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Yes. It won't just be a DJ school - it'll be an Electronic Music Production & DJ Academy. I don't have the cash to start it up without investors but I know some "people to know" in Shanghai and will start hustling upon arrival. I need a day job, though, for residence permit, housing, cash, etc. until I get my ducks in a row. But yeah. In about a year you're going to start seeing me in ads on the subway and poo poo. I figure it's impossible to have this kind of business in the USA because white people but I understand China pretty well now, and people in the know seem to think it will work. My plan isn't to run it forever, though, but get it started, train a staff, run it to a point of profitability and sell it off. Anyway is 20k/month plus normal amenities (minus housing) decent for a 20-hour laowai high school teacher in Shanghai? bad day fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Apr 10, 2015 |
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Apr 10, 2015 15:26
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Don't know, never been Doesn't sound like a particularly bad deal, from a general EFL perspective, but I don't know what else is on offer in Shanghai
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Apr 10, 2015 15:39
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bad day posted:
Western teaching certified? It's on the low end, though at only 20 hours a week it's probably an OK deal.
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Apr 10, 2015 16:40
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Tell me stories about teaching germ theory
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Apr 10, 2015 17:26
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I thought regular high schools paid less than like any other English teaching job. Also I'm totally out of the loop on teaching rates, but I thought the corporate language mills were something like 15k for 25 teaching hours a week but actually want you present for 40, and the only places paying more would be teaching little kid or being at international school
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Apr 10, 2015 18:30
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How much does it cost to open a school in Shanghai anyways?
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Apr 10, 2015 20:39
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At my DJ school I would lock the students in a room for 4 hours every day for 3 years because that's what I did.
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Apr 10, 2015 22:15
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LentThem posted:I thought regular high schools paid less than like any other English teaching job. Also I'm totally out of the loop on teaching rates, but I thought the corporate language mills were something like 15k for 25 teaching hours a week but actually want you present for 40, and the only places paying more would be teaching little kid or being at international school 15k would have been near the high end for publicly-advertised positions when I left last year; and they usually won't care if you're there outside class hours (though obviously your classes are gonna be poo poo if you aren't putting in some prep). I've never heard of of a high school or university job paying good money, but I ain't heard of a lot of things that exist.
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Apr 11, 2015 00:17
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augustus gluten posted:At my DJ school I would lock the students in a room for 4 hours every day for 3 years because that's what I did. Tell us more
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Apr 11, 2015 00:35
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VideoTapir posted:15k would have been near the high end for publicly-advertised positions when I left last year; and they usually won't care if you're there outside class hours (though obviously your classes are gonna be poo poo if you aren't putting in some prep). Most HS jobs pay less than training centers. I think he was talking about international school gigs. I know high school gigs here in Tianjin that pay like 4,000 rmb/month.
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Apr 11, 2015 03:02
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Arglebargle III posted:You sure? March may be the season but a lot of places will be interviewing new candidates and filling vacancies through June. Many schools run their budget cycles by the academic calendar so June/July is their absolute deadline for filling positions. I don't know about Hong Kong though, maybe it's different there! I'm talking about the English School Foundation of in Hong Kong. But do be careful about working in places where you are slotting in the last minute - HR is probably really incompetent and the administration shady as heck. Normal schools tend to have a few other candidates on roster and wouldn't have these last minute hires. Anyways... Useless Name posted:Has the 2+ year experience requirement moved to the inland provinces yet? The good provinces on the coastline definitely require you to be two years older after graduating, but I remember Changsha being filled with 21-22 year olds doing a leap-year in China. They would often all come to Hunan through the same recruitment agency, get paid really lovely, get drunk every weekend/day, and 90%+ leave after a year. But all had legal z-visas. I mean, why would someone with 2 years of esl experience ever want to come work in a tiny (population 1 million+) rural town in Hunan for 5000 rmb per month. I hope they all die early. Or at least get their organs harvested for research or for people in need goldboilermark posted:Most HS jobs pay less than training centers. I think he was talking about international school gigs. I know high school gigs here in Tianjin that pay like 4,000 rmb/month.
