In reality, the road to success is often a perilous one fraught with long hours and sleepless nights. Even when you consider your venture to be firmly established, difficult decisions need to be made constantly to ensure you stay in business.

For Benson Pau, managing director, Wings Trading Co., Ltd., which just celebrated its 20^th anniversary this year, some of the hardest decisions he has had to make have been his best ones. They have also won him the Best Managed SME Merit Award 2000.

The Hong Kong entrepreneur started Wings with his wife in 1980 as a general trading company buying and selling toys and kitchenware like so many other trading companies. They first targeted the Middle Eastern market, and then expanded into Europe, and then into the U.S. in 1988.

"For the first 10 years, we were a simple trading company just buying and selling toys and household products," Mr Pau said. "We knew we couldn't continue doing this forever, so in 1993 we made a major decision to throw out our toy business and focus on adding value to our houseware business."

At the time, toys represented 30 per cent of the company's turnover, but within two years the increased houseware business doubled that of the discarded toy business, Mr Pau said.

He achieved this by offering his customers more value-added services -- from feasibility studies to packaging to quality assurance. A R&D and a QC team were also set up to complete his one-stop customer service vision.

But the company's new added-value services are only half of story. Mr Pau said that without the dedication of his staff, the average 20 per cent annual growth Wings' has enjoyed over the past decade would not have been possible.

"People are very important in a company; they are everything," he said.

While Mr Pau believes that improving the quality and value of services provided to customers is vital, he also feels the same about his staff and encourages them to continually improve themselves.

"We all consider the company a learning organisation," he said. "Everyone keeps learning some different aspect of the business because we keep moving them around from one department to another so that they know how the whole operation works."

In 1998, Wings embarked on another strategic decision. Plans were drawn to bring into being Wings Product Workshop Limited, an online arm of the company launched in April 2000.

Named wings365.com, Mr Pau said he sought the skills of designers with whom he'd built up solid relations over the years to design brand products and to market them online.

"We are not a concept company, we provide services and products to customers," he said.

Mr Pau said he has no delusions that succeeding in e-commerce will be easy, but he believes that it’s a valuable tool that will help his company continue to grow.

"With so many similar companies fighting for the same business, it is becoming increasingly difficult to win orders, he said. "By trying alternative trading channels we are trying to provide more added-value services to our buyers," he said.

He is injecting HK$5 million into the e-business to get it up and running, and stressed that the new arm of the company will be autonomous to avoid jeopardise the existing business.

Among the two new products to be launched on the Web site are Wings' Time Bomb and Egg Timer.

As part of Wings' online business, Mr Pau said the firm also decided in the same year to establish a work-in-progress (WIP) system, similar to that used by courier services to track packages.

The system will allow everyone -- from the customer who placed an order to, the factory manufacturing it, to his office staff -- to see instantly the progress of an order.

"In the long run, customers will be able to check to see if they still owe us something, such as artwork," he explained. "Of course it will rely on everyone inputting their information, but once everyone is to used using the system, it will benefit everyone."