August 28th, Tuesday.

Pei Qian was sitting in a car, heading to the Tenda Experience Store.

Bored during the ride, he took out his phone and gleefully browsed through the discussions of netizens criticizing the Morning Dew Gaming Platform.

Seeing netizens declaring that the platform was doomed, would definitely collapse soon, and would be condemned by everyone, Pei Qian felt refreshed and invigorated.

Wonderful!

It had been a long time since he’d felt such satisfaction.

In recent months, it seemed like every month brought the bad news that another industry was booming. After enduring multiple heavy blows, Pei Qian had almost forgotten the initial joy of projects losing money and had somewhat grown accustomed to projects making money and becoming wildly popular.

This wasn’t good!

People should be more resilient in the face of setbacks, more persistent despite failures.

As long as one persisted, wouldn’t a turning point eventually come?

Take Meng Chang, for instance. If Pei Qian had given up on him when he repeatedly earned only base salary and kept messing up promotional plans, how would today’s success have been possible?

Thinking about this, Pei Qian felt a bit proud.

In any case, the beginning of this cycle was quite good. As the first project of this cycle, the Morning Dew Gaming Platform had set a good example for other projects in terms of losing money and being criticized.

In the future, by summarizing the experience of the Morning Dew Gaming Platform and entering other industries, the probability of losing money would surely increase significantly!

Pei Qian had already arranged all future plans for the Morning Dew Gaming Platform.

After this bug-finding activity ended, the traffic attracted by the rewards would quickly dissipate, and the previously accumulated negative public opinion would fully explode.

Then, the popularity of the Morning Dew Gaming Platform would plummet at light speed.

Pei Qian would seize this opportunity to allocate more promotional funds for regular advertising of the Morning Dew Gaming Platform.

But with its reputation damaged and no particularly good games on the platform, no matter how much promotional expense was invested, it would all be wasted and wouldn’t have much effect.

This way, wouldn’t they be burning money while doing nothing?

Optimistically, if the platform’s connection to Tenda could be kept secret for a year or more, it would be of great help, helping Mr. Pei get through how many settlement cycles?

Pessimistically, it should be no problem to last for at least half a year, at least securing the current settlement cycle.

If one day the relationship between the Morning Dew Gaming Platform and Tenda was exposed, public opinion would likely reverse instantly. At that point, Pei Qian would move all of Tenda’s games over, set prices lower than the official platform, and simultaneously change the revenue split for other game companies to a 9:1 split, with the platform taking only 10%.

While minimizing profits as much as possible, he would also conduct more promotional activities to burn money, striving to keep the gaming platform’s profits negative for a period of time.

This way, it should be able to last at least another year.

That would be enough.

For Pei Qian, if the gaming platform project could maintain a no-profit status for two or three years, that would be perfect. As for what happened afterwards, that was too distant and not something he needed to consider now.

Pei Qian happily made his plans, increasingly convinced that his decision to have Tang Yishu manage the gaming platform and Meng Chang handle the promotional work was the wisest decision possible.

As he pondered, they arrived at the experience store.

The entrance of Golden Prosperity Plaza was still as crowded as before.

Pei Qian felt a bit melancholic and silently sighed.

This time, the large screen outside the experience store no longer displayed the promotional poster for the GPL Spring Finals but had changed to a focal promotional poster for the GPL Summer Season regular matches.

Clearly, this large screen had become a huge promotional billboard for the GPL League venue across the street, and it was dynamic too, visible from far away, with an incredibly effective promotional impact.

Pei Qian really wanted to complain: I didn’t set up this big screen for this purpose!

But he was also worried that Tian Mo might ask in return: Then what was it for?

Pei Qian really wouldn’t know how to answer.

Never mind, let it be.

Advertising for GPL was still better than advertising for other businesses to make money. After all, GPL’s influence was already significant enough, and its popularity was already high enough. Whether or not this big screen advertisement was added wouldn’t make much difference.

Pei Qian put on his mask and went straight to the experience store, finding Tian Mo lurking among the crowd.

After that, Pei Qian took him to a relatively quiet café inside Golden Prosperity Plaza.

As for why they didn’t talk in the experience store…

Obviously because there were too many people.

Although the experience store also had dining and viewing areas, they were basically always packed. Especially after the snack market became popular, the experience store arranged for snack vendors to come and work in shifts regularly. Many people who came to the experience store would first go to the dining area to eat after getting tired from browsing, so it was very crowded.

With so many people around, it was easy to be exposed, so it was better to find a quiet café.

Pei Qian looked around, and seeing no one nearby, he finally felt at ease and took off his mask to take a sip of coffee.

Looking at Tian Mo, Pei Qian found it hard to express himself.

Three months had passed since the trial operation of the experience store.

During these three months, the store’s popularity had completely exceeded Pei Qian’s imagination.

Fortunately, there was still one piece of good news: the experience store was basically not making money.

Although the experience store sold merchandise, with the existence of Headwind Logistics, most customers only looked without buying.

Of course, they might have placed orders online after viewing, but there was no way to know.

