Far removed from the shirt-and-tie business world in which he once worked, Liu Yongxin opened a fried chicken shop nine months ago in an alley in his neighborhood near Taipei Municipal Gan-Dau Hospital. He wears a T-shirt and flip-flops as he stands in front of a 160°C oil fryer. He sprinkles flour onto 10-centimeter-long pieces of chicken, drops them into the oil, and sets a frying time. Once they're golden and crispy, he pulls them out with a pair of tongs, sprinkles salt, pepper, and curry powder on them, and drops them into paper bags for customers. As pedestrians pass, he calls out, "Two pieces of chicken, special price, NT$75!"

The small shop is open for business from 11 in the morning until midnight, 365 days of the year. It took in around NT$150,000 in February, and after rent, part-timers' salaries, and food costs, it netted less than NT$20,000. While Liu is free, it's tough work physically and mentally. But he prepared himself from the outset to be in it for the long haul.

Employee or boss?

The 37-year-old Liu had always been in the service industry since graduating from National Chung Hsing University with a degree in Chinese. He sold toys, and later worked for a computer company selling Internet telephones and network switches.

Though he majored in Chinese, he didn't have the attitude that he was too cultured for marketing. Though his work has nothing to do with his degree, he believes that he is a quick learner. He says that whatever your major is, you only use a little portion of what you learn after you enter the workforce. A six-credit university course only means 96 hours of instruction. "I work for eight hours a day-what is there that you couldn't learn in two weeks?" he says. "Anyway, when you sell computers you only need basic knowledge of the products."

After working for more than 10 years, he was made a middle manager with a salary of around NT$1 million a year. After he turned 35, he began to think about opening his own business. He knew in his heart that he couldn't work in an office his whole life.

In the service industry, there's a lot of pressure to make sales. He found himself getting frequent headaches and cold sores. A doctor told him that he had a slight case of depression. "I didn't want to die there," he says. He felt like he was going nowhere. In late 2006, he told his boss he was going to quit, but the boss asked him to stay on.

A year later, the economy took a turn for the worse, and the company went through three waves of layoffs. It went from 100 employees to 50. One day, his boss said to him, "Now you can quit." He'd talked his own way into it, so he didn't fight it. He didn't receive any severance pay, and he wasn't even eligible for unemployment benefits. His losses were at least in the hundreds of thousands of NT dollars.

Vocational training

Liu, who enjoyed cooking even before quitting his day job, enrolled in a cooking course at Aletheia University supported by the Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training of the Council of Labor Affairs. Class was held all day on Saturdays for 108 hours over 18 weeks. Tuition was NT$17,000, with 80% paid by the CLA. After learning more than 70 dishes and taking a course in alcohol-free cocktails, he was certified as a level-three chef.

Liu's always had a strong sense of taste-he can distinguish between brands of shacha sauce and tangyuan dumplings when he eats them. Before he opened his restaurant, he'd often cook for his family. He had a repertoire of more than a dozen dishes, and cooking was never any trouble for him.

After quitting his job, he planned to open a restaurant and prepared NT$600,000 in capital. He originally wanted to open a simple Chinese-style stir-fry shop, but after realizing that such a place required too much space, manpower, and capital, he went with his instincts and opened a small shop selling fried chicken, french fries, fish cakes, and drinks like winter melon and green tea. He named it "Chicken and Tea Headquarters."

The space is around 20 square meters for NT$23,000 a month. After installing a freezer, a sink for hand-washing, a deep fryer, and a counter, there's barely enough room to turn around. There's no restroom either. Liu has to go next door and use one at the hospital.

When he officially opened in late May of 2008, he had a full-time employee to alternate shifts with him as well as two part-timers. But business was bad and the employees had nothing to do. For the first half-year, he did only around NT$2,000 in sales a day. That wasn't even enough to cover salaries. Every day he was open, he lost money.

Where are the customers?

"I thought this was the perfect location," Liu says. Gan-Dau Hospital is just next door, and Guandu Junior High is just down the street, past a small park. "My shop is open so late, why aren't there any customers?" He asked himself, even if he was already putting in 99%, where was there room for one more percent of effort?

To let customers know about his shop, he took menus to the junior high and the nearby MRT stop four times but to little effect. Many times, he'd put on a homemade sandwich-board sign with his shop's name, menu, and location on both sides and hand out menus in front of the school around four and five in the afternoon as students were getting out. It attracted a lot of students who like fried chicken. He'd also walk down to the MRT station with the sign and shout "Delicious fried chicken" as he pointed in the direction of the shop. "People I passed all noticed and laughed," he says. "It was a success."

Thinking a lot of people would come to Guandu Temple to pray around the Chinese New Year holiday this year, he printed footprints on 100 sheets of A4 paper and pasted them every ten meters between the temple's exit and the shop. He was afraid he'd get hit by a car in the daytime, so he waited until after nine o'clock at night to put them up and didn't finish fumbling around in the dark until two in the morning. He even threw his neck out. On the fifth day of the holiday, he tore them all down as he was afraid agents from Taipei City's Department of Environmental Protection would come back from holiday and fine him.

"I'm the one in charge, and whenever a decision needs to be made, there's no need to hold a meeting to discuss it," he says. "The only thing I have to take into consideration is time and the amount of stamina it'll take." He explains that within 200 meters there are six fried chicken sellers. One has already gone out of business. If there's anything else he can do, he'll do it and never give up.

"People who are soft by nature aren't fit for starting their own business," he says. "If you can't imagine pitching your wares to customers, you shouldn't even think about it." He describes how the open-front storefront allows winter winds to blow right in, and how in the summer his clothes aren't dry for even a minute. He manages stocking, production, development, storage, and marketing problems on his own-it's more tiring than working in an office.

Steady growth

He's been open for nine months now. For the first six months, he took in around NT$60,000 a month. Since then, his monthly intake has steadily increased to NT$80,000, then NT$120,000, and finally NT$150,000. He hopes that in March or April he'll be able to reach NT$180,000. "I'm a hard worker," he says. "No need to be shy about it."

Since he works such long hours, his college lecturer wife once asked him if he could keep up this pace. But he feels that if he were to quit now, all that hard work would have been in vain.

As for the future, Liu hopes to open another location within three to five years. But for now, he's tied up with the one he's got. "I know nothing about chain stores," he says. "Opening just one more would be enough at first. My goals are big, but I've got to run things realistically." Chicken and Tea Headquarters is his operation, and he makes no excuses. He opens on time every day, even in the rain or a typhoon. He is confident that if he keeps working hard, he'll reap the rewards.