When was the last time you met an Expensive Person ?? ?? ???

Sometime back, I heard the sharing of gratitude from a youth in a religious gathering. She shared how a stranger had stepped forward and offered a piece of equipment that would turn out to save her entire presentation in school, preventing a catastrophe that would have cost her grades for that year. She recognised this as a miracle and she thanked God for it. Later when we got to distil what this all means by looking at her miracle and those that others have shared, a pattern seemed to emerge: almost all of these encounters involved one or more strangers who answered a call for help and stepped forward to do so without expecting anything in return.

For those of us who believe in a Higher Being, it is quite possible that this call to help might have come from God to that stranger, who by God’s Grace had stepped forward. For others, that stranger simply paid it forward.

There is a Chinese term to describe these wonderful people: 贵人 (pronounced Gui-ren), which literally translates as an “Expensive Person”. It refers to a benefactor of sorts. But quite often, these individuals go beyond someone just giving money to help (we call those individuals “Donors”). Also, while such “Expensive Persons” may come out of ‘nowhere’ as someone we never knew before, they may also be someone we have known for a long time but never thought would be able to help us in this way. These individuals do more than material support but tend to engage with us at a deeper level.

To just about anyone, and more so to an entrepreneur, these Expensive People or Gui-rens do more than giving fleeting donations, or a one-off advice over coffee, to providing us with:

1. Moral and Emotional Support, cheering us on even as the journey gets tough and sharing their own battle scars to show proof that it is possible for us to pull through, if we hang in there;
2. Network Support, providing the access to markets and distributors, or people who could get the word out there for us;
3. Resource Support, helping us access technologies that could help scale our businesses quickly and at low or manageable cost;
4. Expertise Support, to guide us along the different parts of a founder’s journey, from innovation to ideation, to fundraising storytelling, to corporate development and everything else in between.

Typically in business, people became Gui-ren to others for these reasons:

They were paying it forward, or They were paying it back

Let’s delve deeper in these two aspects:

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Paying it forward

In religious and mindfulness practices, we are often invited to nurture a sense of gratitude – to be grateful for the gifts we have, the things we know, and the people who have entered our lives and made that difference in our lives and the state of our businesses. As we count our blessings, we cannot ignore the Gui-rens in our lives. These are individuals who may be complete strangers and heard our call for help, then answered the call with what they have on hand. That act and those that follow would have changed our fate or the fate of our enterprises. These individuals do not expect anything in return as they weren’t planning to step forward and help someone they didn’t know in the hope of receiving a reward of any kind.

But here is the thing: if we hope to get them to continue to assist us in our businesses, or our children’s studies, or any endeavour over a prolonged period, then we will need to consider how to remunerate them to make their effort worthwhile.

This is because it’s one thing to help us briefly once with what they have on-hand. Afterall, they could just be passing by or might have had a chance encounter with us at some event. But if we hope they would continue to invest time, resources and expertise to aid our enterprise, they will need to set aside such time, resources and goodwill and these are attributes that money cannot buy, since it took them many years and lots of trials to possess them. So to pass this off and expect them to avail such resources to us without due compensation would be unreasonable.

Put simply,

helping once with something that is priceless is paying it forward. But doing it again or over a prolonged period, especially for an enterprise that would generate material benefit for its owner, is an INVESTMENT.

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Paying it back

When someone has helped us in the past, whether for no compensation or as a paid individual, and that action helped our businesses reach new heights or get through a rough patch, we are drawn to return the favour. Some of us will actively do so with our resources and network to help that person tie through or soar when the opportunity arises. In my business dealings, I have the privilege of knowing such individuals who continue to inspire me to help others with my expertise and experience.

Now here is where it gets interesting: these individuals are paying it back because you first paid it forward. Had you not done so, they might not have been your Gui-ren. So this whole virtuous cycle started because you stepped up to be that Gui-ren to them in the first place and you weren’t counting the costs of doing so then.

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Be the Gui-ren; Nurture more Gui-rens

We are all too familiar with the story of how a destitute young man who was given a glass a milk by a girl in the lowest moment of his life when he was hungry and asked for a glass of water. This young man would later grow up to become a prominent doctor and as chance would have it, he would treat this same girl years later and wrote off her bill with a note that said, “Paid in full with one glass of milk.”

This story in its essence is true and the doctor was Dr. Howard Kelly (1858-1943), a distinguished physician who was one of the four founding doctors of Johns Hopkins, the first medical research university in the U.S. and arguably one of the finest hospitals in the world. But Dr. Kelly wasn’t impoverished as the tales would have it. Far from it.

He was in fact the scion of a relatively well-to-do family with pocket money in the amounts many would envy. Simply, the man wasn’t poor to say the least, and definitely not to the point of having to beg for food (read the full story in the blog here).

But here’s the point:

he remembered the act of kindness from the little girl. The facts would show that he had the practice of writing-off the medical bills of 3 out of 4 patients because they couldn’t afford the expenses of medical treatment. But he remembered this one and the glass of milk he got from her.

This is the act of paying it back and we can reasonably assume that because Dr. Kelly remembered the prior act of this girl, so she turning up as a patient would mean a little more than the others he has treated as a faceless physician. That the words “Paid in full with a glass of milk” would hold special meaning to her, and to him.?

And this is where being a Gui-ren is powerful. If one act of kindness could trigger this association as we see in Dr. Kelly’s note to the girl, what more a prolonged engagement with a benefacted could do down the road for the one who first stepped forward?

So,

Be that person who always pays forward. Be that Gui-ren.

And one day, when you need the most, perhaps those whom you have helped would pay it back, and when that happens, you can take heart that you have met an “Expensive Person”, a 贵人.

And when worthy Gui-rens arrive and you hope to get their continual support to help in the business, be generous at rewarding them and not make them feel shortchanged.

In my book ????The Fast Founder: from Startup to Exit in 36 Months ????, I dedicated one chapter on how we could get the resources and the help we need from different individuals and parties without spending much. I discuss how we could structure different sharing models with these individuals who could be our Gui-rens and bring disproportionately higher value than what we share out / pay out to them.

When everyone in the business world seeks to be a Gui-ren to others and offer to help each other prosper, I think business would be a great and happy endeavour for many of us.

Entrepreneurship is already so tough. But having our peers to cheer us along and help us get through could be the bullet that changes the course of our battles.

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Be a Gui-ren to others, and nurture our Gui-rens well.

I am a venture innovator who advise entrepreneurs & business owners on how to scale and exit their enterprises.

I wrote the book ????The Fast Founder: from Startup to Exit in 36 Months ????, available in Kinokuniya, Amazon SG, Amazon Kindle and major eBook platforms. It made AmazonSG’s #1 Bestseller (Small Business) in 2 weeks and Kinokuniya Bestseller in 5 weeks.