onto something, you know? So you're the man for ideas, dude. And you've found your channel and your show, and I can't wait to tune into the Rich Rob Show.

That's kind of you to say. I don't want to brag, but the other day, 2 people were talking about me and one of them said that I'm not as stupid as I look. And the other one, it gets better. The other one said, I don't even think that's possible. So I was like, wow, that's good. Right? I went with good. Jay Gray, everybody. Thanks, buddy. All the best to you.

That was awesome, buddy. All right, buddy. Catch you, man.

That's a wrap. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Rich Robinson Show, season one at the speed of China. Visit therichrobinson.com/show to smash that subscribe button. Please also go to iTunes or whatever platform of choice, rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much. Zaijian. See ya.