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REGIONAL> Profiles
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Roadmaster
By YU TIANYU (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-29 17:05 Tough start
Guo persuaded his family gradually and started his business in the building materials trade and interior decoration then went into a machine parts manufacturing business. It was named Senyuan in 1998. A "walk-on" is a utility role in Chinese traditional opera. And Guo says initially his company played such a role, painstaking but unnoticed, in Liaoning's huge and advanced machine manufacturing industry. For the first two years, the company was making supporting parts and components for other enterprises. "I was depressed when the machine parts made by Senyuan were used for products of other companies, and Senyuan could not even put its name on them, " he says. Guo decided to reform and push Senyuan to become an independent enterprise with own core business and unique products. Senyuan's first project was snowplows, not an easy task for a business with less than 20 employees. Guo sent some of his staff, to study at the Provincial Highway Administration to determine the needs and demands of highway operations by day, while at night they were disassembling several foreign snowplows that they had purchased in order to learn the designs. After a year, Senyuan produced its first snowplow and sold for it over 300,000 yuan. Encouraged by their success they made several other kinds of products, such as lawnmowers, and Senyuan gradually made a name for itself by making a niche for itself in the road maintenance business. At the time there were about 1.3 million Km of paved roads in China, but most of the business was going into construction. "According to my experience in the machine industry, innovation is the lifeline for an enterprise," Guo says. Guo and his partners and staff pooled about one million yuan plus some loans, and started their research and development of a black top repair machine. "During that time, my colleagues and I moved to live in the factory. We slept there when we were tired and then got up to continue working," he says The hard work paid off in 2002 when Senyuan produced a blacktop repair machine that was the country's first developed with independent intellectual property rights. Now, Senyuan has become a technology innovation demonstration enterprise in Liaoning. From official to entrepreneur Guo was not the only government official who "went to sea" but also one of the few who didn't drown. Of others in his old department who left to seek their fortunes as entrepreneurs, more than 90 percent returned to their old jobs within five years. The key to success outside of the government is "to accept your new identity and its pitfalls as well as to rely on your previous experience as an official", Gou says. "As a government official, people always respect and flatter you. But as entrepreneurs in China, especially those with small and medium-sized enterprises, there is a lot of discrimination and sometimes people create difficulties for you," he says. What makes Guo easy with the transition was his childhood experience as the son of a former landlord family in a rural area of Heilongjiang province. At the time when people were judged by their parentage, Guo was isolated by his classmates due to his family's "feudal" origins, and he says even teachers didn't help him in his studies. He always went home immediately after class, because he was scared of staying at school. "It did help me to be less vulnerable to unfair treatment and discrimination when I'm doing business," Guo says. Government officials do have advantages when they are running an enterprise, Guo says. First they come from China's elite group with a good educational background and well trained at organizing and mobilizing their human resources. Most are also adept at predicting and catching the direction of governmental policies and making appropriate decisions and strategies, he says. Senyuan has been concentrating on innovation and manufacturing environmentally friendly road maintenance machinery because the government is pushing energy efficiency and environmental protection for all industries across the country. "A business career is full of challenges and conquest, but being an official is just repeating myself," he says. "I enjoy my life as an entrepreneur since everything I have done rewards me with a lot honor and satisfaction. It is what I never experienced as a government official," Guo says, his face wreathed with smiles. Through his constant efforts of running his enterprise, Guo wants to argue that government officials are not only good at writing reports and having meetings, they also can do business and fight in commercial field. On the bookshelf in his office, the series of Sun Tzu's Art of War is displayed. Guo says he reads them during his leisure time. Doing business well is like winning a war, and the key to success in both is creating and using the right strategy, he says. (China Daily 08/25/2008 page12)
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