It’s about relationships.

We have an exciting growth company in a cool industry but at the end of the day what makes me happy is the relationships I get to make with co-workers, customers, stakeholders and suppliers. It is easy to get busy and stay stuck behind a desk, head down and working hard. But it is important to make the time to grow relationships when the opportunity arises. I feel it is one of the key measures of success in business.

Well this blog post is about one of those times.

I am Canadian, and grew up playing hockey. It has been a passion of mine for over three decades. One thing I was always jealous of growing up in the Vancouver area of Western Canada was that we very rarely had the chance in the winter to play hockey outside like you can in other regions of Canada. Pond hockey was something that seemed to happen in most areas of Canada, but not in the Vancouver area. I can remember skating outside only a few times. As it wasn’t a regular occurrence, a competitive game outside was extremely rare.

So when supplier of ours, who has since become a friend, suggested a visit to his hardwood flooring mill in Quebec, my mind started racing. When he mentioned he had a cabin in a rural village and that they keep the surrounding property cleared for playing regular pond hockey games, I was hooked!

Fellow BuildDirect’er Rob Jones and I set up a video schedule to shoot the process of making a sustainable hardwood floor from start to finish. We arranged a visit to the forest where hardwood trees are responsibly grown and harvested, we spent time at all stages of the milling process and then the finishing line. We spent quality time with the great staff at the mill and learned so much about the process of this beautiful, sustainable type of flooring. My personal favorite is a Canadian Hard Maple. It’s durable, stable and beautiful.

But below is a video of my true passion; hockey!

Playing competitive pond hockey with friends outside (and finishing with cold beers) was nothing short of brilliant. With about -4C (24F) and no wind, it was perfect conditions. I’m glad no wildlife came down and joined the action. We walked around the area before the game and the amount of wildlife tracks was incredible.

Watch and enjoy…

The rules: we played for approx 1.5 hours of 4 on 4 hockey, no goalies. But you had to be inside the crease area to score, so it was a tight-checking game that ended 10-9. Our team snuck out the victory. The mill owner, JP, put up $80 to the winning team. Does that make me a professionally paid hockey player?

Anyway, I was happy I survived as a few of the guys were in their early 20’s and really knew how to play. Frankly, I’m the guy at 1:40 of the video that gets rocked! My elbow was black and blue for 2 weeks (mental note: wear elbow pads next time… and keep your head up!)

Cheers.

Building Business Relationships on Common Ground (Or Ice) is a post from: Building Materials and Flooring With Rob Banks. Rob is Co-Founder of BuildDirect, the world's leading online source for building materials including wood flooring, tile and stone, decking, roofing, siding, sustainable building and more. Rob writes on a variety of topics including procurement, intertnational travel, building products, and building industry trade shows.

Related posts:

1. Business Travel: What You See In the Middle of Nowhere, Part 2
2. Hello From Rob Banks – That’s Me

If you follow my blog, you obviously know  I do a lot of travel to Asia.

Living in Vancouver is a brilliant location to do business with Asia as we are the gateway to the Pacific Rim. The best airline in the world, in my opinion, is Cathay Pacific Airways , and they actually became a global player due in part to the success of the Hong Kong to Vancouver route. That has now extended to New York, Vancouver, Hong Kong.  So the flight is more popular than ever.

To get to Hong Kong from Vancouver it makes sense to take the late (or technically very early: 3am) flight and arrive at approx 6am local Hong Kong time. This allows a full day of work starting in Hong Kong, or gives you time for a flight / bus to the mainland (ie: Shenzen), still leaving half the day for meetings. You can easily be in Shenzhen by 11am from Hong Kong  airport.

To be ready for a 3am flight, I start packing at approx 9pm after the kids are in bed. Hang out with my wife for a bit before she goes to bed then finish packing. I grab a little nap from 11pm to midnight. I’ve already done online check in, so I call a taxi just after midnight and head to YVR (Vancouver international airport). After a little chat with the fabulous staff at Cathay Pacific, I’ve checked my bags in by 1:15am.

I go for a walk to get the blood flowing, grab a magazine and powerbar for the flight, and then eat a sub. Yah, it’s late to eat, but I have to start adjusting my internal clock to China time. When I arrive I have to be ‘on’ for my important meetings, otherwise, why make the trip? I head through security at approx 2am and enter the Cathay business class lounge (benefit of traveling so much with Cathay). I usually have a latte, and read the Southern China Morning Post, currently my favorite newspaper in the world.

photo: Gary Hayes

Heading to the gate is always a weird feeling. It is a 10 minute walk from the Cathay lounge to the gate and for 9 minutes you don’t see a soul. Everything is closed; no staff or passengers around. For a very busy airport it is an odd feeling. Then, when I arrive to the gate there are hundreds of people. Usually there is another gate nearby, also going to Asia, and that will be packed as well. A total of 1,000 people in the airport and 900 of them are sitting together!

