March 5 Enspyre Entrepreneurial Challenge draws 120 foreigners

On March 5, the Enspyre Entrepreneurial Challenge, a seminar for foreigners who want to start a business in Taiwan, ended up drawing a record-setting 120 people. Shunning the truth that the whole world is abandoning Taiwan for the benefit of the mainland, the 120 person strong crowd displayed a admirable drive and enthusiasm for their business ventures.

Winner of the NTD235,000 EEC prize was Casey Payne, a serial entrepreneur from the US. Casey says that he will use his new won resources to kick-start the technology consulting company that he has been planning for some time. Back in the US he has already founded 2 businesses but had to divest them when moving to Taiwan with this wife.

The seminar featured 3 main speakers. First out was Ann Hu, a local accountant who has pretty much cornered the market for foreign-owned businesses in Taiwan. Enspyre President Elias Ek said that when Enspyre was founded 3 years ago they were not happy with the accounting firm they were using and started asking friends for referrels. To Elias big surprise he found that about 70% of all foreign entrepreneurs he knew used the same accountant - Ann Hu.

Ann laid out the procedures that are required for a foreigner to start a business in Taiwan and gave an overview of Taiwan's accounting requirements in terms of issuing uniform invoices, tax reporting and year-end reports.

After that Enspyre's Elias Ek reminded the crowd of all the costs involved in starting a business. "There are so many costs one easily forget, everything from tiny consumables like toilet paper to big culturally based issues like Chinese New Year parties and red envelopes," said Elias.

Drawing from his years as a marketing professional Elias then jumped to an overview of different marketing techniques and how SME's with limited funds need to plan their marketing in order to get the most for their money.

Elias ended with the observation that so many companies spend lots of money on developing their products or services and equally much on their marketing while often forgetting about developing their customer service, in essence making the investments a wasted effort. "A potential customer sees an advertisement and calls up a company. If the person answering is unprofessional, rude or uninformed, why bother advertising at all? And remember that a customer do not cut a small business any slack, they expect the same high level of service," said Elias.

The ending lecture was by Donovan Smith, an American who has lived in Taiwan for over 14 years and runs 2 businesses here. He spoke about his experiences as a sales person and a sales manager in Taiwan. He said that one big difference between foreigner and Taiwanese business people is that the Taiwanese want to take more time up front to establish a relationship before jumping into business discussions. He also said that sometimes he could use the fact that foreigners are not "expected" to do much haggling. It sometimes ment that he could get away with a better price or a faster negotiation. Sometimes.

Looking at the 120 foreigners who attended the Enspyre Entrepreneurial Challenge, it is hard to make any major groupings but there seems to be two business areas that come up more often than others, English education and trading.

After a long and intellectually stimulating seminar the whole crowd retired back to JB's, a new restaurant in the Shida area opened by - what else - a group of foreigners.