Chapter Two: The Foundation — What I Created During Eleven Years at Dun'an

Chapter Two: The Foundation — What I Created During Eleven Years at Dun'an In the spring of 2007, the tax was refunded, and the nation revised its law. In that moment, I was certain I had embarked on the right path. But conviction alone is not enough — you must have the capability, the methodology, and the skill to turn conviction into reality. Dun'an provided me with a scenario sufficiently complex to test and run the systemic models I had in my mind, piece by piece. Those eleven years at Dun'an were the best experimental field of my life. It was not that I learned something from someone else; rather, I already had the system, the method, and the model, and then, on the vast field that was Dun'an, I repeatedly sowed, validated, adjusted, and harvested. I. A Single Excel Sheet That Transformed Real Estate Decisions from Guesswork into Calculation In the mid-to-late 2000s, the real estate market was at its hottest. Dun'an had acquired a plot of land in Shenyang to develop a courtyard housing project. The land was obtained through public auction. I still remember the day of the auction — the competition was incredibly fierce, with over a dozen rounds of bidding, even making the newspapers. We ultimately won the land, but at a very high premium, nearly double the starting bid. This incident plunged me into deep thought: why did the auction spin out of control? Because before the auction, we had no clear model to tell us — what was this land truly worth? Beyond what price would our profits be entirely consumed? In that era, most real estate companies bought land based on experience and intuition, with no quantitative basis for decision-making. I decided to build this model myself. My logic was simple, captured in four words: begin with the end in mind. The endpoint was certain — how much could the houses built on this land sell for? Assuming a sales price of five thousand yuan per square meter, a figure already validated by the surrounding market, the future sales revenue became a certain endpoint. Working backward from this endpoint, I began building the model. What was the plot ratio? How many square meters could be built? How long was the development cycle? What were the pre-sale conditions? When could the sales permit be obtained? I quantified every link with data. Then, I introduced the biggest variable — land cost. I discovered that for every 1% increase in land price, several percentage points of net profit would be eroded. If the premium exceeded a critical threshold, the project would flip from profit to loss. No one had ever presented this relationship so clearly with data before. This model was built in Excel, yet it became the core decision-making tool for company management. Every time a land purchase was considered, the model was run — input the land area, plot ratio, surrounding housing prices, and it would instantly calculate: at what land bid price would net profit be what amount; beyond which price point would risk become uncontrollable. From ambiguity to clarity, from gut feeling to data-driven decision-making — this was the first step toward certainty. But this was only the budgeting level. The real challenge lay at the execution level. Real estate projects have long cycles and numerous stages — from land acquisition to construction, to pre-sale, to delivery — each link tightly connected. A problem in any single link would trigger a chain reaction. I spent three years deconstructing the entire project execution process from start to finish, assigning responsibilities down to every department, every person, every single day. Take the most direct example: the pre-sale permit. Without it, the houses could not be sold. And to obtain the pre-sale permit, the rigid criterion of 25% of total project investment must be met. This meant that from land acquisition to groundbreaking, from foundation work to the main structure emerging above ground, no time node in any link could slip. Securing the permit one day earlier meant opening sales one day earlier and recouping funds one day earlier. Delaying it by one day meant one more day of capital costs, eating further into net profit. I precisely calculated the time nodes for every link down to the day. This was the embryonic form of my "atomic task" thinking. A grand strategic objective must ultimately be decomposed into the smallest execution units — down to each person, each day, each action. Every action has a time node, and every time node directly impacts the financial outcome. Everything is interconnected; every link is tightly coupled. II. Every Cent Must Correspond to a Specific "Task" The real estate project allowed me to run the first version of the "begin with the end in mind" and "atomic task" model. But what truly transformed this thinking into an executable system occurred during the budget management process. At the time, I was heading the finance department and realized a problem: traditional budget management relied on "people" — a leader would approve a sum on a whim, and the subordinate would spend it and submit reimbursement later. Whether the