when I was a freshman, I co-founded a “Movie Club” in my college with my friends and was selected as the chairman. After like a year after the establishment of “Movie club”, we got a chance to host an “outdoor movie party” at a major foreign language culture festival. We were so excited that finally we’ve got a golden chance to prove our quality and make our voice heard . Actually, as a new society, “Movie Club” was not supposed to be offered this chance of hosting such a grand event. Fortunately, this activity was nearly removed from the festival because a veteran society, English Society, which was originally assigned to be responsible for that project, quitted due to financial problem. I heard that good news from my classmate and talked with the committee of the “Foreign Language Culture Festival”. Certainly, we won the “bid for hosting outdoor movie party”.
However, such a big event would for sure cost us a big sum of money. Our accountant did the math and told me that the expense would be like 2500 Yuan in total. I dispatched my people to look for sponsorship from the stores near our campus. It turned to be a huge letdown. So I held a brainstorming session to come up with ideas of getting a sponsor. To be honest, all of us were inexperienced newbies that time, and we racked our brains four hours trying to get us out of this awkward financial predicatment. At the brink of giving up, our poster designer told us his father had close relationship with Bird Cellphone Company’s boss. We took a bus to Ningbo and successfully “convince” Bird that what we were doing would help a great deal with pushing their products in our university. Honestly, not matter how hard we tried, we would never get their support if it weren’t for the poster guy’s father’s help. I’m still grateful to the poster guy for all that he did for us. It was my first time to learn the importance of establishment and maintenance of a good rapport with people. Sometimes, a person’s interpersonal communication skills count more than his professional know-how. I admit that I was a bit tense when I was dealing with Bird’s marketing manager. I felt like we don’t deserve that much of money. I was wrong. Actually, sometimes people just have no clue what they can do. It’s about having faith in our capability and seizing the opportunity.
Bird agreed to offer 3000 Yuan to us, but the money would only be transferred after the outcome of our event was proved to be satisfactory. Thus we could but borrow money from friends and prepared it with great efforts. The worse thing was, as soon as learning that we got a commercial sponsorship from Bird, our “Foreign Language School demanded to have the money in accordance with the rules of our University, therefore we couldn’t use the money without suffering from a lot of bureaucracy in the finance department. That really drove me nuts because those were money we borrowed from friends. Some of my men complained and wanted to quit as a tacit protest against the school’s “ridiculous” rules. Yeah, it’s so not fair that the school contributed zero to our activity but compromised what we were trying so hard to do, nevertheless complain would even make things worse. As a matter of fact, nothing in real word is totally fair and reasonable. Instead of bearing bitterness against the school, it’s would be a lot wiser for us to live with that unfairness and absurdity and give it our best shot regardless of anything standing in the way or anybody who wants to make us look real bad. We tried to get some extra money from our parents, cos you know, when the little money is tied up with the bureaucratic rep tape, there is almost no possibility of us to get the money in good time if we needed to pay the bills. The bottom line is, the party turned out to be a hit of the festival. People flocked into the playground, pogoed to the rock band we invited, burst out laughing when watching the movie “ My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. Bird company was fairly satisfied with the outcome, and money was transferred to my account instantly. We went out for a dinner to celebrate it with the money left. We felt so happy and relived after all that we’d been through together. Nothing is like leading a great team and making the best out of our lovely partner.
