Chapter 86: The New Company Takes Shape
Xiao Liang had spotted Xu Jianqiang the moment he came downstairs, but he hadn’t had time to greet him.
“You go handle your guest first,” Yuan Wenhai said, waving at Xu Jianqiang in greeting. He told Xiao Liang to go over while he took the others back to the station for processing.
Xiao Liang sent Xu Lihuan, Fei Wenwei, Wu Qiyan, and the others back upstairs first, then walked over to Xu Jianqiang with a smile.
“What kind of wind blew President Xu all the way to our little Yunshe today?”
Xu Jianqiang didn’t know what Zhang Feili’s relationship was to Xiao Liang and the others. Assuming he had merely stumbled upon a local spectacle, he tucked his hands into his pockets and smiled.
“I had nothing to do this afternoon and was planning to climb Suyun Mountain. Just before heading up, I remembered you were in Yunshe, so I thought I’d stop by. Didn’t expect to actually run into you. I hear you’ve been making big moves lately. Aren’t you going to invite me up?”
Aside from that night over tea in Shishan County, Xiao Liang and Xu Jianqiang hadn’t been in contact. He hadn’t expected Xu to still be keeping tabs on things here.
“Come on up. I was thinking of inviting you over one day to give us some guidance anyway.”
Xiao Liang led Xu Jianqiang and his secretary toward the west side of the cultural center building.
The open space by the river had once been overgrown with weeds, and the cultural center had never cared to manage it. Now it had been cleared and tidied. Camphor trees, bay laurels, roses, and Chinese roses had been planted in the corners. It hadn’t cost much, but the place had gained a quiet, unexpected charm.
The exterior of the west stairwell had been modestly renovated. A new copper door had been installed, granite steps laid, and a path of blue bricks connected it to the small square to the south. Beside the stairwell door, a deliberately aged plaque in clerical script read: **Suyun Biotechnology Co., Ltd.**
The west stairwell had originally been designed as a fire escape, leaving little room for major renovation. Aside from a fresh coat of paint, the walls on both sides were now covered with promotional posters for **Naojianling**.
Before coming, Xu Jianqiang had mostly been curious about what Xiao Liang was planning. After all, the new company had hired fifty or sixty salespeople within a single month and still showed no sign of stopping.
Now, standing in the stairwell and reading the posters, he began to form a guess. Confused, he turned to Xiao Liang.
“Are you planning to distribute health supplements, or make your own?”
“We’re making our own. The production line at the juice factory has already finished trial adjustments,” Xiao Liang admitted frankly. At this point, there was nothing left to hide.
“Why health supplements?” Xu Jianqiang asked, even more puzzled.
Nanting Lake Juice Factory was limited by scale and by Dongzhou’s supply of fresh fruit. It would be difficult to grow the juice business very large. Xu Jianqiang had already guessed that Xiao Liang hadn’t set up a company and recruited a sales team of this size just to sell the factory’s fruit juice.
Still, he hadn’t expected the company’s real product to be a health supplement.
Since the first wildly popular supplement appeared in 1986, the health supplement market had charged into public view in an almost savage fashion. It had been developing at high speed for eight years.
At present, roughly a thousand supplement products were competing in a market worth around ten billion yuan.
In Jiang Province alone, Xu Jianqiang knew there were already one or two hundred supplement manufacturers. Dongzhou itself likely had a dozen or two, though none had made much of a splash.
Before resigning from his public post in early 1992, Xu Jianqiang had also considered whether to enter the low-barrier health supplement industry.
Advertisements for all kinds of supplements now flooded the major media. Xu Jianqiang was not only familiar with the industry; because of his family background, he also knew certain things ordinary people did not. For instance, some people in higher circles were already deeply dissatisfied with the exaggerated, even fraudulent, claims rampant in supplement advertising.
That was why he found Xiao Liang’s first real product choice so strange.
The market looked large, but precisely because the threshold was so low, it was crowded with uneven players, many of whom only wanted to make a quick fortune and run. Apart from brutal competition, the industry carried unpredictable policy risks.
Had Xiao Liang not seen that?
Or had Xu overestimated him?
“I founded Suyun Technology with great difficulty and scraped together only seven hundred thousand yuan. The only production resource I can currently connect with is Nanting Lake Juice Factory,” Xiao Liang said helplessly, spreading his hands. “What better choice do I have?”
Since Xu Jianqiang had personally brought his secretary here on only their second meeting, Xiao Liang no longer played coy.
He invited Xu Jianqiang and his secretary into the office. Besides telling him about the July campaign in Xijiang, he also explained the process of building the new company in August.
Throughout August, apart from taking over the market promotion and sales of Nanting Lake Juice in Xijiang and Dongzhou, almost all of Xiao Liang’s energy had gone into building the framework of Suyun Biotechnology, hiring people, training them, and getting them used to the work.
During this period, the juice factory’s original inventory of one hundred thousand cases had already been completely sold. The initial inventory sales contract was now fulfilled, and the factory had recovered four million yuan in sales revenue.
After deducting early market promotion and sales costs, as well as the sales bonuses for Xu Lihuan, Wu Qiyan, Zhang Feili, and the others, Xiao Liang invested the more than seven hundred thousand yuan he personally earned into building, staffing, and operating the new company.
Meanwhile, aside from the four million yuan in recovered sales revenue, the juice factory had also recovered more than three million yuan in misappropriated funds handed over by Xiao Yujun and the others in August.
