Because the whole Indonesian journey – as is usually the case these days – started in Dubai.
The world’s ‘melting pot’ where everyone who wants to do business on a global level meets.
And where it’s very hard to come across native local entrepreneurs, yet you meet dozens of Czechs and hundreds of Brazilians, Americans, Filipinos or Koreans.
Many of them (like I once did) come here with big eyes that we will do business here. And many of us will meet the right people here to do business anywhere else. In the Emirates itself, it’s about long attendance and extreme patience, as I’ve written about before.
But back to Dubai and the trip to Bali. At the Light & Building exhibition I met a distributor for Steinel, a German company that is one of the top manufacturers of motion detectors. He introduced me to his Singaporean colleague Edrick, who in turn introduced me to his friend from Jakarta, Jimmy, who has great contacts with hoteliers in Bali and was about to host a conference on energy conservation.
The word was the word and a few months later, Jeevak Mathew Varughese, Steinel and I were sitting on a plane heading not to the Middle East, but to Southeast Asia.
Go to work on Saturday? No problem
The conference was held in Kuta. On Saturday.
I was surprised. “Do they have a working day in Bali?” – I checked with my colleagues.
“No, they don’t have to work today. So they have space for education.” – was the answer.
If you’re flying from Europe, where Thursday is already Little Friday and Monday is still an extended Sunday, you’ll appreciate this. It lets you know that people have come not to do time, but because they are genuinely interested.
And that’s what it really was. There were about forty people registered for the event, and then there were over sixty guests sitting in the hall who kept coming up to us. During the breaks and after the program, we had to keep explaining, adding to and breaking down where the solutions were going.
What was the biggest interest?
Logically, air-conditioning, because this is where hotel or residential money really flies through the windows. I know it from home. I like my home heated to 21 degrees, my wife maybe a degree more. There is no appreciable loss or expense in tempering that.
But air conditioning? How many times on vacation have you walked into a sweltering room that was a good 30 degrees and the sun continued to beat down on the windows. At that moment, of course, you first start looking for the air conditioner control, and fire up the smallest setting it will allow. Maybe 15 degrees, just to make the room bearable.
And we know that in this mode our iNELS solutions can typically save up to 40 – 45% of all costs. Simply by never allowing the temperature to leave a reasonable range, keeping an eye on the blinds in empty rooms, never allowing air conditioners or heaters to go to extremes.
Alongside this, of course, we presented our beloved retrofit. A solution that can turn old hotel rooms into new ones in no time.
After all, that’s what happened to me here. At the hotel in Uluwatu, I walked into a room with six different switches. At night, you want to turn on the light and you turn on four different lights before you finally hit which switch is for the lamp.
I used to give this story to the conference as well. And what did she bring? Contacts. A refresher. Experiences. And a real glimpse of the Singapore franchise.