money was spent correctly or was worth it, no one could clearly say. This was not budget management; it was post-hoc accounting. I decided to change this logic. The core principle was simple: every cent of expenditure must be linked to a specific "task." If you treat a client to dinner, why? To secure which order? What is the relationship between this order and the company's strategic objectives? From strategy to atomic tasks, from atomic tasks to every cent — forming a complete chain of cause and effect. This system operated as follows: every department and every individual, when proposing a budget, had to present their "task" — What are you going to do? Why do it? How does it relate to the company's strategic goals? Without a task-based justification, not a single cent could be approved. This completely eliminated gray areas. No one could apply for a budget citing "custom" or "rough estimate"; you had to tell me clearly: what is your task, how much will it cost, how long will it take, and what results will it produce? III. The Purpose of Standardization Is Not to Control People, But to Liberate Them Every transaction in the finance department is related to a process, and every process involves specific people. Without standardizing human actions, process standardization is empty talk. I spent three years thoroughly cataloging every routine action of financial personnel. How long does a voucher review take? What steps are involved in a payment approval? What are the sub-actions for each step? Everything was clearly documented. As a result, a new employee, by simply following the standard operating manual, could quickly become proficient. Veteran employees no longer had to rely solely on experience; efficiency could be quantified, and quality could be tracked. During this process, I summarized a pattern. For employees, over 80% of their daily work consists of routine, repetitive tasks. These tasks can be completely standardized. Only when these routine tasks are standardized can employees be freed from trivial entanglements and have the energy to handle the 20% of unexpected situations. For leaders, however, it is exactly the opposite. Only 20% of a leader's daily work consists of routine decisions; the remaining 80% is spent dealing with emergencies and navigating uncertainty. This discovery further solidified a conviction: the purpose of standardization is not to rigidly control people, but to liberate them. Standardize routine work to allow employees to operate efficiently; free leaders from minutiae so they can concentrate on tackling genuine uncertainty. IV. Certainty Begins with Every Accounting Voucher The standardization system was not only validated at the operational level; it also played a crucial role in the most fundamental aspect of financial accounting. At the time, we used Yonyou financial software. In those days, the functionality of financial software was not as powerful as it is today. But I set a principle for myself: all accounting must achieve extreme precision and must be traceable at any moment. I required my team, when making every single accounting voucher, to input all foreseeable information. Which project does this expense belong to? Which department spent it? Which employee handled it? All these dimensions were clearly tagged at the very moment the voucher was entered. The benefits of doing this were immense. Group leadership would often conduct surprise inquiries: How much has been spent on a certain project so far? What are the total travel expenses for a particular general manager this year? Because I had clearly tagged the attributes of every employee, every project, and every expense in the supplementary accounting, even for cross-year queries, I could pull up the data within seconds. This ultimate pursuit of traceability and transparency was best validated during a major tax bureau inspection later on. It was a comprehensive tax audit, and many companies had issues uncovered, but our company was found to have no irregularities whatsoever. Because every voucher was clear, accurate, and well-founded. The calculation of every tax payment could be traced back to the original contracts and invoices. This is the foundation of certainty. It was not learned from outside; it was built by my own hands, starting from the most fundamental level — every voucher entry, every account design, every expense trace. V. Dun'an Was My Best Experimental Field From 2006 to 2017, I worked at Dun'an for eleven years. During these eleven years, I repeatedly practiced three core methodologies on this field: begin with the end in mind, atomic tasks, and rules first. These three methodologies were not something I learned at Dun'an; they were something I created and repeatedly validated at Dun'an. Every practice was a validation; every validation made me more certain of the next step to take. Dun'an gave me a scenario sufficiently complex and sufficiently real to put every idea to the test in practice. Without Dun'an, there would be no theoretical foundation for the later Wu ROE, no underlying logic for the Pureroot System, and no version of me sitting here today writing these words.