In short, despite the high popularity of the experience store, the actual money earned barely covered the various costs of normal operations, and sometimes it even lost a little.

Initially, Pei Qian was very disappointed to see the experience store become popular, but after a while, he thought the situation might not be so bad.

If the first experience store couldn’t make much money, would opening more stores make even less money?

Diminishing marginal returns!

Jingzhou could be considered Tenda’s home base, where there were already many fans. This was Tenda’s first experience store, and it was located opposite the GPL venue. It seemed reasonable that it would be popular.

If they opened more stores in megacities like the Capital, Magic City, and other first-tier cities, would they start losing money?

After careful consideration, Pei Qian felt that the experience store, a good money-burning entity, shouldn’t be hastily abandoned. Despite the risk of continuing to make a profit, they should still try opening a few more stores.

The pensive Mr. Pei made Tian Mo feel a bit uneasy.

“Mr. Pei, are there aspects of my work that you’re dissatisfied with?”

Pei Qian responded with a chuckle.

Wasn’t that stating the obvious?

There were too many unsatisfactory aspects, the most unsatisfactory being why hadn’t he managed to deter all the customers?

But he couldn’t speak so bluntly, so he had to be vague: “Well, let’s just say there’s still some room for improvement.”

Tian Mo nodded slightly.

Having room for improvement was normal; after all, he was an outsider to the sales industry. No matter what, there was still too much to learn from Mr. Pei.

“Rest assured, Mr. Pei, if there are any deficiencies in my work, please point them out, and I’ll definitely make serious improvements! In the future, I’ll continue to stay by your side and learn more about sales knowledge!”

After a moment of silence, Pei Qian said, “There’s no need to stay by my side.”

Tian Mo: “Huh?”

Pei Qian said with some melancholy, “I have nothing more to teach you. Your next task is to open one more experience store in each of these three cities: the Capital, Magic City, and Sheep City.”

“Choose the best locations, spend the most money, and recruit all new staff. In short, start everything from scratch, and do it all over again!”

“As for the staff of the Jingzhou experience store… notify them that only one-fourth of the core staff will be retained. The others will all be dispatched—no, assigned to Slackin’ Internet Cafés, one person per café. They can choose which one they want.”

Pei Qian had already thought about this plan repeatedly.

Doing it all over again with new people in new places—surely Tian Mo couldn’t make the experience store successful this time!

The success of the Jingzhou experience store was partly due to Tenda’s long-term cultivation and accumulation in Jingzhou, and partly due to Liang Qianfan’s excellent site selection and design.

Actually, if the experience store work had been assigned to Tian Mo from the beginning, it might have been better.

But talented people like Tian Mo, whom he had encountered by chance on the street, were rare and couldn’t be sought out deliberately. The store was already being renovated when he found him, so there was nothing to be done.

In any case, this time he wouldn’t let Liang Qianfan get involved. Assigning all the work to Tian Mo should be no problem, right?

Given Tian Mo’s current abilities, selling things in the Tenda Experience Store at the EASY difficulty level was fine, but opening an experience store by himself would certainly be fraught with difficulties.

And since he was unfamiliar with cities like the Capital and Magic City, the probability of failure would be even greater.

In addition to this, Pei Qian also planned to reassign all the old staff of the experience store.

After all, if only the person in charge was sent away, the experience store could still possibly continue operating according to the previous arrangements.

But what if all the core staff were sent away?

Each Slackin’ Internet Café had just reformed its sales area, no longer selling any third-party peripherals, only selling Tenda’s own products.

There weren’t many products to begin with, and paired with these deterrent-style salespeople, they shouldn’t be able to sell much, right?

Even if they reluctantly sold some, the harm would be far less than at the experience store.

With a sudden turnover of three-quarters of the staff, perhaps the entire experience store would suffer a major blow and never recover?

Tian Mo was stunned.

“Huh? Mr. Pei, is this really appropriate?”

“I’ve only just barely adapted to management work, and I still don’t understand how to open an experience store at all! Besides, if I leave, who will be the manager of this store?”

Pei Qian had anticipated this response: “The choice for manager is simple—isn’t Zhuang Dong perfect?”

“Zhuang… Zhuang Dong?” Tian Mo was even more shocked.

Others might not know, but how could he not know what Zhuang Dong was like?

The fact that he could work as a salesperson in the experience store without causing major damage was already the result of straining his intellectual limits!

“Mr. Pei, Zhuang Dong is my buddy, and I certainly have no objections about him. But… can he be a manager?” Tian Mo looked bewildered.

Pei Qian smiled slightly: “If you can be a manager, why can’t he?”

Tian Mo: “Well, this…”

He was about to say, “Mr. Pei, don’t insult people,” but then he thought that perhaps what Mr. Pei said wasn’t wrong at all.

Maybe it was just his own perception that he was much smarter than Zhuang Dong.

In others’ eyes, even if he was somewhat smarter than Zhuang Dong, he probably wasn’t that much smarter.

And Mr. Pei had repeatedly praised and shown favoritism toward Zhuang Dong, clearly having found some quality in him that, under Mr. Pei’s catalysis, could lead to success.