The flight to Hong Kong is 12 to 14 hours long depending on the wind, so catching up on some sleep on the flight is a must. I find if I watch a movie or two, and then get 5 hours or 6 hours of sleep I’m then set for the day. If I am heading on to Vietnam / Indonesia / Malaysia etc, all the connecting flights leave around 8 to 10am, so it’s easy to make most connections while  still arriving to my final destination in time to make the day useful.

I find Hong Kong airport one of the best in the world, and if flying on Cathay there is no airport that is it’s equal. The lounge for Marco Polo members is second to none. Grab a shower /shave, coffee and a bite (all complimentary in the Cathay lounge) and your refreshed and set for a successful start to your trip.

Happy travels!

How to Travel to China and Stay on Your Game, Too is a post from: Building Materials and Flooring With Rob Banks. Rob is Co-Founder of BuildDirect, the world's leading online source for building materials including wood flooring, tile and stone, decking, roofing, siding, sustainable building and more. Rob writes on a variety of topics including procurement, intertnational travel, building products, and building industry trade shows.

Related posts:

1. Business Travel Adventures in China: Airline Exercises
2. BuildDirect Goes to ‘Noble House’
3. BuildDirect In Wuxi China, Part 2

As I wrote in my last blog post, I was in Wuxi, China last year, a city a few hours drive outside of Shanghai and the attraction I went to see was the ‘the Big Buddha’. The Grand Buddha at Ling Shan is approx 300 ft tall (88m) and I believe is top 10 largest Buddha statues in the world.

Take a look!

The area around the Grand Buddha was massive and absolutely beautiful. It was kind of a Disneyland for promotion of the religion. The location in the mountains gave you the feeling it was very remote even though it wasn’t too far from the city. Hope you enjoyed the video!

BuildDirect In Wuxi China, Part 2 is a post from: Building Materials and Flooring With Rob Banks. Rob is Co-Founder of BuildDirect, the world's leading online source for building materials including wood flooring, tile and stone, decking, roofing, siding, sustainable building and more. Rob writes on a variety of topics including procurement, intertnational travel, building products, and building industry trade shows.

Related posts:

1. BuildDirect In Wuxi China, Part 1
2. How to Travel to China and Stay on Your Game, Too
3. Xiamen, China: Can you make a city beautiful by adding lights?

Traveling is China for myself rarely means I get to experience tourist type attractions. But when I was in Wuxi China last year, one day a factory owner took me out to see some of the local tourist attractions.

The video is the key attraction of this blog as the area is really a beautiful part of the world. I start the video over looking Lake Tai and then most of the video is the area surrounding the Grand Buddha.

Wuxi is nicknamed ‘the Pearl of Lake Tai’ as it sits on the shore of Lake Tai. The city has a nice feel to it and I had one of the best meals I’ve had in China; a small noodle shop for locals that has been around for many decades.

I don’t have a photo from the restaurant, but the one thing I could have done without is that after we were finished eating, I saw them put leftovers back in with the pot to be served again the next time. In a 3,000 year old town, who am I to argue? Oh well, glad I saw that after and not before.

Regardless, it tasted great.

BuildDirect In Wuxi China, Part 1 is a post from: Building Materials and Flooring With Rob Banks. Rob is Co-Founder of BuildDirect, the world's leading online source for building materials including wood flooring, tile and stone, decking, roofing, siding, sustainable building and more. Rob writes on a variety of topics including procurement, intertnational travel, building products, and building industry trade shows.

Related posts:

1. BuildDirect In Wuxi China, Part 2
2. How to Travel to China and Stay on Your Game, Too
3. The Best Food In China

I love this series as it really does reflect my life of element to when I travel, especially in China. I do not get to experience what a tourist would.  I rarely see beautiful things, museums, the Great Wall (I’ve been to China dozens of times, and I still haven’t seen it!).  But I do get to have experiences that are amazing and pretty unique.

Now having been to China as many times as I have and reading about my experiences on this blog you might think…. “Wow, all Rob does in China is spend time in factories, visits to the big Buddha in Wuxi and eat food that looks incredibly dodgy”.  But wait! You’d be wrong! For those that know me you’d be stunned (taken aback even) to hear I spend a lot of my time drinking beer.

I know! It’s shocking!

Here are some types of beer I’ve tried, mostly around the dinner table at various restaurants around the country.

I prefer to drink Chinese beer when I’m in China.  Why go to China to drink Budweiser (which happens to have a lot of distribution in China)? The most consumed beer in China is Tsingtao. I really enjoy it.

