Shaun Rein - You Can’t Win Unless you Know How to Lose
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunrein/ (Shaun Rein) is the founder and managing director of the http://www.cmrconsulting.com.cn/ (China Market Research Group) (CMR), a globally prominent strategic market intelligence firm focused on China. He works with boards, billionaires, heads of state, CEOs and senior executives of Fortune 500 and leading Chinese companies, private equity firms, SMEs and hedge funds, to develop their China growth, political and investment strategies. Rein wrote international best-sellers The War for China’s Wallet: Profiting from the New World Order, The End of Cheap China and The End of Copycat China. Rein is regularly featured in The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. His op-eds have appeared in The New York Times. He frequently appears on CNN, BBC, MarketPlace, CNBC, Bloomberg, PBS and MSNBC. Rein formerly taught executive education classes for London Business School and was a weekly columnist for CNBC and Forbes. He also wrote a column for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Rein is one of the world’s most sought after keynote speakers for his focus on innovation, consumer trends and the economy in China. His speaking engagement clients have included: Estée Lauder, Adidas, HSBC, AXA, Credit Suisse, Baker McKenzie, Blackrock, Baillie Gifford, KPMG, Macquarie Bank, Nomura, Baird, Deloitte, CLSA, Solvay, Sodexo, and Nestle. Apart from China and Hong Kong, he has spoken in economies such as South Africa, Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, Singapore, Thailand, Mexico, Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea. “I had the students but it was very difficult for me to actually turn a profit. The difficulty in human resources in China has become a central theme of my business and most businesses that we’ve worked with over the past two decades. Mine started with the difficulty of hiring foreign talent, but actually the lack of top Chinese talent and the inability to retain good talent has been a major problem for me in my company China market research group ever since we started in 2005.” Shaun Rein Support our sponsor Today’s episode is sponsored by the https://womenbuildingwealth.net/ (Women Building Wealth) membership group, the complete proven step-by-step course to guide women from novice to competent investor. To learn more, visit: WomenBuildingWealth.net. Worst investment ever In around 2001, while Shaun was a 23-year-old a graduate student at Harvard University, he was putting some thought to the big question: “What am I going to do with my career?” What he did know was he never wanted to go the corporate route and work somewhere like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, even though most of his classmates were headed in that direction. Instead, he had been interested in entrepreneurship ever since he had run an event-organizing company in Canada while he was a student at McGill University. The company managed 3,000-head dance parties, populated mostly by pre-legal-drinking-age (21) Americans that he bussed up to Montreal, where the legal drinking age is 18. At the time, he was living in Tianjin, China, going to and from there and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He realized there was a great opportunity for teaching English because “Chinese love America”, and they wanted to learn English. Budding idea to start English learning center in China So he decided to set up an English language learning center for 5-15 year olds and teens in China. The center’s focus was on speaking, because a lot of local children could already read and write well, but he and his team wanted them to learn correct American-accented English. So he returned to Tianjin, found Chinese partners, and set the company up with the unique selling point that every teacher would be a current or former Harvard student or teacher. Center opens with a bang but various snags emerge He opened the company and to big celebration. Classes started and people were very excited to have Harvard students or Harvard graduates coming to Tianjin....
