Chapter 11 Business Tao 10 Information is money

The essence of business: We are in an era of information explosion. Information is the greatest wealth in this era. Having information is equal to having wealth.Sometimes, even a sentence, a piece of news, or an insignificant matter hides a huge business opportunity.Careful Wenshang seems to have understood the relationship between information and opportunity, and has long begun to use information to make money. There is an exaggerated description that Wen merchants can smell where there are opportunities to make money as long as they stop on the street and smell it with their noses. Li Feng, a businessman from Wenzhou, lost his mother when he was young, and his family was poor. He dropped out of school and started a small business with his father before he graduated from elementary school.

In 1987, when Li Feng was 15 years old, a piece of news caught his attention: a farmer in Quanzhou, Fujian Province made a fortune from ornamental fish.Ornamental fish occupy less land, require little investment, and are sold at a high price. As long as you master the breeding technology, you can make a lot of money, but if you want to learn this technology, you need 1,500 yuan.Li Feng was moved. In order to save money, he decided to study at Fuzhou Agricultural College. Wenzhou and Fuzhou are located in the southeast of the same place, not far from each other, but their dialects are very different.Li Feng overcame all kinds of difficulties and learned the farming techniques.After returning to Wenzhou, in 1992, catching up with the national government department to recruit technical personnel from farmers to support Somalia, he founded Heber Farm.Li Feng applied for the job with the purpose of starting a business as a young man and looking for ways to earn money and become rich.At that time, with the cooperation of the Somali government, Li Feng made his own contribution as a breeding technician, and the farm breeding achieved remarkable results.The farm not only has more than 200 hectares of fertile land with good harvests year after year, thousands of cattle and sheep grow well, and freshwater fish farming is also relatively smooth, all of which are unprecedented in Somalia.

In 1994, Li Feng went to South Africa to work in a factory owned by a Zhejiang native in Debano Port and began to learn English.Li Feng's goal is to go to Fabodel to start a business.Half a year later, he observed that there was a leather factory between Fabodel and Namis, but no shoe factory.So he hired five people, got wood from the surrounding area to process into shoe soles, and then bought leather to process clogs.Summer in South Africa is very hot. These clogs are very similar to Japanese clogs. They are very cool to wear. In addition, the production process is simple and the production cost is low. If the quality can be ensured and the price is good, it will naturally be very popular among customers.It is a pity that Li Feng is both a boss and a worker, and it is very hard work.The shoemakers he hired were local blacks, who were lazy and impatient without special training, so the slippers they produced were poor and sold poorly.After struggling for four months, they lost several thousand yuan and had to close down the factory.

After the factory closed, Li Feng, not willing to admit defeat, began to buy small commodities from Wenzhou, especially simple toys and small decorations, and waited to sell them in South Africa.There is still a large gap in South Africa's small commodity market, and these goods from China are cheap and good, and are very popular among South Africans.But the profit of small commodities is not too big. After deducting the cost of shipping, the profit is not much, so it can only be regarded as a small business. One time when he was visiting relatives in China, he chatted with a friend, and the attentive Li Feng learned of this information: there is a unique variety called triticale in China, and its output and value are more than 10 times that of the general variety of wheat.Li Feng learned that triticale has started to be promoted in China, but there is still a blank in South Africa.The land price in South Africa is not high, and it is also cheap to buy rye seeds from China, with low cost and high output, which made Li Feng see the prospect of this project.So he immediately returned to South Africa and started to set up an agricultural technology company, renting land in South Africa to cultivate triticale seeds for sale.The company leased 100 mu of land at a relatively low rent for a period of 10 years.At that time, Li Feng's funds were far from enough. He tried his best to negotiate and negotiate with the other party, and the other party finally agreed to let him pay the rent for four years first, and the rest in installments.Even so, the funds were in a hurry. After buying the fertilizer, there was only 5 yuan left in the company's books.

Recalling the difficulties of starting a business, Li Feng once said: "If it wasn't for being competitive at the time, I really couldn't do it anymore." Suffering is directly proportional to the brilliance created, this sentence was finally verified by Li Feng.The maturity of triticale ushered in a new stage for Li Feng: the wheat seeds quickly occupied the South African market, and the company's profits also increased, and Li Feng quickly accumulated millions of dollars. In fact, business opportunities are everywhere. As long as you can observe carefully and pay attention to every small detail in your life, you can catch any opportunity to make money like Li Feng.

Liu Wenhan, who is known as the "father of the wig industry" in Hong Kong, seized the opportunity by saying a word at the dinner table. In 1958, Liu Wenhan, a small businessman who was not satisfied with auto parts business, traveled to the United States to investigate business.One day, he went to a restaurant in Cleveland to have lunch with two Americans. While the Americans were eating, they chatted about business. One of the Americans said a sentence with only two words: "wig." Liu Wenhan rolled his eyes. Liang blurted out and asked: "Wig?" The American businessman said again: "Wig!" Then he took out a long black wig and said that he wanted to buy 13 wigs of different colors.

Such conversations at the dinner table were nothing more than ordinary conversations in shopping malls at the time. A sentence with only two words had no special meaning or value, but the speaker had no intention and the listener meant it.With his quick mind, Liu Wenhan quickly made a judgment: the wig can make a big fuss.This lunch unexpectedly became the starting point of Liu Wenhan's fortune. After some painstaking investigation, he discovered that a wig-wearing craze is rising in the United States, and Liu Wenhan has shown a very broad market.As soon as he returned to Hong Kong, he began to investigate the source of raw materials for making wigs without stopping.He found that the human hair (real hair) imported into Hong Kong from India and Indonesia is made into various hairstyles (wigs), and the cost is quite low. The most expensive one is no more than 100 Hong Kong dollars each, while the price is as high as 500 Hong Kong dollars .Liu Wenhan was overjoyed, and immediately made a decision: set up a factory in Hong Kong to manufacture wigs for sale.

