My business partner Jon Greenlee and I would strap ourselves to the wing to save money. When we travel, we rarely sleep because we have to book these bizarre trips. It’s crazy.
Our first international business trip was pretty terrible. We needed to get to Asia and our first thought was that we couldn’t afford it. But then we got online and found a way to get there without going completely broke.
We drove from our headquarters in Pittsburgh to Washington, where we caught a morning flight to South Korea. From there, we went to China, Japan and Indonesia. The entire trip was five days long, and we got maybe five hours of sleep the whole time.
In China, we had translators, but we were still used to conducting business American style, where you can get a deal done in two hours and everybody leaves happy. But in Asia, every meeting was about 10 hours long and everyone wanted to serve us food. We were so stuffed and jet-lagged, it was ridiculous.
When we got to Jakarta, we went through complete culture shock. The traffic was crazy and our hotel was on high alert because of a bomb scare. But we managed to do some business. The plan was to fly out of Jakarta at midnight, land in Korea and then fly home.
By this time, both of us were completely exhausted, but my partner was having the worst of it. When we landed in Washington, he bolted off the plane, so we wound up going through customs separately.
Finally, he showed up and when he realized we still had to spend several hours in a car to get home, he threw his bag against a wall. Security immediately came over to question him. He started mumbling about how tired he was and I think they felt sorry for him so they let him go.
Our chief financial officer picked us up and we motioned for Jon to get in the back of the car. He slept the whole way home.
The trip was actually worth it since we eventually opened two offices in China and one in Indonesia.
But sometimes you don’t get the deal.
We had a meeting in England, and we had to get there and then back to Pittsburgh all within one day. We flew out early in the morning and right after landing, we went to our meeting in this beautiful older building. We had a nice presentation lined up. Since we’re a tech company, everything is supposed to go smoothly.
We had a converter and Jon plugged in the computer. The electricity immediately went out. We stood there looking at each other, with the clients looking at us, with that “who are these losers?” expression on their faces. We didn’t even know if it was our fault.
I tried to salvage the meeting by just talking about our technology, and told them to imagine what it would be like. They looked at me like I was insane. I think a few yawned. Of course, we didn’t get the deal.
Our friend who lined up the meeting for us felt so bad about everything that he bought us two first-class tickets home. I would love to tell you we enjoyed first class, but I can’t. All we did was sleep.
By Ty Morse, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com
By Ty Morse, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/business/to-asia-and-back-again-sleep-not-an-option-frequent-flier.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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