Chapter 70

Agreement in hand, the two of them went to a restaurant near the park, and Li Lan came straight out with it: she wanted Zhang Lin in her company.

Hearing the invitation and the salary attached to it, Zhang Lin laughed out loud. "Lanlan, are you serious? The company doesn't exist and you're hiring. Thirty thousand a month, nearly five thousand more than my last job — you can bear to part with that?"

Li Lan nodded seriously. "Of course. Sister Zhang, the office and the laboratory are signed, and Cerulean will exist within days, so I really do want you as head of research and development. And I know thirty thousand isn't a lot. It's the first year's figure — it'll rise as the company grows."

Thirty thousand counts as high for a pharmaceutical researcher. New graduates were on about seven thousand, and lower still at some research institutes; private companies did somewhat better. Zhang Lin had been four or five years at her pharmaceutical company and had reached deputy section head at twenty thousand-odd, and confirmation would have brought another rise — except that it happened before she was confirmed.

She was an extremely good researcher: thirty-three, and already at associate researcher level, equivalent to an associate professor, one step short of senior. Which is why Li Lan had been so surprised to learn her company had taken her promotion away purely for being pregnant — and had then recognised an opportunity.

Somebody with her experience wouldn't struggle to find work, so Li Lan wanted to ask while she was between things. If she said no, Li Lan would have to find somebody else.

Zhang Lin looked at her seriously. "Lanlan, you're serious?" Had she not spent time with her and known what she was like, she'd have assumed with total confidence she was being sold a fantasy.

Li Lan handed over the business plan, equally serious. "Sister Zhang, this is what I've written. Read it and you'll see I'm not joking. The test reports are at the back."

Zhang Lin took it and began to turn the pages, and her indifference gave way to interest. It had plainly been thought about hard; every step from product selection to marketing was set out in detail. And at the calendula and rose test reports her eyes went wide, and she frowned and read more closely.

She finished and let out a breath. "The finished products in these reports — you made them?"

If the plan itself had told her Li Lan wasn't joking but had thought this through, the reports were what actually surprised her. Not because the products were unusual — the opposite; both were entirely ordinary, and that was the surprise, because Li Lan's figures were two to three times better than the best she knew of.

Li Lan nodded. "Two of the planned products. There are several more I haven't had time to make."

Zhang Lin set the file down. "I don't know how you ran the experiments, but on these reports alone I'm rather curious how you did it." Developing new products is hard; raising the performance of commonplace materials by more than a whole level is no easier. No wonder she had the confidence to start a company.

It touching on sensitive ground, Zhang Lin asked only in passing. The plan had genuinely interested her, though, and she rubbed her chin. "If you can produce it at scale and hold those figures at scale, decent sales work should take you a share of the market."

"Yes. And that's only Cerulean's basic range to start with. There'll be more areas later." Li Lan said it with complete confidence.

Youth is a fine thing. Something about that confidence made Zhang Lin feel younger herself, and she smiled. "In that case it looks as though I've a long road ahead of me."

Li Lan's eyes lit up. "Sister Zhang — you accept?"

Zhang Lin shook her head. "No. What I want to discuss is buying in."

A woman who reaches associate researcher in her early thirties is not one who sits still, and she had no intention of being a housewife because she was pregnant. Having some savings, she'd thought about starting something herself since resigning — except that one person cannot do pharmaceutical research alone. Reading the plan, she recognised an opportunity.

"A million yuan for twenty per cent. How's that?"

Twenty was a figure she'd weighed. As founder, Li Lan's technical contribution plus the initial capital justified eighty; and if it went the way the plan said, a million would be no loss at all.

Li Lan hadn't expected an offer. She'd written the plan partly with later investment in mind, and by pure accident had landed her first investor.

A million isn't much, but with the rent gone she had thirty-odd thousand left, and it answered exactly the thing that was burning. Twenty per cent also sat precisely on her limit; any more and she wouldn't have agreed easily, acquaintance or not.

She thought and nodded. "A million for twenty per cent is fine. I'll put in another five hundred thousand later, so the cash comes to two million excluding the technical contribution — and if you want to sell later, Cerulean has first refusal." She added a few conditions.

Zhang Lin nodded without much objection. Several of her friends were looking for investment and she knew these were the basics. "In that case let's find a time to sign, and once we've signed you'll be my boss," she said wickedly.

Where a student found that kind of money she didn't know, but plenty of wealthy people's children start companies, and she took Li Lan for one of them. As long as the plan held up and it was run properly, she didn't mind investing, and she didn't press.

An investment and a senior hire in one afternoon, and Li Lan felt considerably lighter. "Sister Zhang, the company doesn't exist yet."

"It will soon enough," Zhang Lin said, unbothered.

"We haven't got a production line, though, and the park's laboratory hasn't the equipment for it. Fine for developing products, no good for manufacturing — so are you contracting out at first?"

Having only just decided to invest, she was already planning at speed — and had, without noticing, started treating Li Lan as an actual partner.

Li Lan had thought about it. "Yes. I've a list of decent processing plants and I mean to go and look at their capabilities before I decide."

Zhang Lin considered. "I was in the hospital sector, but I know a few people running contract plants — good process work, and they've handled contracts for international brands. There are two in Tianjin, which is near enough to start with."

"Are there?" Li Lan was delighted. Zhang Lin's arrival was already paying. "I'll go in a few days."

They finished two hours later, and having no job to go to, Zhang Lin drove her back to the university; documents assembled, they went to the agency together. With Zhang Lin added as a partner, though, a one-person limited company no longer fitted, so Li Lan switched to a limited liability company with five million in registered capital, payable within the term — and then it was a matter of waiting for the registration to go through.

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Registration done, it still wasn't over. The hired laboratory equipment began arriving and being installed, and since Li Lan had no time during the day, Zhang Lin gave up half of every day to overseeing it.

Li Lan was hardly idle either — busier, if anything. Long journeys not suiting Zhang Lin, inspecting the contract plants fell to her. For which she'd resigned from Professor Lin's laboratory; she'd only been recording data there, and with a laboratory of her own the loss wasn't great. Dr Zhang regretted losing his human reminder system, but she wasn't Professor Lin's student and he couldn't stop her going.

It produced results. Over a weekend she got round the plants Zhang Lin had named and settled on one in Tianjin, and before the National Day holiday Cerulean cleared the commerce bureau. Next came applying for the cosmetics production licence while settling raw material supply.

With no growing site of its own, and raw material being the most important part of the process, there could be no carelessness about it. Across the National Day holiday plus two days of skipped lectures, she went to three provinces back to back.

Calendula in Ningbo in Zhejiang, aloe in Fujian, mint in Taihe county in Anhui — some through Dr Zhang's introductions, some through Zhang Lin's, and fortunately both sets were reliable. By the end of the holiday she had sources for aloe, calendula and mint.

The rose base at Pingyin in Shandong wouldn't fit into the holiday and had to wait for a weekend after term, and probably another day or two skipped. In early November she found that supplier too.

Suppliers and contract plant settled, the early work was done for the moment — and then a phone call from Zhang Lin had her moving again a few days into the quiet.

Part of the first consignment of raw material had reached the store. This lot wasn't for production proper but for trial runs to tune the process — and for Li Lan to build experience. Since only she knew the procedure, only she could do it; once the patents were registered it could be handed to other researchers.

Zhang Lin hadn't been idle in the meantime. Unable to travel about, she had nonetheless got the laboratory and the office looking like a company, with the Cerulean mark up at both doors. It had been designed for them: the two characters, plain and clear, with the English underneath, in the blue of the earth seen from space. It looked oddly right.