Steaming into the third week

Last week has been pretty busy both in signing up new speakers and in getting the real business done. We are only in our third operational week, and a lot of work still has to be done.

On the speakers' side, I'm happy that we can work with two really top speakers: Fan Gang and Wang Jianmao. As you see, I still have to refer to external sources, since our own profiles are not yet online, but I will let you know here when they are there.

We will represent professor Fan exclusively in Greater China, but we will also be able to help event organizers outside China to get professor Fan as a speaker.

Professor Wang, associate dean of China's most successful business school CEIBS, is another eminent speaker, but unfortunately because of his busy teaching schedule, only available for speaking opportunities in Shanghai.

We got a pretty nice reception from the major PR-firms in China and they have promised to add our information into the package their account managers will offer to clients who have an interest in China or are visiting China. A service like Chinabiz Speakers can save them potentially a lot of work and help them to identify great speakers in a relatively simple way.

The real deal making, we have sent out five offers in the past ten days, one for an international conference in Europe, is still going through our own contacts. We do expect a lead time of one to two month before we can see the first inquiries coming through these third parties.

Meanwhile, we lost some opportunities too, although opportunities might not be the right word. In one case a US conference organizer offered a free economy flight to one of our top-speakers. That would easily take three full days out off his busy life without any compensation. We are very happy to lose this kind of opportunities.