Delay No Mall is Delayed No More!

"What a difference a day made, 24 little hours...," sings Dinah Washington as I sit here tapping away on my keyboard. This is the song, I would like to dedicate to the G.O.D. team that transformed Delay No Mall in 24 little hours. After lunch yesterday, BL walked AW and I through what seemed like a war zone -- racks were empty, contractors were still finishing up construction work everywhere, unopened cartons of stock were stacked up in every direction:



By noon today, Delay No Mall soft opened for business. It's still not yet entirely open, but what's up-and-running is looking like a very attractive teaser of what's to come:





For the non-Cantonese speakers reading this blog, here's a little Canto lesson: Delay No More, on which Delay No Mall is based, is the transliteration of a very rude phrase having to do with someone's mother. Canto lesson no. 2: Never greet a Canto-speaker, especially a woman, with "Ciao!" and "Hi!" used in sequence, no matter how cosmopolitan you think you might sound.

Delay No Mall
68 Yee Wo Street
(across the street from JIA Hotel)
Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
T: +852 2577 6988

5-Day Dash between Hong Kong, Singapore, Shuzenji, Nasu & Tokyo

I arrived in Singapore Friday afternoon for what I had expected to be a leisurely weekend hanging out, eating and drinking with friends. Just as I was getting ready to head to Chubby Hubby and his S's Bhutan-inspired dinner, I got a call from M, a client in Tokyo. First of all, M never calls. Either his assistant emails or P calls. So as soon as I heard I heard M start with, "I was wondering if you could do me a favour...", I knew that saying "No" wasn't really going to be an option.

The favour, it turned out, was to check out two venues outside Tokyo on Monday so that the venue for a May 2008 event could be confirmed by the end of Tuesday (spaces in ryokans go fairly early). It would not have been a problem, except I had to be back in Hong Kong to host an event Tuesday evening, which meant that I really only had all of Monday to visit the properties, which were both 2 hours from Tokyo, in opposite directions. Assuming that train schedules and appointments worked out, I would have to arrive Sunday night in Tokyo, which meant cancelling my early morning pilates session with Ole and bailing out of a Sunday poolside brunch that RB had so graciously organized for me. For much of Friday evening, I was on the phone with MM and KM in Tokyo trying to figure out whether it was actually logistically feasible to visit both Asaba in Izu and Niki Club in Nasu in one day. Once we figured out that it was, I had the near impossible task of getting on a flight out of Singapore. In the end, I managed to get the last business class seat on an 8am flight from Singapore back to Hong Kong to connect with an afternoon flight to Tokyo. I barely had enough transit time to head back into town to swap my summer clothes for some warmer clothes, which BL, being the life-saver that he always is, managed to scramble together for me. My schedule on Monday looked like this:

9.06 Tokyo - 9.49 Mishima
10.04 Mishima - 10.36 Shuzenji (local train)
5-minute car ride
10.45 Appointment w/Asaba at for one hour
5-minute car ride
11.56 Shuzenji - 12.31 Mishima (local train)
12.57 Mishima - 13.56 Tokyo
14.20 Tokyo - 15.35 Nasu Shiobara
30-minute car ride
16.00 Appointment w/Niki Club at for one hour
30-minute car ride
17.28 Nasu Shiobara - 18.44 Tokyo

Not so bad, really. I noticed that I would get back to Tokyo in time for dinner so I dropped SM a line via facebook to see if she if she was free.

Here are a few highlights from the 5-day trip that involved 16 hours on planes, 9 hours on trains and 2 hours in automobiles:

1. Chubby Hubby & his S's mac-n-cheese made with Bhutanese Gruyere & Emmanthal cheeses (OK, the cheeses aren't exactly Bhutanese, but they were made by a Swiss cheesemaker living in Bhutan). They had just gotten back from 10 days in Bhutan the day before and had tried to manage my expectations by telling me it would be a very "simple" dinner. But I always believe that it's in the simple dishes that true talent reveals itself. And their mac-n-cheese certainly did not disappoint! Nor did their expertly-roasted, super-succulent castrated chickens.


