Five days were too short a break especially when one was busy.
Lu Fan had been running around doing many things so he started rethinking his approach to achieve his dreams.
He wanted to be an Online Tycoon, but the things that he had been doing felt like he had become an errand boy of some sort.
The thing that took most of his time was the Expansion of META. The company had been expanding in directions he never planned to venture.
The novel platform was getting popular by the day and new works were popping up at an insane speed. His approach of paying per view was new and fresh and there were hardly any platform that could afford to burn through money the way he did.
I mean, a reader could just skim through a book before they dropped it, but Lu Fan still counted that as a view. He was currently still paying on view per book, but he would soon change it to view per chapter when the platform had enough books.
The thing that became a problem was the lack of editors and monitors. He had tried his best to automate many functions on the platform, but if he did anymore, he would officially be stepping into the realm of Artificial Intelligence.
It could not be helped. He still had to develop slowly and digest what he already had properly. He might be comfortable with burning through money, but that did not mean that he was okay with wasting it.
He had to make sure that the content released was of good quality. Reputation was the most important in the long run.
Li Lin had been hiring left and right, and the urgency of a new building was becoming more apparent. He could not possibly ask for more floors from Li Lin. He had spent most of his day going around looking for suitable buildings, but the ones that were up for sale were either too small for his needs or too far from Li Lin's building.
He had even started considering acquiring the real estate around and building a suitable building from the ground up. But how long would that take?
He could only settle for renting the closer buildings for a time until he found a solution. Well, the solution was obvious but Lu Fan was finding it hard to implement. He simply needed to move the whole company to the town square.
The company was still new and they had hardly made enough to make such a move. If he decided to go ahead with it, it would mean that he would have to use money from his personal account.
It was not a big deal, but that was not very good practice. If he kept feeding the business like this, was it still a business? The least the company could do was sustain itself, no?
To that end, Lu Fan started introducing new sources of revenue to the teams in META. Some teams were just consuming too many resources. The fashion department for example was given the task of custom printing and painting on T-shirts and other such clothes.
This idea was still fresh in 2009 and there were hardly any who did it for the art. Lu Fan was sure that it would generate a pretty penny if they managed to do it right. At least, they should manage to generate their own capital.
He also had other departments start doing local advertisements and the like. It was not very hard to gather funds to publish a weekly and advertise local businesses. The internet was also a tool that he planned to use for ads.
The pop-up ads were gaining traction and he took advantage of that. The laws against them were still undeveloped and were up in the air. He had to take advantage of this.
But the thing that brought him the most joy was teaching An Xing'er and Xu Ling'er.
It could not be helped. Who wouldn't be happy surrounded by two beautiful girls who were practically begging you to pay attention to them?
Lu Fan had not planned to bring Xu Ling'er into the fold yet, but Chen Lu came to the company to bring him lunch the other day and met An Xing'er.
That day, An Xing'er was practicing her choreography and had tied her hair back and lost her glasses. Her youthful beauty was fully unleashed making her glimmer under a layer of sweat.
Chen Lu was dazed the moment she saw her and then she immediately became guarded. She had already considered Xu Ling'er as her daughter-in-law, and here was another beauty.
It would have been okay if she was on any other floor, but everyone knew that the fifth floor was Lu Fan's territory.
The way she looked at Lu Fan was as if she was looking at the scum of the world. Lu Fan literary felt a stab in his heart from that one look but did not explain. He was a scumbag, so what? And he had yet to confirm anything with anyone. A boy also had to protect himself in this era.
After she left, Xu Ling'er joined them in thirty minutes.
Lu Fan was not sure what Chen Lu had said to her, but from then on, Lu Fan felt like An Xing'er and Xu Ling'er were competing. It was so intense that he had to draw up a timetable for both of them.
He taught Xu Ling'er about Trading and the stock market in the morning, and An Xing'er would spend most of his afternoon learning everything he knew about Music, Music Production, and Dance.
Most of the things he was teaching them were what he learned from YouTube and other such sites and when he got tags, he would spend money maxing them out. In five days, he had become a guru in the Entertainment Industry.
He even started doubting the use of following An Xing'er to university just to waste time on things he knew better than the professionals. But that applied everywhere. As long as he had enough money, Lu Fan would never face much difficulty in any course he pursued. Maybe he should think of ways to do more than one course.