Five businesses, one calendar
How I actually work across dairy, rice, spirits, media and software without any of it collapsing.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Life
The question I get most often is how the ventures connect. Dairy, rice, spirits, talent, software. People look for a thesis.
There is not one. Or rather, the thesis is not in the sectors. It is in the fact that all five have the same shape of problem: a real thing exists, and almost nobody has done the unglamorous work of making it legible to the outside world.
What transfers
Almost nothing about dairy helps with rice. Almost nothing about rice helps with spirits. The domain knowledge does not transfer at all, and pretending otherwise is how people end up shallow in five directions.
What transfers is a small set of habits.
Count the thing before forming an opinion about the thing. Every one of these businesses had a number everybody quoted and nobody had verified.
The back of the package is more important than the front. True of a rice bag, a bottle, and a business plan.
Whoever does the work should be able to see their own work. Adoption of any system, in any sector, tracks almost perfectly with whether the person entering data ever benefits from having entered it.
Write it down or it did not happen. Not for control. Because memory is a liar with excellent intentions.
What does not transfer
Time. There is no leverage trick here. Five things take five times as long as one thing, and anyone who tells you they have found a way around that is selling something.
The honest arrangement is that each venture gets concentrated blocks rather than continuous attention. A week that is genuinely about rice. Then a week that is genuinely about the farm. Context switching within a day is where the quality dies — not because you cannot hold two subjects in your head, but because the second subject gets the tired version of you, every time.
The cost of working this way is not confusion. It is latency. Everything takes longer to reach anyone, and some things wait longer than they should.
The part that makes it possible
I build the tools. That sounds like an additional workload and it is, but it is also the thing that makes the arrangement survivable.
If I have to ask someone for a number, I am dependent on their week. If I can query it, I am not. Every hour spent making a business legible to itself buys back many hours of asking, waiting, and reconciling. It is the single highest-return activity available and it never looks urgent, which is why almost nobody does it.
On not being the expert
The uncomfortable truth of working this way is that in every room, someone knows the subject better than I do. The dairy vet knows cows. The miller knows grain. The distiller knows spirit.
That is fine, and it is actually the job. My work is not to out-know them. It is to ask the question they have stopped asking because it is too obvious, to write down the answer, and to connect it to a market that does not yet know any of this exists.
It requires a specific kind of ego arrangement: confident enough to be the person asking naive questions in front of experts, unbothered enough not to need to be the smartest person present. I did not start with that. It came from being wrong in public enough times that it stopped being frightening.
Why Cambodia makes it work
This arrangement would not function in a mature market. In a mature market, every one of these sectors already has professionals doing this work properly, and a generalist adds nothing.
Here, the gap is real. There is excellent product and very little infrastructure of the boring kind — systems, records, labels, compliance, story. Being useful does not require being exceptional. It requires being present and finishing things, which is a much lower bar than it sounds and almost nobody clears it.