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