Tsingtao is a beer with 100+ years of tradition and was a German brewery for decades before the Chinese Government took over. It is in the realm of a quality European beer, really quite enjoyable.  Most cities in North America have exported Tsingtao available, although it tastes different in China. Outside of Tsingtao, which is a Beijing beer, I always attempt to drink a local brew. Here are a few brands I’ve tried over the past year:

BBoss Beer	Cheerday	Harbin	Mons Beer	Sedrin

Here is a late night snack that you buy when drunk… since they do not have late night hot dog stands to fill your drunken desire there usually is a guy on a moped with a hot stove.  If you can’t figure out what it is it is a greasy fish head in an ash tray.

Mmmmmmm…

What You See In the Middle of Nowhere, Part 4: Beer! is a post from: Building Materials and Flooring With Rob Banks. Rob is Co-Founder of BuildDirect, the world's leading online source for building materials including wood flooring, tile and stone, decking, roofing, siding, sustainable building and more. Rob writes on a variety of topics including procurement, intertnational travel, building products, and building industry trade shows.

Related posts:

1. What you see in the middle of nowhere, Part 3
2. Hello From Rob Banks – That’s Me
3. Business Travel: What You See In the Middle of Nowhere, Part 2

Some of the best feedback I get on my Twitter account and blog posts are around my ‘What you see in the middle of nowhere’ topic.  I do a lot of traveling around the world and I honestly enjoy my travel in China.  The people are amazing and the experience with the culture and local customs is remarkable.  That said, I really don’t enjoy some of the food.   I’ve described business trips in China like an episode of Fear Factor and a drinking game all wrapped into one.

I keep expecting Joe Rogan to jump out and ask me to eat an uncooked elephant intestine for $25,000.  It’s just like that, except no Joe and no money!

Here is an example.  We are in Wuxi, China (few hours drive from Shanghai) and I am served a nice looking dish.  I really like black pepper and spicy food, so I assumed this is a local dish with a bunch of pepper on it. Hmmm, I should have known better. Yah, those black bits are large ants. The dish actually tasted really good, the locally harvested pine nuts were fabulous, but there’s something about a mouth full of ants…

As mentioned in previous posts, Chinese culture is heavily focused around food. It is mandatory to spend time in restaurant in order to conduct successful business. Most Chinese businessmen I’ve met are proud experts at eating out. An interesting experience for the non-China resident is the way they display the food in a restaurant, before it is prepared. Here is a photo of a water snake (or eel) before it is taken out and prepared.

It feels a little bit like being at the zoo, numerous tanks of fresh seafood are displayed and you walk around with an employee and you pick out what you’d like to eat.

Now, I’ve been to hundreds of restaurants in countless different cities and towns in China.  Some are beautiful and clean,  some are not. I’ll let you imagine the physiological battle you need to personally overcome after you’ve had the unfortunate experience of walking in an unclean, live food environment… and then be honored as the first to eat each dish, no one digging in before you do. Yummy.

Finally, on one of my walks through a restaurant in Huizhou, China I took a little video of one of the plastic tray that we could order from.

Again, I started looking around for Joe…

What you see in the middle of nowhere, Part 3 is a post from: Building Materials and Flooring With Rob Banks. Rob is Co-Founder of BuildDirect, the world's leading online source for building materials including wood flooring, tile and stone, decking, roofing, siding, sustainable building and more. Rob writes on a variety of topics including procurement, intertnational travel, building products, and building industry trade shows.

Related posts:

1. Business Travel: What You See In the Middle of Nowhere, Part 2
2. The Best Food In China
3. What You See In the Middle of Nowhere, Part 4: Beer!

Taipan of the Noble House; Ian Dunross Struans. If these names mean anything to you you’ll probably enjoy this blog post. James Clavell (of Shogun fame) wrote a fabulous novel called Noble House. It was a sequel to the equally impressive novel, Taipan.

These are my two favorite books.  I read them as a young adult and have re-read them several times. My wife thinks I’m crazy since I read them so often, but they are inspirational and entertaining for me. They definitely influenced my career path. I have always been enthralled (obsessed) with martial arts and Asian culture.  This book, which takes place in Hong Kong, fed that Asian obsession.

When I researched and learned that the novel was loosely based on fact (the business history of a company called Jardine Matheson), I was hooked. I was fascinated with the aspects of global trade & finance along with the dynamics of doing business as a foreigner in Asia. I visited Hong Kong as a 20 year old, have been back numerous times and have loved the city ever since.

Noble House was a mini-series on NBC in 1988 starring Pierce Brosnan. In the mini-series the Jardine House was used as the location of the Noble House.  Jardine Matheson is still located in this building.  Formerly known as Connaught Center, it is a 52 storey building built in 1972. It is the star of this brief video I took on a recent trip to Hong Kong.  Enjoy!

BuildDirect Goes to ‘Noble House’ is a post from: Building Materials and Flooring With Rob Banks. Rob is Co-Founder of BuildDirect, the world's leading online source for building materials including wood flooring, tile and stone, decking, roofing, siding, sustainable building and more. Rob writes on a variety of topics including procurement, intertnational travel, building products, and building industry trade shows.

