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It has definitely been a long time since I’ve blogged, and what better way to start than now, to help us get rolling into the New Year. Hopefully, I’ll be more consistent with my blogging next year. My plans are to blog at least once a week, most likely on Mondays. If I can’t put out the time to give SLR readers something to read about, how can I expect to make SLR successful? What a year ’07 has been. We’ve all seen or have even been a victim of all the tumultuous events this year, from the gambling ban to the “oh-not-again” scams to the failure of multiple ‘companies’. However, if there is anything positive to be taken from ’07, it is that this was the year SL cleansed itself and the year the financial sector was officially born. Hopefully, we have all seen the trough. The question now is how high is the peak?
Looking back to this year, I would be lying if I told you that we expected to be where we are right now when we first started. However, that doesn’t mean that we did not have our fair share of failures. Most may not know, but we did have our hands in the gambling and casino business, adult business, and even the real estate business. In the end, I just realized that we did not have any value proposition or strategic advantage that would differentiate our gambling and adult business from our competitors, so it was better to just scratch those ideas. As for real estate, I believe our idea is still a good idea, but SL is just not ready for it yet, and it was better to just take the loss and end the business to possibly start it up later, then to try to wait for SL to catch up. However, if we had to pinpoint our success on one thing, I would say it was not so much in our ability to do business or to produce a profit, but it was our Customer Service and the People we surrounded ourselves with. Most people who come to me looking for a job or an opportunity to move up always tell me about their financial skills and employment background. Unfortunately, that does not ‘WOW!’ me. When Reina Ferraris came to me and submitted a notecard, I hired her on the spot. No, she did not tell me of her abilities. Rather, she pointed out what was wrong with JTF, particularly that our customer service level was not as good as I thought it was. Many fail to realize this, but in what is considered a ‘social platform’, your success is not what your people can produce for you, but it is in what your people can do for your customers. If your people can take care of your customers, your customers will in turn take care of you – it’s that simple, but it is amplified even more in social platforms. Anyone can learn the financial and accounting skills, but not everyone has what it takes to treat people right. And when you find those people, make sure you hold onto them. An old but ‘cool’ wise man once told me to ‘hire up’, and to surround yourself with people that are better than you. So I listened to that old man and hired him – in comes Mr. Bogart Beck and HIS desire to TYPE LIKE THIS so that he can MAKE YOUR eyes STRAIN and GET OLD like his. The one thing I’m not afraid to admit is that Bo has taught me a lot more about running my businesses than I would have learned on my own. I’m not afraid to ask him questions, nor do I ever feel that I know more than him, and I especially hate it when he calls me ‘Boss’ because I am in no position to be his boss, neither in experience nor knowledge. If you want your business to be successful, you should take Bo’s advice as well. Learn to talk less and listen more, humble yourself and surround yourself with people that are better than you, because they will help drag you UP to where they are. Otherwise, you’ll just surround yourselves with people that will drag you DOWN to where they are. That’s basically a cliff note of ’07. Looking forward to ’08, I do see a lot of potential ahead. Our key strategy for ’08 is synergy. However, I do need to be careful that we remain focus, and not try to be everything for everyone. I’ve already hinted this a few times, but we’ll most likely be rebranding JT Financial in ’08 to SLWallet.com. Yes, we may lose the name and brand that we’ve worked hard to build up, but SLWallet does a better job of conveying what we’re about, and will help us more when we branch out to RL businesses. Our ultimate goal isn’t to be a bank inside SL, but to be a financial backend for linking SL businesses to RL, and we need to rebrand ourselves to be able to convey that message. Some ventures that we do see a lot of potential in are our Property Management system and SLMarketLive. While SLML is live right now, we have not been managing it and have decided to change our business strategy, with the changes coming next year. If we can get both the PM and SLML going the way we want, we expect this year to be a VERY PROFITABLE year, and the year RL businesses finally see how things are suppose to be done. Well, that’s it folks. I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! PS: If I were a real life investor, I’d invest heavy in oil in the short run, and solar in the VERY LONG run. The world is getting populated and more advance faster than ever, and our demand for energy will only go up. While there are many alternative plays, none of them will come fast enough to alleviate the demand for oil. Plus, it seems like almost everything we have demands on oil one way or another. As for solar, if we’re to save mankind from himself, we’ll need to learn how to get off this planet before we kill each other off, and the only ‘immediate’ energy out there is solar energy, excluding antimatter and dark matter that is (No - this isn't science fiction... it's real people). I did say VERY LONG run. As for countries to invest in, don't look at the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) anymore. They're the playgrounds for the deep pocket people. I would recommend looking at my home country - Vietnam. China's demand for labor will only increase manufacturing/production costs, so they'll eventually move some of their manufacturing to another country with low labor costs. Vietnam is the next best alternative because the cost of labor is low, and it's a country full of port cities. And we know what port cities did for colonial America.
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