But where to find experts in making wigs?Liu Wenhan fell into distress and anxiety again.One day, a friend came to visit and talked about a master who made wigs and beards for Cantonese opera actors.When Liu Wenhan heard it, he was overjoyed, so he immediately went to visit the master.However, it takes this expert three months to make a wig, so how can he do business like this?what to do?Liu Wenhan's thinking didn't stop there, he quickly connected the manual operation with the machine operation in his mind, and finally came up with a solution.Invited this unique wig "expert" and recruited a group of female workers. Liu Wenhan, who is proficient in mechanics, modified several machines and taught the workers how to operate them. The world's first wig factory was built in this way.

Wigs of various colors were mass-produced, and the news spread like wildfire. Thousands of orders came in like snowflakes, and the money in Liu Wenhan’s pockets also increased day by day. Elected as the chairman of the Hong Kong Wig Manufacturers Association.Careful Liu Wenhan heard the way to make money from other people's lives. This is not turning stone into gold, but opening a treasure house of wealth for him.Therefore, the speaker has no intention, but the listener must have heart. Coincidentally, Li Hui also found a chance to make a fortune from someone else's words. After Li Hui retired from the army, he was assigned to a state-owned enterprise as a middle-level cadre. The enterprise restructuring made him lose his "iron job" overnight.In order to make a living, he began to travel far and wide looking for business opportunities.In the past two years, he has grown Chinese herbal medicines, sold health care products, and managed construction materials. In the end, not only did he not earn a penny, but he also lost all his savings from working for more than ten years.The most exasperating thing is that his mobile phone worth more than 3,000 yuan was stolen on the train to the Northeast. It happened that his wife was looking for him urgently at that time, and she became suspicious of him because Li Hui didn't answer the phone. The son got into a divorce.

Not long after, a friend of Li Hui had the same experience.The friend threw the empty mobile phone case on the ground, and sighed at it, "If only you had reminded me!" set".He bought 500 at once, and they were sold out soon after returning home. This time he made a net profit of more than 5,000 yuan. Li Hui realizes that modern people are inseparable from mobile phones all the time, and it seems that there are huge business opportunities in practical products related to mobile phones.At this time, he saw in the newspapers that there were merchants in Shenzhen, Guangdong, Hefei, Anhui and other places distributing "Mobile Companion".After on-the-spot investigation, Li Hui found that although merchants in Shenzhen do not charge franchise fees, their supply prices are equivalent to the retail prices stipulated by Hefei companies. The monopoly right in the county, and the product quality and service quality of the Hefei company are better than those in Shenzhen.

After comparative analysis, Li Hui quickly called the company in Hefei that distributes "Mobile Companion".During the phone call, he learned that this company not only has high-end anti-theft covers for mobile phones, but also "dual mobile phone SIM cards" that can freely switch numbers, "mobile phone invisibility bags" that can make mobile phones invisible, and "mobile phone security bags" that can prevent mobile phone numbers from being lost. Number backup device" and "free charger" that can charge various mobile phones at will.At the same time, as long as the company signs the agency right of "Mobile Treasure", the company will give away the monopoly right of the PHS signal booster for free.These kinds of products are very useful for mobile phone and PHS users. Li Hui immediately remitted 2,700 yuan for the franchise fee, and signed a monopoly right in a county under Anqing City. Five days later, Li Hui received a large box of product samples and various promotional materials from the company.He non-stop distributed these items to every mobile phone store and mobile Unicom agency in the urban area, and promised to pay a corresponding referral fee for each product he sold, encouraging them to promote products for himself.These include: three types of random chargers; a convenient and money-saving dual card; a backup device for mobile phone numbers; the stealth bag of the mobile phone is even more unique. Put the mobile phone in the bag and immediately enter the "invisible state". "The number you dialed is temporarily unavailable" instead of the impolite voice of "the user you dialed has turned off the phone", thus achieving the effect of civilized do not disturb, especially suitable for occasions where it is inconvenient to turn on or turn off the phone. Because these products are distinctive, economical and practical, some mobile phone dealers also put these products in "big gift packages" as promotional items or bundled sales of new mobile phones.Orders came in like a snowflake, and the exhibits presented by the company to Li Hui were sold out, and he quickly sent money to the supply company to purchase the second batch of goods. What excited Li Hui the most was that these small products were also favored by many group units, and he signed two big orders one after another.Wherever there are mobile phones, there is a market for "mobile phone treasure". Li Hui became more and more motivated. He signed the monopoly rights in five cities around Hefei and Anqing at once, and hired more than a dozen experienced salesmen to help promote sales.Only three months after signing the contract, Li Hui earned more than 400,000 yuan purely by promoting "Mobile Treasure". If Li Hui hadn't been a careful person who is good at paying attention to small information in life, then he would not have earned such a large amount of money easily. We are in an era of information explosion, and information is the greatest wealth in this era, and having information is equal to having wealth.Sometimes, even a sentence, a piece of news, or an insignificant matter hides a huge business opportunity.Careful Wenshang seems to have understood the relationship between information and opportunity, and has long begun to use information to make money.