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Apr 11, 2015 04:32
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Vogue posted:Good info. I'll wait it out, got post-grad stuff supposed to line up soon anyway. Does anyone have experience in Zhuhai and can name a few areas that are similar? (Coastal, laidback, not cheap/rural). Also I really didn't like the day I spent in Maocao, everything way was too expensive and touristy. I know Zhuhai is supposedly a huge vacation destination as well, but it seems to be the case only for people already in China whereas Maocao had a lot of fellow laowai (which pumped up the price of everything). There's a goon living in Zhuhai for 2 years right now. He used to like Zhuhai being all Chill and now but now he's all bored and wants to move to Taiwan. His Mandarin is not too bad and is basic conversation level from self studying.
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Apr 11, 2015 04:33
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So there's been some badmouthing of international schools in this thread. Is the HK NET program better in terms of not driving people insane and/or finding bullshit reasons to fire them? Also, if I've got a mandarin-speaking kid with a US passport and I went NET, would I have to pay a fortune to put them in school?
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Apr 11, 2015 04:39
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goldboilermark posted:I know high school gigs here in Tianjin that pay like 4,000 rmb/month. So it's a budget thing, right? I mean most high schools probably have crap budget for hiring teachers. I would think if we are talking about standard public high school in Shanghai, the absolute upper end would be 10k/month, and they need someone for more than 20hrs/week. For corporate language mill gigs in Shanghai, I think I saw an ad recently for Wall Street English offering up to 17k for full-time teachers, and 11k for part-time (20hr), and these guys usually pay more than a lot of the language mills. So High School will definitely be lower than that. There's no way international schools were part of the original discussion, because nobody dedicated enough to teaching to get western qualifications before coming here would have a career plan that involves running several business that arent really teaching in schools and being DJ-By-Night
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Apr 11, 2015 04:40
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Oh you have a kid and want to be NET? Good luck getting affordable placement! There used to be the government subsidized schools for English speaking families like ESF but decolonization cut its funding. Now they are run like private international schools  But if you are an ESF teacher your children get free placement though, then again, are you qualified for ESF? If you are qualified for the ESF in the first place, you wouldn't be in this predicament in the first place right? It's the curse of ESL! Hurrary！goldboilermark posted:Most HS jobs pay less than training centers. I think he was talking about international school gigs. I know high school gigs here in Tianjin that pay like 4,000 rmb/month. Isn't that like civil servant pay? You do get a pension 
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Apr 11, 2015 04:47
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VideoTapir posted:Western teaching certified? It's on the low end, though at only 20 hours a week it's probably an OK deal. Not certified, but I now have a masters in business and 6 years of experience teaching English in China. I've been the head teacher (of two teachers lol) for a middle school international class for the last 4 years. In Henan. I know I could get a better paying entry-level job in finance or something but am only really interested in teaching for one more year, then transition to being a full-time entrepreneur. So 20k is not bad? I'm looking at a couple positions and they're all in Pudong. I really, really don't want to live in Pudong but if it's only for 10 months or so I guess I don't care.. It's better than Henan. edit: also my "DJ School" won't be like a training mill - we'll basically be selling 3-month intensive courses in computer music software/hardware. bad day fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Apr 11, 2015 |
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Apr 11, 2015 05:09
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LentThem posted:So it's a budget thing, right? I mean most high schools probably have crap budget for hiring teachers. I would think if we are talking about standard public high school in Shanghai, the absolute upper end would be 10k/month, and they need someone for more than 20hrs/week. I really know very little about this stuff outside of Tianjin, so I'm not really one to ask about Shanghai or stuff like that. Sorry 
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Apr 11, 2015 05:19
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VideoTapir posted:Also, if I've got a mandarin-speaking kid with a US passport and I went NET, would I have to pay a fortune to put them in school? A colleague has kids in an international primary school in a tier 2 city on the mainland. Costs are about 14k USD per year, per child. Trammel fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Apr 11, 2015 |
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Apr 11, 2015 05:25
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Trammel posted:A colleague has kids in an international school in a tier 2 city on the mainland. Costs are about 14k USD per year, per child. That's what I was hoping to avoid. I'll only be considering international schools in places where I could get my kid into a local school, or where they'd get free tuition.