With relatively ample working capital, the factory not only repaid part of what it owed fruit growers, ensuring the new season’s fresh fruit purchases could continue, but also reorganized the production department on the basis of the old production section. Six production engineers and technicians from the municipal pharmaceutical factory, including Chen Zhu, were hired to strengthen management and technical capacity.
Before mid-August, the juice factory had immediately purchased concentrated juice pulp and restarted the first workshop’s bottling line, ensuring continued supply to the Xijiang and Dongzhou markets. It had also purchased additional equipment and completed trial production of the oligosaccharide-based health supplement.
Once the formula was finalized, there was nothing particularly complicated about producing an oligosaccharide supplement. Apart from the higher requirements for purification, the rest was no more complex than bottling juice.
At present, Gu Peijun was leading Xiao Xiao, Chen Zhu, and the others in trial production and process adjustments for the supplement.
Xiao Liang had recruited He Xueqing to work with Xu Lihuan, Wu Qiyan, and the others on building the new company, including recruitment, training, trademark registration for **Naojianling**, packaging design, qualification approvals, and certification. Everything was proceeding in an orderly fashion.
After mid-August, Xiao Liang further split Suyun Biotechnology’s fast-growing sales team of more than sixty people in Dongzhou and Xijiang into two major groups.
Zhang Ming and Zhao Xudong each led a sales group to form Suyun Biotechnology’s First Marketing Department, which would continue handling market promotion and sales of Nanting Lake Juice in Xijiang and Dongzhou.
The core salespeople, after completing preliminary training and adjustment, were all pulled out and placed under Xu Lihuan and He Xueqing in the newly formed Second Marketing Department, devoting all their efforts to preparing the early market launch of the oligosaccharide supplement **Naojianling**.
In Xiao Liang’s eyes, the core work of July and August boiled down to one thing: the initial building and screening of a market sales team.
At the beginning, when he drew people from the juice factory to clear inventory, Xiao Liang had had little room to choose. Xu Lihuan, Fei Wenwei, Zhang Ming, and the others received some basic training, but that training was limited. The time had simply been too short.
After the new company was registered, besides the unexpected success of recruiting He Xueqing, Xiao Liang finally had some capital. He began openly recruiting market sales staff on a large scale in both Xijiang and Dongzhou.
By 1994, Dongzhou and Xijiang already had a number of workers from city and county state-owned enterprises waiting for posts or laid off, creating a pool of relatively educated candidates. Even so, sales and marketing personnel available in the two cities had generally received no professional training, let alone accumulated rich work experience.
The initial interviews could only serve as a first filter. After a period of intensive training and adjustment, the screening of the sales team had only just been completed in the past few days.
Those who lacked ability, or whose dedication was insufficient and who were not especially suited to marketing or sales, were temporarily assigned to the First Marketing Department or transferred to administration and finance. Those who performed well during the training and adaptation stage were concentrated in the Second Marketing Department.
Of course, some employees were truly unsatisfactory. Xiao Liang didn’t even wait for their probation periods to end before letting them go.
Zhang Ming and Zhao Xudong’s abilities were adequate, but not strong enough to be considered core personnel capable of independently leading a new sales team.
At the same time, Xiao Liang wanted to prevent them from considering themselves founding veterans and stirring up internal conflicts later. So he simply put the two of them in charge of the First Marketing Department, which was destined to be marginalized in the short term, continuing to handle Nanting Lake Juice sales in Xijiang and Dongzhou.
The market outlook for Nanting Lake Juice was relatively clear. The sales team would receive fixed wages during probation, while official salespeople would receive a base salary plus commission. Sales supervisors would receive bonuses calculated according to team performance. Income expectations were also clear, so Zhang Ming and Zhao Xudong were fairly satisfied with the arrangement.
Aside from appointing Xu Lihuan as manager of the Second Marketing Department, Xiao Liang did not temporarily divide the department into separate marketing and sales functions. Instead, he grouped everyone into five teams.
He Xueqing, needless to say, was one team leader. Fei Wenwei, who had come from the juice factory’s inspection department, was also notably capable in all respects.
Back in 1990, Fei Wenwei had actually passed the college entrance exam. But his family was poor, his parents were in poor health, and he still had two younger siblings in school. He had given up further education and entered the factory early to shoulder the family burden.
In addition, there were Ji Hongjian, Shen Zheng, and Tan Xing—three strong candidates recruited from Xijiang and Dongzhou in August, all with standout ability and work experience.
Generally speaking, marketing and sales operated on different levels: one involved strategy, the other tactical execution. But Xiao Liang did not draw a clear line between them for the time being. He had He Xueqing, Fei Wenwei, Ji Hongjian, Shen Zheng, and Tan Xing each lead one sales group.
Part of the reason was that the company was just starting out and lacked truly professional talent, leaving little room for refinement. More importantly, Xiao Liang didn’t want to confine He Xueqing to marketing from the start. He wanted her to have as much exposure as possible to front-line sales work.
In any case, most domestic companies had not yet realized the importance of distinguishing between marketing and sales. Xiao Liang simply played dumb and followed the current for now, avoiding an early departmental split that would only require a major personnel reshuffle later and possibly trigger unnecessary chaos.
The launch preparations for the oligosaccharide supplement **Naojianling** were now complete. Staffing was in place, market advertising in Xijiang and Dongzhou was about to roll out on all fronts, large quantities of posters and brochures had already gone to the printers, and the warehouse had been stocked in advance with forty thousand boxes of product.
