Business Knowledge For Success

On Saturday June 25 the latest business seminar in the Enspyre Entrepreneurial Challenge series took place.

Enspyre President Elias Ek opened the seminar by thanking sponsors and all who came and urged the participants not only to partake of the knowledge from the speeches but also take the chance to network amongst themselves.

This time around the conference was co-hosted with the Business Incubator from the Chinese Cultural University. The CEO of the incubator, John Liao, gave the first speech with a presentation of their services and how they can help start-ups succeed. He said “our English-speaking consultants are available to assist you.”

Up next was Michael DePrenda, an American who has lived in Taiwan for many years and has started several businesses here. He suggested all foreigners to find a local partner to smooth the way. Best of all he said was to find a spouse and start a business with him or her since one can trust family most. Visibly excited of the chance to share his thoughts with so many people, he gave the listeners a long line of potential business opportunities that he thought someone should take advantage of.

Ola Kronkvist is the co-founder of Taipei’s first Swedish restaurant. He described the love and care that had gone into every detail of his restaurant called Flavor. He described how his and his wife’s dream really is to have a hotel but that the restaurant is a calculated step on the way to reach that dream.

The next speaker was Michael Lee, a prominent lawyer from California that is a partner with the Pamir Law Group. He described the fundamentals of raising money and that “money has its own language and you need to master it before you can raise money. A point that came out especially clear is that not all dollars are the same, one has to keep in mind what other requirements or benefits an investment comes with. For example, a family member would likely have vastly different expectations than a professional Venture Capitalist.

The final speaker was Francis Morris. Mr. Morris is the President of AskMorris consulting, and he went through step by step how to evaluate what kind of website a company needs based on their needs, size and goals. He showed how for example putting a contact form on the site rather than just offering a email address not only can make the process more professional but also protect the email address from being “harvested” by spammers.

Comments from the participants were overall very positive and several people asked when the next seminar would be. No word on that as of yet but stay tuned for further updates.