Go East, young man, go East. Again.

Got into Seoul at 4 a.m. a couple nights ago, and now I remember why I hate flying. Over the course of the double-layover trip, the majority of the 18 in-flight hours was mildly to mediumly (why is that not a word?) turbulent. Have you ever been extremely tired and wanting to go to sleep during a 13 hour flight, but unable to stay asleep for more than 5 seconds because of turbulence? It makes time stretch on and on and on.

Anyways, I just had a meeting with the 7 SLI school Directors about my new recruitment website and business in general. I was pretty nervous going into it, and the 100 degree heat of my boss's office didn't help, but it went pretty well (everyone looked like they simply wanted to get the hell out of the sweat tent at first, but they also seemed mildly impressed with my recruitment website and gave me some pretty good feedback after the meeting). It seemed to at least solidify my position as their definite recruiter for the future. It was especially nice when I told them I would be reducing all my recruitment prices, and then my boss said, "If you have to charge us more in order to assure us that you won't sell your services to some other school, that's OK." Talk about completely laying your hand out on the table! Cue victory music and commence price jacking! Not really, but it's nice that he threw that option out there without me even having to ominously hint at it.

Now I need to get the website actually working (the model I showed them was pretty limited because my programmer and I have some work to do still), and I also will be hunting down some other schools to pitch my recruitment biz to. I have one meeting setup with a very small (5 teachers) school next Tuesday, and hopefully I'll get a couple more setup next week as well.

In the meantime, I'm gonna travel around to the various SLI campuses and meet all the teachers I recruited and see how they're doing. Or, better yet, maybe I'll just set up a big dinner in central Seoul and invite everyone. The only reason I hesitate at the latter is that I might be in a position where I have the traditional Korean elder's job of stiffing myself with the bill. We'll see.

-Jimbo

Ivy in Asia

Well, it's actually Denver at the moment, but I'll only be here another few weeks before I ship off once more to Asia - specifically, Korea (for sure), Japan (maybe), Singapore (maybe), and China (unlikely but possible). I'll explain all that in a minute...

I'm in Denver now because I decided to strike while the iron was, well, lukewarm and expand further on my teacher recruitment business. I'll have a new website up for it very soon (www.ivyinasia.com), and it's obviously called "Ivy in Asia". It's just an improvement on my previous Yahoo pre-made website, but it will make recruitment much easier for me, for the teachers, and for the school Directors I work with. It will allow automatic uploading of all necessary files (like resumes and contracts), it will have a members-only section for teachers to network amongst themselves while in Asia, it will have a school Directors' page for them to easily request teachers from me, and it will organize everything so there's not so much confusion with the Visa and hiring processes like there is right now. Basically, it's just further automation of little things that I shouldn't have to waste my time on. I'll still be contacting my recruits directly - I wouldn't want to lose my personal touch! - but now I think I'll have some more time to spend on other things, like going to Asia and finding some great schools to work with.

More on all this later, and hopefully more frequent posts!

Back in...New Haven?

If the world is my oyster, I want to know where my pearl is! Ala "Dumb and Dumber": I got no cash, no girlfriend, I've been sleeping on a couch since January, and I'm back in New Haven, CT, America's Armpit.

Well, I guess it's not that bad. My cash from last year's teaching gig is stashed away in Korea, waiting for me to transfer it to an American bank after the exchange rate drops sufficiently. The couch isn't bad, in fact it folds out into a bed and is quite comfortable. And New Haven is still a lot of fun, especially now that summer is rolling around. And girlfriends have kooties anyways.

I thought it would be fun to see my old fraternity/squash team friends, and it has been for the most part. But then there's the whole issue of the "What the hell are you doing back here?" question that everyone asks. Luckily, my response is more interesting than normal: "I'm a music producer and international talent recruiter." Bam! While those both may be heinous overstatements, they do tickle at the truth. I'm working with my brother on his Low Strung cello-rock music, and I'm acting as his manager/producer. Obviously this means that I must wear polyester suits everywhere to go with my slicked hair, gold chains, and sunglasses. I've been working on organizing and promoting his Low Strung material, including getting the necessary sheet music and record licenses, putting up the official website (www.lowstrung.net), finding cellists to audition for a NYC-based Low Strung group, getting practice space, booking gigs for this summer in NYC, and getting the word out to radios/newspapers/magazines/blogs about Low Strung. I haven't yet made a dime, and I don't expect to for awhile because it's a work in progress, but it's very interesting/fun to work on this stuff and I know that Dave's stuff is so good that CDs and sheet music sales will be a great little source of income for him (and me, to a lesser extent if it gets going strong).

I've also been spending a lot of time with Dave constructing a 2D sound diffuser, an acoustic treatment idea that my brother had for breaking up sound waves in small spaces so as to make the room sound larger. The idea is not new, but the design is different enough from other similar models that it would be legal to produce - and much cheaper. However, despite the many hours we both spent constructing and prepping the diffuser, we literally broke the mold, not in a good way. It's sitting in Jim Sinclair's basement now, busted to all hell.

And my "teacher recruitment" business is actually turning into something bigger than I had originally planned, because I now see that I can do this so much better than any normal Korean recruiter. It all comes down to one basic reason: I explain things much more clearly and fully than other recruiters. I'm going to get a new website for my recruitment up and running, and when I do, I hope to make a couple contacts with other schools in Korea (or Japan?) and expand a bit. Slowly though - I don't want to sacrifice the informativeness/honesty of my recruitment just to expand quickly. I will definitely need to go back to Asia to visit whatever school(s) I contact, to get to know them just as well as I know my former school. I'm pretty excited about it, but we'll just have to see how it turns out. More on that later.