Chapter 100 Setbacks

Pei Qian felt a little dizzy.

I opened the restaurant, and now I can’t even make a reservation for myself?

Lin Canrong reminded him, "But don't worry, President Pei. According to your previous instructions, we’ve reserved the largest private room on the 20th of every even-numbered month for company events, and every first and third Sunday of the month.”

“So next Sunday, September 5th, you can still come and dine.”

Pei Qian: “……”

He had indeed arranged in advance for Mingyun Private Kitchen to be reserved on the 20th of every even-numbered month for company team-building activities. The largest private room was also reserved for possible business banquets on the first and third Sundays of each month.

Looking back, that standard seemed a bit conservative. He should have reserved a few more days.

The main thing was that Pei Qian could never have imagined that Mingyun Private Kitchen would become what it is today…

Pei Qian originally thought, so what if there were a group of regular customers? Mingyun Private Kitchen has so many private rooms, and they serve lunch and dinner every day. Surely one or two rooms would be left over?

But now, reality slapped him hard in the face!

So… how did the news leak out??

Could it be Lin Wan causing trouble again?

Pei Qian thought about it. Most of his treasure employees were grassroots whom he had promoted himself. None of them had very deep backgrounds, so they shouldn't have that much power.

The only employee with that kind of power should be Lin Wan.

However, Shenhua Corporation's influence in Jingzhou was not strong. Their industries were mainly in Pengcheng. How could they find so many people to eat at Mingyun Private Kitchen?

Or… have other enemies emerged???

Pei Qian didn't speak for a long time, partly because he hadn't recovered from this fierce blow, and partly because he was thinking about which link went wrong.

Hearing that President Pei hadn't spoken for a long time on the phone, Lin Canrong thought that President Pei was happy about the popularity of Mingyun Private Kitchen and quickly seized the opportunity to flatter him.

Oh no, how could it be called flattery? Everything he was about to say was the truth, without a single false word.

"President Pei, I have to say that your previous instructions to focus on the private kitchen business and not consider publicity were indeed visionary and so correct!"

"Your grasp of the mentality of Jingzhou's wealthy class has simply reached its peak. Every step is interlocking, which is admirable."

Pei Qian: "???"

What are you talking about? I don’t understand at all?

Pei Qian knew that Lin Canrong was blowing rainbow farts, and he was not interested in these rainbow farts at all. In fact, he was very disgusted.

These rainbow farts were simply exposing President Pei's scars!

But Pei Qian had to listen because he had to figure out through Lin Canrong's rainbow farts which link in Mingyun Private Kitchen had gone wrong!

Lin Canrong on the other end of the phone didn't notice President Pei's surprise and continued to speak excitedly.

"Now that I think about it, my understanding of the wealthy circle was too shallow. The local wealthy circle in Jingzhou is not big, and most of them know each other. Our private kitchen mainly targets customers in this small circle, so you thought it was unnecessary to promote it, which was so correct."

"Because information spreads too quickly in this small circle!"

"That customer named Xue Zhebin only came after seeing Zhang Zuting's Weibo, and then he invited Wang Peng, the CEO of Quanmin Dianping (Everyone's Reviews). As a result, President Wang commented on the review website, and Mingyun Private Kitchen immediately became popular!"

"I didn't expect that it would be so simple for our low-key restaurant to become popular!"

"Of course, your other decisions have also added icing on the cake."

"Mingyun Private Kitchen has no name, so President Wang didn't write the name in his review on Quanmin Dianping. This immediately highlighted Mingyun Private Kitchen's maverick temperament, which sparked widespread discussion!"

"Moreover, the lack of a name also led to the fact that it could be found every time when searching with keywords with spaces, so our exposure has greatly increased!"

"The most critical point is that the regulations you set for the restaurant, such as not allowing photos, changing the table and tableware according to the dishes, and the waiters' service like a gentle breeze... all perfectly meet the needs of the target customers and are well received by the nouveau riche!"

"And the good reputation among the nouveau riche has in turn affected the general consumers. Although the prices of our dishes are relatively high, most general consumers also feel that they are worth the money after consuming here. This is precisely because of the word-of-mouth effect of the top nouveau riche!"

Lin Canrong praised the success model of Mingyun Private Kitchen, which was not entirely to flatter President Pei, but also to sincerely sigh.

He personally experienced the whole incident. At the beginning, he also had many misunderstandings about President Pei's arrangements, and even didn't have high hopes for the future of the private kitchen.

But now, the doubts have been completely resolved, and President Pei's unexpected arrangements have worked perfectly!

Pei Qian remained silent. Lin Canrong's rainbow farts all went in one ear and out the other. There was no need to remember them, but he remembered these two names.

Xue Zhebin and Wang Peng, the two culprits!

Xue Zhebin even came after seeing Zhang Zuting's Weibo, so Zhang Zuting was also to blame!

Pei Qian just wanted to say four words: impossible to defend against!

There were too many enemies, and he was simply surrounded on all sides.

Pei Qian sighed silently. Alas, three more names would be added to his little notebook.

"Then book a private room for me next Sunday. Just make the menu different from last time."

Pei Qian said weakly.

…

…

After hanging up the phone, Pei Qian felt a lot of pressure, and his mood was not good.

According to the current popularity of Mingyun Private Kitchen, it would definitely make money.

But, it wouldn't make too much money.

