Best Buy Mobile open in China

This was an amazing week at work.  We have been working for the past few months to open Best Buy Mobile stores inside of our Five Star stores in Nanjing, China.  We opened our first two stores this week.  The first was in Liu He on Wednesday and the second in Xin Jie Kou on Friday.  Liu He is a rural part of Nanjing about an hour North of downtown.  Xin Jie Kou is in the heart of Nanjing.  It is the busiest store in the Five Star chain.  I was so proud of our Best Buy Mobile team and our Five Star team for all that has been accomplished.  It was amazing to see how hard our team worked to accomplish major milestone.  My family has been amazing to support me in this.  I couldn't have done this without them.  I know move to China has been extremely hard for them.  I have been working a lot since they have been here and they have been surviving China in large part without me.  Hopefully now that the first two stores are open I will be able to spend a little more time with them.

I am extremely blessed to work with on an incredible team.  Our team consists of people from all over the world. We represent China, USA, Canada, Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, India, and Pakistan.  We have been able to accomplish so much in such a short amount of time.  I also have an amazing team that works for me.  Ken, David, Louis, Victor, Hood, Mandy and Cherry and our store teams have worked tirelessly to get everything in place in order to open the stores.  It is such a pleasure to work with such great people.  Seeing our stores open is definitely top three proudest moments in my work career.  Even better than seeing these stores open is to see the great results that we are getting.  This is because of great strategies developed by the team and then many people executing the strategies at a high level.

Our business model and company culture is very different than what exists currently in China.  There has been much resistance and struggle to get to where we are today with two stores open.  There has also been much support by people realizing that things need to change.  These past few months have really been an exercise in change management.  We have been aligning support for the work we are doing and helping others to move from resisting the work to supporting the work.  In any change this tough work and also continuous work.  I have learned so much over the past few months.  We have so much more work to do and we have proven we can do it.

Short post this week.  I've also attached some pictures of our team and stores.

Ribbon cutting

Liu He Store

Eric (District Manager), Boyd, Sunny (District Ops Manager)

Sheri Ballard (President Best Buy International)
Stephen Mackarel (CEO Best Buy Mobile China,
also my boss)

Proud of the work the team has done.  

Celebrating the ribbon cutting

Team photo

Thanks to Steve Brown for the pictures.  Steve is the Supply Chain Director on our team and an amazing photographer. 

Boyd