British born Chinese Eddie Yu is the author of ‘Speedlights and Elephants’, a book about winning the online business game.

Since graduating from Leeds University in 1997, Eddie, 37, has been involved in various entrepreneurial activities throughout his career, and eventually having built up a part time internet business between 2001-2003, he went full time in 2004 with Lady Luck Media.

Career

Before then, he has worked for British Aerospace, FNX Ltd and Derivatech Ltd, where he consulted for top tier banks such as Bank of America, ABM Amro and Bank of China.

At the beginning, the company was creating websites for various small clients, but the main focus was through a niche opportunity called affiliate marketing. Eddie quickly identified that this new marketing strategy would change online marketing and traditional marketing at a fundamental level, so he took the opportunity and committed to making it work.

Since then, Lady Luck Media became a highly skilled niche company focussing on search engine optimisation, high impact conversion strategies and low expenditure high yield traffic campaigns. From 2004 to present day, Eddie has personally generated over £6m revenue for his clients by using these new online marketing tools and strategies.

NLP

In 2008, the company took another focus to engage and help other Entrepreneurs to create the kind of success that Eddie had created from a starting budget of zero. His personal learning and growth also took him into the coaching fields where he trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and is now a Master NLP Practitioner.

Helping others 

Incorporating all the training and lessons learnt, Eddie is passionate about helping others and this has lead to his involvement with non-profit organisations.

Eddie firmly believes that with social entrepreneurship and technological advancements we can create a world without offices and impact climate change for the betterment of our planet.

Nee Hao asks Eddie a few questions

What’s your background?

I was born at St Helier hospital in Carshalton and my parents are from Hong Kong.

Have you worked in a Chinese take away before? 

Yes, I work in my parents takeaway from the age of 13 to 19

What did you study at university? 

I studied Computer Science & Management Studies Bsc and then Information Systems MSc

Why did you choose the name ‘Speedlights and Elephants’ for your book and how long did it take you to write it?

I wanted a fun quirky title that people would have to read to find out why. The title is a metaphor for the fun and not so fun things we all have to do in business to succeed. It took me 28 days to write the book.

What were the main challenges in writing the book?

The main challenge in writing the book was finding the higher level metaphors to layer throughout the book. I wanted a really deep richly layered book which had stories as well as practical advice.

Tell us a little more about Lady Luck Media?

Lady Luck Media is my first company that was fully incorporated in 2004 to cover the activities I was doing in the internet marketing world. It’s objective is to provide digital marketing solutions for entrepreneurs to get their businesses off the ground.

How long have you been your own boss for?

10 years

What do you do to relax? 

I do salsa dancing, I love movies and I’m a massive fan of snowboard/skiing and adventure holidays.

Where do you see yourself in the near future? 

There’s a lot of future plans, however the main one right now is that my personal mission is to help create a world without offices. Commercial office space is responsible for 20% of CO2 emissions which adds 10billiion tons to global warming each year. Sad fact is that offices are empty 70% of the time, all that time draining our global resources and killing us at the same time. There are much more efficient ways of working and technology is playing a massive part. I can see in 50 years time that the structure of society will be totally different and there will no longer be a need for centralized working spaces. I think offices are a thing of the industrialist age and we are rapidly moving into a new era of society, business and working. I’ve position myself as the champion of this cause and I do believe that with the right technology, systems, psychological training and processes, we will be able to work without the need for offices. I already know several companies with hundreds of staff who all work remotely. A friend of mine works in Microsoft Hotmail division in Toronto and they are already implementing remote working to the extent that most staff now works only 1 day a month in the office. If Microsoft are pioneering it, you can be sure they know it’s the future too.

What advice can you give to the readers who want to write a book? 

If you want write a book and don’t know how, get a book coach. That’s what I did, I’m lucky to have worked with The Book Midwife (aka Mindy Gibbins-Klein) and she really helped me to get my ideas down in the right structured manner. Her experience was what helped me to write the book in such a short period of time. If you want to get published there are lots of options, but best thing to do is to network with other authors and find out from them what they did. This will help you to formulate your ideas and plans.

What are your thoughts on the future of the internet? 

The internet is an ever evolving organic network and the recent developments have added a social layer to bring in wider communications methods and give people the power to converse even easier. I think the internet is all about connections and the real exciting technology which is only just in its infancy is cloud applications. Let’s see where that heads.

And your thoughts on business in China?

Well to be honest China doesn’t really come into our business because we are aimed at the UK market. We use manufacturing services in China to help us create products we need to further our brand. I think if you want to target China as a market to serve you need two things, 1) you need to be able to speak fluent mandarin, 2) you need a man on the ground in China.