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Apr 11, 2015 05:35
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LentThem posted:So it's a budget thing, right? I mean most high schools probably have crap budget for hiring teachers. I would think if we are talking about standard public high school in Shanghai, the absolute upper end would be 10k/month, and they need someone for more than 20hrs/week. It's the university teaching jobs that have budgets and are limited to 6000 rmb/month or less. High schools operate under a rating system where one of the requirements to move up into an 'A' rating is to have a foreigner teach English at the school. This then gives the school access to more government money and the principal can buy a new BMW for his mistress. Public school teachers in Hunan would earn 4000-5000 per month but only because the recruiter that brought them over is taking 3000-4000 per month in fees. As for Shanghai, it runs a world class public education system that has plenty of money. I've heard of 20,000 per month before, though often the teacher is asked to teach AP classes too. Schools in China are primarily funded and run by the province they're in, so Shanghai schools can afford to hire actual skilled English teachers instead of just white faces.
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Apr 11, 2015 09:26
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Trammel posted:A colleague has kids in an international primary school in a tier 2 city on the mainland. Costs are about 14k USD per year, per child. Funnily enough, that sort of tuition rate for a private primary school in the US is a dream.
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Apr 11, 2015 15:43
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Bucket Joneses posted:Funnily enough, that sort of tuition rate for a private primary school in the US is a dream. Because in the US you move to a nice white school district so anyone putting kids in private schools are rich to start with.
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Apr 11, 2015 16:07
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caberham posted:There's a goon living in Zhuhai for 2 years right now. He used to like Zhuhai being all Chill and now but now he's all bored and wants to move to Taiwan. His Mandarin is not too bad and is basic conversation level from self studying. Taipei is another place that's in my sights, mainly because I haven't kept up with my Mandarin and I'm big into eSports. It kinda feels like cheating myself out of the ~CHINA ADVENTURE~ since way more people speak English in Taiwan and there'd be less to explore. With news that I have to wait two years after graduation to do all this stuff legally though I'm fine to give it some time, maybe actually get back to 学中文 so I can 听懂 Vogue fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 15, 2015 03:48
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Vogue posted:Taipei is another place that's in my sights, mainly because I haven't kept up with my Mandarin and I'm big into eSports. It kinda feels like cheating myself out of the ~CHINA ADVENTURE~ since way more people speak English in Taiwan and there'd be less to explore. With news that I have to wait two years after graduation to do all this stuff legally though I'm fine to give it some time, maybe actually get back to 学中文 so I can 听不懂 eSports are kinda big in China. They just had a multimillion dollar Dota 2 tournament a couple months ago and host several multimillion dollar LoL tournaments a year, and the company that owns LoL is a Chinese conglomerate that runs literally half the internet in the country. Also most of the best teams in those games are from mainland China. I actually have met people that have moved to Shanghai or Guangzhou from the west to start covering esports and it's the craziest loving thing.
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Apr 15, 2015 03:59
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fart simpson posted:You're doing it wrong. You can just link your bank account directly with Alipay and you'll never need to worry about manual money management again. Okay, this doesn't work either. I submitted everything then got an email a while later, and this is the error. 银行卡信息认证失败。 你的银行卡信息认证失败，请更换银行卡重新认证或撤销认证8天后（2015年04月24日）使用原银行卡重新认证， 撤销本次认证。 It's something about the bank card but I can't find anywhere that says what the problem is? The information is correct and the card is activated for internet use. E: The manual recharge thing finally worked so I no longer care. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 16, 2015 10:27
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I don't think a bank card has anything to do with the verification step at all.
