Scott's China Trip - Part 1: Joining the Group and the Chinese Visa Fiasco

After I had given my two-weeks notice at AmeriBen in early September, I downloaded a bunch of podcasts to listen to and hopefully help me figure out what I wanted to do next. One of the podcasts was called “EasyResidual Income,” something I already had some experience with through my credit investing. I listened to two episodes in which Mike Gazzola was interviewed about how he and a partner (Matthew Behdjou) had started an Amazon store selling products they had sourced in China. They had grown their business to over $300,000 in sales in about 9 months starting from scratch (however, building off of their considerable marketing and business experience). A lot of what he said really gelled with many of the sound principles of business I have learned over the years and the way he gave away substantive, actionable information for free in his podcast convinced me that he actually had something of value to share.

A few days later I went to their website and signed up for their program. They do a phone interview to start people off and basically do a sales pitch for their course. In the podcast they mentioned that they were going to be taking a group of students with them to China to learn how to source their own products as well as getting some first-hand experience with Mike and Matt on the ground. I decided that I wanted to be a part of that China group and that if I simply followed their program, didn’t give up, asked a lot of questions, and did my homework, I would be able to at least make back the $10,000 tuition to be part of the China group and potentially much, much more.

The next few weeks were a scramble as my passport had expired and I also needed a visa (which you can only apply for after getting a passport). Consequently, I ended up paying a lot of expedited shipping and processing costs since I was really jumping in at the last minute. Everything with the passport went smoothly enough, but the visa was another story. Mike made a video about a visa company that he recommended and how to fill out their forms to send away for your visa. I got my passport and got everything arranged to send away for my visa on September 29^th. I sent it via UPS overnight mail and requested the 2-3 day processing from the visa company. I received verification that they received it on Friday the 30^th and was confident that they would be able to get it processed and back to me by the 6^th or 7^th of October before my Monday the 10^th departure for China. Well, it turns out the week of October 3^rd thru 7^th is a Chinese holiday and no one was working so my visa didn’t get processed until Thursday and they sent it back to me FedEx discount shipping to arrive on Tuesday the 11^th by 8:00pm! I was FREAKING OUT! It was bad enough I wasn’t going to have my visa in time, but they also had my passport too! I could actually probably have gotten to China with just a passport and then would have had to get a visa at the airport, but without a passport I wouldn’t be going anywhere. This company was about to cost me $10,000 in order to save $10 on shipping costs!

I forwarded the e-mail to Mike, with whom I had been in contact a few times via phone, e-mail, and text to get everything ready for China (his responsiveness and helpfulness also was very reassuring that I hadn’t just bought into a scam). Mike replied that he would look into what he could do but that we were probably going to need to work through FedEx. All this time I was in Salt Lake visiting my family and I was super stressed out because of this visa thing and I hadn’t even told anyone in my family at that point that I was going to China. I got on the phone with FedEx and they were basically like, “Sorry, our system doesn’t allow for changes once a package has been shipped. You need to call the people who sent it and have them call us to make the changes.” Well, I had concluded that after putting a rush order on my visa (which they had not met) and shipping it such that it would arrive 48 hours AFTER I needed it after specifically asking me when I needed it by, they weren’t going to be super helpful. I asked for a supervisor and told him that I needed him to think like a human being and not go off of what his system told him. I told him I needed a person at one of the stops along the way to find that package via the tracking number, physically grab a hold of it, and then put a new shipping label on it that I would pay for and e-mail or fax or whatever to them, and ship it to me overnight so I didn’t lose $10,000. Fortunately, he started thinking like a human and helped me put a stop order in place and gave me the fax number for the first destination hub for my package. All I had to do was print out a new label and fax it to them.

Easy enough, right? Wrong. The next two-and-a-half hours were spent unsuccessfully trying to navigate and operate the FedEx website to get a shipping label printed off, both from my home computer and from a FedEx branch in Salt Lake. Nothing was working and the staff couldn’t figure out why. As I was on the phone with their corporate office I got another call from a NY area code which I ignored even though I thought it could be Mike as I knew he was traveling (and I’d gotten calls from him from different area codes in the past). As I was about to leave the FedEx store to go back home and try on my computer again, I got a text from Mike that said: “Visa is handled will arrive tomorrow check your voicemail.” Hallelujah! I listened to my voicemail and Mike said he’d been on the phone for the past three hours putting the fear of swift annihilation into every person at UsChinaVisa.com he could get on the phone until he got someone who would actually take action and help. He found someone who drove down to FedEx and picked up the package before it got loaded and had it resent overnight mail to me. He even paid the guy $100 via PayPal just for helping us out in such a pinch. But to those who didn’t help he sent a strongly worded e-mail basically threatening to use all of his marketing skill and experience to tear their company’s reputation to shreds if they didn’t make this right immediately. When I called him he told me to delete the e-mail because he didn’t want me to think he was a mean person, but I told him that I was so glad to have one other person taking this situation as seriously as I was and really appreciated his help. This was another huge boost to my confidence that I hadn’t been too rash to invest so much money into a program without taking a longer time for due diligence (I did look them up online to search for any scam warnings or reviews and didn’t find much, good or bad, and kind came to a “no news is good news” conclusion). We got back from Boise the next day and sure enough, under our door mat (per the instructions I left on the door before leaving town) was a FedEx package with my passport and a 10-year China visa. What a relief!

It looked like I would be going to China after all.