Related posts:

1. How to Travel to China and Stay on Your Game, Too
2. Hello From Rob Banks – That’s Me

One of the coolest things I get to experience in my role at BuildDirect is seeing things that many others wouldn’t see. This little video shows one of those moments. I was flying from Shenzhen airport in the south of China up north to Shenyang airport on a Chinese domestic airline call Shenzhen Airlines.

Other than the obvious differences in the service, language, food and ‘movie’ selection (I’m a little concerned that the general population that fly domestic Chinese airlines may all end up with hearing problems.  They certainly are not shy on the volume level of said movies…) I have learned that the most unusual difference in the exercise routine that happens on longer flights (usually 2.5 hours+ in duration).

Here is a small clip of an exercise session that the entire plane took part in.

The flight attendants respectfully asked me not to film this, so I had to try and do it without drawing too much attention … it isn’t a great reflection of what happened, the starting part had a lot more arms waving in the air, but you get the general idea.

Business Travel Adventures in China: Airline Exercises is a post from: Building Materials and Flooring With Rob Banks. Rob is Co-Founder of BuildDirect, the world's leading online source for building materials including wood flooring, tile and stone, decking, roofing, siding, sustainable building and more. Rob writes on a variety of topics including procurement, intertnational travel, building products, and building industry trade shows.

Related posts:

1. How to Travel to China and Stay on Your Game, Too
2. Business Travel: What You See In the Middle of Nowhere, Part 2
3. Domotex Shanghai Flooring Show

I had the chance to wander around the incredible Richmond Olympic Oval with my co-worker Rob Jones recently.  I have a membership to work out at the gym, so we were able to enter the facility when it was closed to the public, hence the footage with no one else present.  The building is amazing and absolutely huge inside. I highly recommend a visit if you are in the area.

May 15, 2009 the Richmond News newspaper reported that the Oval has been recognized with a top national award for architecture.

“The Oval was honoured by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada for innovation in architecture. Architectural firm Canon Design was behind the look of the $173M Olympic speed skating facility. The institute cited the oval’s use of discarded pine-bettle wood for the ceiling; its wood bean span; and the design of heating, ventilating and acoustics as the reasons for the award.”

I’d throw in the incredible location right on the Fraser River and the view of the local mountain range as additional reasons to love this facility.

Well done and congrats to the City of Richmond and all others involved on this recent award, I’m sure many more will follow.

BuildDirect Goes to The 2010 Olympic Oval is a post from: Building Materials and Flooring With Rob Banks. Rob is Co-Founder of BuildDirect, the world's leading online source for building materials including wood flooring, tile and stone, decking, roofing, siding, sustainable building and more. Rob writes on a variety of topics including procurement, intertnational travel, building products, and building industry trade shows.

Related posts:

1. Hello From Rob Banks – That’s Me
2. 2010 Domotex Show in Germany and Wood Flooring thoughts

Many of you have had fun and unique food experiences while traveling.  Here are a few of mine.

After flying all night to Southern China (a 14 hour flight), driving 2 hours to a remote hotel for a breakfast meeting, I walked in and within 2 minutes I was served this:

That’s a turkey foot.  In gelatin.

I was in the outskirts of Beijing in a Sichuan restaurant. Authentic Sichuan food is fire hot. I love spicy food, but I had no idea that food could be that hot. Some people must have an iron stomachs, the smell entering the restaurant burned my eyes!

One dish, which I don’t have a photo of, was a full fish (head, tail, fins, skin, etc) that had been boiled in a pot of oil. The oil had what looked like hundreds of red chili’s in it. The Chinese name translates to ‘water cooked fish’, but there is no water involved, it is fish cooked in large pot of chili oil.

I did take a photo of an appetizer dish, peanuts and fish heads.

It’s peanuts, fish-heads, and ‘vegetables’.  Anything  green is described as ‘vegetables’.  And this dish is served cold.

When I was in Hanover  in northern Germany at the Domotex flooring trade show I found myself walking back from a couple of pints with a co-worker and we saw this advertisement in a MacDonald’s restaurant window:

They don’t have chicken nuggets they have schnitzel nuggets (pieces of veal, breaded and fried). Different strokes for different folks.

Business Travel: What You See In the Middle of Nowhere, Part 2 is a post from: Building Materials and Flooring With Rob Banks. Rob is Co-Founder of BuildDirect, the world's leading online source for building materials including wood flooring, tile and stone, decking, roofing, siding, sustainable building and more. Rob writes on a variety of topics including procurement, intertnational travel, building products, and building industry trade shows.

Related posts:

1. What you see in the middle of nowhere, Part 3
2. The Best Food In China
3. Business Travel Adventures in China: Airline Exercises