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Apr 16, 2015 10:44
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You have to put in your bank and your card. The box is on the same screen as the passport/visa pics and such. Then it says it'll transfer a small amount of money, you confirm the amount and it's linked.
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Apr 16, 2015 11:13
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Grand Fromage posted:You have to put in your bank and your card. The box is on the same screen as the passport/visa pics and such. Then it says it'll transfer a small amount of money, you confirm the amount and it's linked. Oh right.
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Apr 16, 2015 11:15
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In William Dalrymple's In Xanadu he mentions a stop at an Oasis called "Charchalik" in Xinjiang. When I tried to look it up on Google the book is the only result I get is for the book, and a bunch of stuff in Cyrillic. I don't suppose there's a more acceptable transliteration of this name? It's between Charchan and Korla. Thanks.
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Apr 18, 2015 10:07
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bad day posted:Yes. It won't just be a DJ school - it'll be an Electronic Music Production & DJ Academy. I don't have the cash to start it up without investors but I know some "people to know" in Shanghai and will start hustling upon arrival. I need a day job, though, for residence permit, housing, cash, etc. until I get my ducks in a row. As a single data point of comparison, an established restaurant in Beijing, which won an award in 2011 is being offered for sale for 500k RMB. I'm really not sure how much profit there is to be made in selling businesses here.
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Apr 20, 2015 04:27
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Wife and I are in Guangzhou until Thursday for an immigration interview, what's worth doing here? It has just been rainy and poo poo so far so is there anything worth doing that's indoors? Also I can't seem to find a decent pharmacy anywhere, all these little piddly chain pharmacies that don't ever seem to have anything I'm looking for. Recommendations?
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Apr 20, 2015 16:08
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Trammel posted:As a single data point of comparison, an established restaurant in Beijing, which won an award in 2011 is being offered for sale for 500k RMB. Eh, restaurants are money pits - usually they start strong (winning an award 4 years ago means nothing other than they used to have a good chef/manager) and then go to crap after a couple of years. I wouldn't buy a restaurant - no one with any real sense ever would.. I'd buy a school though, if they could demonstrate a consistent revenue stream. I was looking at an English school in zhengzhou but the owner wanted to retain 55% which is bullshit, why would I buy a business where I'm not the majority owner? That's just dumb. Anyway I got a decent job in Shanghai, pretty far outside the city but right off line 16, so I'll be able to go in on weekends. Ducks are in a row for the moment.
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Apr 21, 2015 09:29
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When your DJ school gets started will you look for outside investors or will it just be you as the majority owner? I mean you wouldn't want to split your profits from the sale I figure.
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Apr 21, 2015 09:56
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I want to find someone who will put up the money in exchange for a 30-40% ownership stake, maybe as a convertible loan, maybe as stock. I fully expect to wind up meeting a bunch of Chinese businessmen who would put up the money, let me run the business for them, and never give me ownership - I don't want to deal with those people. After setup costs I don't anticipate the need for more funding - the school will start paying for itself as soon as we open - so I'm comfortable letting go of 30-40% in exchange for startup capital. No more than that, though. Because my overall plan is to build up a profitable business and sell it after 3-4 years in order to fund other ventures I have in mind. There's more to it than a DJ school, though, I'll be bringing over a lot of semi-famous producers who are friends or friends of friends and pimping them out to promoters in Shanghai, Beijing, etc. The school itself would need to be a joint-venture between the main investor and my wholly foreign-owned holding company (which I'm working on setting up this year). My long-term goal is to run some sort of luxury marijuana tourism business in about 4-5 years once 15-20 states have legalized it, and I have the right sort of reputation/connects among the Chinese 1%ers. I dunno, these ideas might seem kind of unrealistic but I've been here a LONG time, and know what I'm doing. My friend in Shanghai thinks someone else will "steal" my idea but I keep explaining that if you can tell another person your business idea, and they can just go do it themselves, it's a terrible business idea. There's a lot more to it than "hire a DJ, start a school" - I'll be training staff and working on marketing before I have an investor, even. The laowai in that city are pretty snobby about their music scene but since I'm adding something that doesn't exist, rather than trying to take customers from an extant business, hopefully they won't regard me as some outsider who doesn't know WTF he's doing. Because I do. I really, really do. I wish I had the time to go to MIDI Electronic festival this year and meet people (may 15th?) but I'm taking two weeks off work to go to the US for my MBA finals and graduation.. I can't take another vacation to go to an EDM festival right after I get back. It's only 300rmb for 3 days, a lot of good-looking acts. I'd check it out if you're in the Shanghai area.