2. Losing myself in Joshua Yang's continuous line drawings and paintings, which have a meditative quality about them while being a meditation on time and memory. A selection of his works will be on exhibit at Marina Mandarin Hotel in Singapore (Level 5) from 11 December 2007 to 31 January 2008.

3. Going for a spontaneous, but oh-so-therapeutic, hair wash at local institution Salon 916 (916 East Coast Road) with A&D. Not for the faint of heart!

4. Shopping for Christmas goodies at Jones the Grocer. Cafe service was appallingly non-existent though; JL never got his cheese platter!


5. Admiring the gorgeous setting of Asaba's Noh stage while sipping a soothing bowl of green tea.


6. Witnessing a queue form outside Krispy Kreme at 6:15am, when the store doesn't actually open until 7am!

To all the budding entrepreneurs out there...

Was listening to Wyclef Jean's new album, Carnival, Vol. II: Memoirs of an Immigrant, on the treadmill this morning and got a great start with this seize-the-day song:
Heaven's in New York


Great business ideas are actually a dime a dozen out there. There never really is a monopoly on a great idea. Reading through 33 business plans, I actually came across a recurring idea (renting out luxury brand goods) with slightly different iterations. It's always easy to spot the opportunity, but too often people talk themselves out of the venture before even trying.

So to all the budding entrepreneurs out there, take a line from Wyclef: "Live life to the fullest, be what I wanna be. ... If doves can fly, so can I."

Young Entrepreneurs

Lounging on a lush, red sofa in the spacious quarters of a Wynn Macau suite two weekends ago, I read through a pile of business plan submissions for HSBC's Young Entrepreneurs Award (This year's competition, open to university students throughout the region, attracted 300+ submissions from Hong Kong's university students alone). It was an inspiring location to be reading ideas for new businesses, because I'm an admirer of casino developer Steve Wynn's entrepreneurial vision. Regardless of what one might think about the morality of the gaming industry, Wynn has played a large role in transforming the image of Las Vegas, from vice city to playground to the mass affluent. Wynn's properties, from Mirage to Bellagio and now Wynn, has pretty much been about evolving American gaming (casinos across the Atlantic have a much more glam history) into a luxury leisure pursuit. It was a reminder that being a successful entrepreneur is not always about coming up with something totally new; it's more about having a vision and the tenacity to see it through.

It's always lots of fun to hear about other people's business ideas, especially when it's being told with boundless enthusiasm. Of the 33 submissions I read through, they ran the spectrum of silly to eyebrow-raising. The judging process is all rather subjective. And I would be the first to tell anyone whose submission did not get through the 10-member advisory committee's screening, which would be more than 250 teams, that a rejection is no true indication of whether the business idea will eventually succeed or fail. There are many great business ideas that will never see the light of day. As there are many not-so-great-on-paper business ideas that eventually succeed over time because of the entrepreneur's persistance.

When the committee met to decide which 50 ideas would make it to the next round of judging, we had interesting discussions about whether an idea would work or not and whether an idea was innovative or not. Interesting in the sense that it revealed more about each committee member's own individual background and biases. For the teams, it's a bit luck-of-the-draw. We were randomly assigned our lot of submissions. Being in the travel industry, I found my interest piquing whenever I came across a travel-related idea, which also meant I might have been a bit harsher on the travel ideas than ideas in other sectors where I have less first-hand knowledge and experience.

Coincidentally, as I was writing this post, the judges' feedback for the 2007 Oxford University 21st Century Challenge Competition, to which two friends and I had submitted a plan, landed in my email inbox. We didn't make it to the final rounds (3 finalists were selected for our particular track and in the end Saïd Business School alumnus David Maren's Email Emblems team was the winner of the Tomorrow's Wealth track with their idea to support charitable causes through emails people send.), but I found the judges comments and suggestions very encouraging and helpful.

I wish each of the 300+ teams that made a submission to HSBC's Young Entrepreneurs Award could have the opportunity to have a 15-minute discussion with the advisory committee, because it's really through bouncing ideas off as many people as possible and getting as many differing viewpoints as possible that helps to polish and refine ideas to the point where they start to sparkle with life. Just by putting idea to paper, though, these teams have already taken the first step towards entrepreneurship. The rest is about faith, passion and perseverance.