Because Mingyun Private Kitchen's reception capacity was limited. It was only so big, and even if it was fully booked for lunch and dinner every day, it couldn't receive too many people.

Mingyun Private Kitchen's daily expenses were also very high, employing several gold-medal chefs, many well-trained waiters, and staff to move tables and change decorations. The labor costs remained high.

The prices of the private kitchen's dishes were high, but they were not exorbitant, so Wang Peng thought it was quite cost-effective.

Therefore, Mingyun Private Kitchen would definitely make money, but it would be impossible to earn back all the investment in the short term.

It could be said to be a blessing in disguise.

Pei Qian spent more than 6 million yuan on this commercial and residential villa, and 10% of that was counted into the system funds, which was 600,000 yuan.

In other words, it would be cost-effective for Pei Qian until Mingyun Private Kitchen earned back 5.4 million yuan.

But… it was only a matter of time before it became not cost-effective.

Pei Qian felt the pressure. It was already the beginning of September, and more than half of the settlement period had passed. President Pei didn't have much time left.

The most urgent things were two things.

First, "A Bloody Battle Song: Power Up Edition" had to be launched quickly and flop, to give President Pei peace of mind.

Second, the mechanism of issuing bonuses based on word-of-mouth evaluation that he had thought of before had to be implemented immediately.

Since having the idea of "issuing bonuses based on word-of-mouth," Pei Qian had formulated a set of rules that had been almost finalized after discussion.

The base number of the bonus was determined according to the project's initial investment.

The coefficient was determined according to the project's word-of-mouth rating. After multiplying the coefficient by the previous base number, the bonus amount was determined and distributed to all members of the project according to their positions and the importance of their work.

The most important thing was how to specifically determine the project's word-of-mouth.

If external websites' ratings were used, it would be easy to inflate the ratings, and they might not be accurate.

For example, for a game, some review websites give high scores, and some review websites give low scores. Which one should be used as the standard?

Relying on all netizens to give scores was also not very reliable, because the scores could be inflated, and competitors might organize water armies to maliciously give one-star ratings.

If a comprehensive rating was made based on authoritative media, player opinions, and internal company opinions…

What difference would that be from creating your own evaluation standard?

So after considering it, Pei Qian felt that if he wanted to issue bonuses based on word-of-mouth evaluation, he had to have a complete internal rating mechanism, which was unavoidable.

Overall, the accuracy of the evaluation mainly depended on two points:

On the one hand, try to eliminate those malicious ratings, such as water army ratings, irrational hate ratings, and so on; on the other hand, while focusing on the target users in a certain field, also try to expand the subject of the evaluation as much as possible.

Many movie or game ratings have a phenomenon, that is, the more niche they are, the easier it is to inflate the ratings.

This is because for niche movies, hardcore fans are willing to give high scores, and before the movies go viral, people who are not interested in this subject matter cannot access them and will not rate them, so the scores will be falsely high.

Once these niche movies go viral, the decline in ratings is almost inevitable.

Therefore, considering these factors, Pei Qian finally finalized a set of internal Tengda word-of-mouth evaluation mechanisms and gave it a rather foreign name: tpdb, the full name being Tengda Project Database.

This database would collect all Tengda projects and rate them comprehensively based on the following factors.

Internal evaluation by Tengda executives;

Comprehensive evaluation by ordinary Tengda employees;

Comprehensive evaluation by authoritative media;

Consumer reviews;

Netizen reviews.

Each evaluation would be included in the total score according to different weights.

Among them, the evaluation weight of Tengda internal employees would be higher than that of ordinary netizens. Each employee's evaluation was real-name, and only a very small number of executives (such as Pei Qian) could see it.

It could not be completely ruled out that internal employees also randomly gave scores or gave friendship scores, but at least everyone would cherish their rating rights more, because the rating records could be traced.

If they gave high scores to their own projects in order to get more bonuses, or maliciously gave low scores to suppress other projects, these behaviors would be seen by President Pei.

Consumer reviews and ordinary netizen reviews used different weights. For example, for a game, the evaluation weights of consumers who actually purchased the game and people who did not purchase the game were different. The former would be higher.

Of course, no matter which evaluation system was adopted, some people would feel that it was inaccurate.

If Pei Qian insisted on having his own way and specially gave more bonuses to those loss-making projects, he could lose money more quickly, but the employees of other projects would definitely be suspicious, and this matter would not be handled fairly.

Therefore, Pei Qian thought of tpdb, a special rating database. With such a relatively comprehensive and fair evaluation system, issuing bonuses according to the above ratings and project investment base numbers, everyone should not have any objections.

At the same time, the way bonuses were issued was also different for different projects.

The longer the operation time, the more times the bonuses would be issued.

For projects like Upwind Logistics, Pei Qian's goal was to keep them running until the end of time, so he could consider issuing bonuses every quarter based on word-of-mouth.

For games like "Turn Back is the Shore" that were bought out, two or three bonuses would be enough. If there were subsequent DLCs, they would be issued based on the word-of-mouth of the DLCs.

Of course, Pei Qian also had to consider the balance between the various projects. Although President Pei preferred projects like Upwind Logistics that would continue to burn money, he could not make the bias too obvious.

After getting everything done, Pei Qian handed this plan to Assistant Xin with satisfaction.

"Starting next month, all project bonuses will be implemented according to this standard."