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Apr 22, 2015 02:51
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Please post updates as they happen. Please.
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Apr 22, 2015 03:23
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Where did you get your MBA from?
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Apr 22, 2015 03:41
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University of Florida. It was an internet program, but I got the same degree as a normal 2-year full-time program. Kind of a hugely stressful pain in the rear end, really - considering I was working full-time and had a kid while doing the program. I wouldn't recommend it.
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Apr 22, 2015 03:46
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I'm curious how you're going about setting up the company, as a JV with a Chinese spouse as the "owner", a WFOE?
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Apr 22, 2015 04:14
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bad day posted:After setup costs I don't anticipate the need for more funding - the school will start paying for itself as soon as we open I am not posting to mock you - I think I recall you giving me advice about China when I was in first-time-work-visa-panic mode, and that was great, so this is genuine serious advice: First, *Any* business that's not just an outgrowth / division of a going concern needs to start out with enough funding to get through the first few months when you're doing all the things a business does (being registered, paying taxes/fees/bribes, advertising, paying staff, having an office) but you're not actually getting paid by customers, because you don't have any yet. Even if you *start* with customers, getting paid by them will take some time. Second, lower portion of the quote seems to suggest that you might face not just apathy, but *actively negative* word-of-mouth. In a business / professions / hobby that's all about word-of-mouth. If that is the case, you need to really think about how you're going to advertise; since your business plan doesn't seem to allocate much funding to 'traditional advertising', and that sort of thing wouldn't be very efficient at reaching your target audience anyway, you should probably try to 'come out of nowhere' and approach club owners with some sort of deal trading promotion for free sets, and ideally a 'training night' on one of their weekly / monthly off-days. But do this *before* you get any of the previously-mentioned negative word-of-mouth stuff, because if your (school's) name becomes a joke, it'll be much harder to make those essential links.
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Apr 22, 2015 04:41
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Oh, I know all of this. Just because I haven't talked about my advertising/marketing plan doesn't mean I don't have one - it's just that I'm not going to publicly discuss that aspect of what I'm doing. I've got this whole thing worked out, down to exact design details, logos, specific locations, employees, advertising, publicity, etc. But, you know, given China things are always subject to constant change, nothing can ever be set in stone. Bribes, surprise inspections, work permits for employees, random unforeseen expenses, these are to be expected. It'll take me a year to get this off the ground, in which time I'll take some private students (but not many). Weirdly, the scene of musicians working in Shanghai is mostly Jazz. Lots of super talented international jazz musicians. There's some some standard EDM stuff going on in the nightclub scene but from what I've seen they're mostly pretty lazy about mixing, use older, previous-gen technology like CDJs, and don't do have many performative elements going on in their work. I don't think it'll be so difficult to make myself - or my students - stand out from the existing crowd - because we really will be teaching them to do something that's demonstrably more interesting than 98% of what you encounter in Shanghai nightclubs. For example I already have a guy lined up to teach this device in our first "guest lecturer" series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAeybdD5UoQ bad day fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Apr 22, 2015 |
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Apr 22, 2015 05:34
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