我們?yōu)槭裁炊ぷ?，這是個old topic.

與我，和很多朋友，工作的意義在于它的ideal。它不是錢，不是位子，而是意義，理念。這些東西很虛。1/15日 USC MBA Round 2 deadline, 讀到了我的同事Kai的一篇essay, 關(guān)于BeBeyond在賣什么。寫的真好!

堅持理念已經(jīng)很難，在生存的壓力下，在和市場上其他所有player的做法背道而馳的狀況下，堅持理念不掙quick money就更難了. (于BeBeyond, 如果我們就搞面試技巧培訓(xùn)，或者干脆做中介替別人寫PS, 我們的收入早就翻翻了)

看著Kai的essay，我想起了我的一段經(jīng)歷。05年BeBeyond的發(fā)展仍然很緩慢，到底要多久我們才能有突破呢? 絕望中，我思考如果不在BeBeyond我可以做什么。NGO中做officer or manager！他們的工作有意義，而且我完全具有相應(yīng)的能力。痛苦了兩周后，我找了一個在NGO中做到director的朋友聊，在回家的路上，我決定接著做BeBeyond，無論多難. 愿意很簡單：和她提及的在中國做得不錯的國際NGO的工作和成就相比，我覺得BeBeyond做得更扎實，更有影響力，更有長遠的意義。更重要的是，同樣做有意義的事，我們可以self-support, 還可以make profit, 比NGO了不起多了。

重提這段經(jīng)歷，是想說，堅持ideal有多難。我猶豫過，Kai也是。下面是他的essay, 獻給所有的理想主義者。

The most difficult thing in business is not to sell our product, but to sell our dream. As an entrepreneur as well as educator, in my past three and half years, I changed thousands of college students’ job-hunting mindset, and directly spread out the brand-new job-hunting concept to more than 100,000 audiences in 40 Universities in Beijing & Shanghai.

I joined BeBeyond as an evangelist, holding the belief that we can change China students job-hunting situation by teaching them right concept and methodology. We provide action-based and deep-self-discovered training compared to traditional techniques teaching and test-taking preparation class.

Nevertheless, there was no such a market needs, as Chinese students and colleges focus more on test taking skills than setting up career goals and building up right job-hunting concept. Almost 99% of the students thought that they needed the “right” answer of every interview question but not a never-heard and expensive workshop.

In my first year, I cold visited every career office in 15 universities in Shanghai, talked to all student unions I could reach, trying to build up partner relationship. Also, I knocked out every boy’s dorm in those 15 universities. But only few people would like to join our workshop and few student organizations would like let us hold seminars, which was our most important marketing channel. I still remember that during my first public career speech in one famous University in Shanghai, more than half of the audiences left the room without patient and respect before I finished.

On the other hand, our competitors seemed to be very popular among the students in a very short time. I thought we were lagged behind. Every time when I picked up the enquiry phone call with hope and excitement, but heard that all they asked was “do you provide any companies’ internal information and recommend me to my desired one?”, I felt lost. At the age of 24, without many experiences, I wondered whether we were on the right track. There were two choices in front of me: start to provide what our customers “want”,, or stick to our dream by teaching them what they “need”. We chose the latter one, which means that we chose a way with more challenges and difficulties.

We’ve rejected countless potential customers who didn’t buy in our concept and vision. I wanted to earn money to keep us alive and make an easier life, yet I stick to our original vision. We repeated our vision and mission in all kinds of occasions, such as seminars, training, emails, coffee hour, Christmas party and all our marketing messages. Now, when we gradually build up our brand and the students and career office become more mature in job-hunting, we win an edge by putting our competitors into a dilemma that they can’t change their image in a very short time.

By not teaching trainees to use some tricks to win the job offer that most of other competitors did, our workshop has 100% job-hunting success rate in the past 3.5 years, and 75% are getting offer from multi-national companies, such as McKinsey, P&G and JP Morgan, compared to less than 15% generally. We not only provide an opportunity to change young students’ career, but also teach them respect self uniqueness which benefit longer in their career development.

Now, the former trainees who have promoted to senior level position in various companies started to recruit employees directly from our current workshop. They started recommending our trainees to their hiring managers. As our reputation is growing, several top-tier universities’ career offices have adopted our training concept and content as their internal job-hunting courses. Consequently, we bring value to more students in colleges and universities.