Following a Chinese entrepreneurial expression, David Wolf’s “leap into the sea” as President and CEO of Beijing-based Wolf Group Asia Ltd. started with a long sales cycle for his first corporate client, and a new piece of software he downloaded, called Daylite, which helped him prove to himself he could take that leap and keep swimming.

In 2005, Wolf stepped off the “corporate burn-out bus” as head of the Asia-Pacific technology practice at Burson-Marsteller, an international public relations agency giant. Armed with his decade of Chinese business experience, and his trusty Apple PowerBook G4 laptop, his phone started ringing 48 hours after leaving the agency. He quickly took on assorted freelance assignments, but harbored a vision for a company devoted to providing Asia-based marketing strategy for top-tier U.S. technology, telecom and media companies.

“I’m an inveterate experimenter with software,” says Wolf. “I make it a bit of a hobby, if not a fetish. I have tried just about all the Personal Information Managers (PIMs) and project management programs out there, and subsequently, “uninstall” is one of my favorite features! I found Daylite just as I was closing my first big piece of important business with a big-name client.”

“It was a complicated beauty contest involving approvals in China and the U.S., so I set up an Opportunities Pipeline in Daylite that worked me through a process and didn’t let me forget anything. We closed the deal, and it proved to me as well as to my wife – who runs finance and administration – that we had a system in place to track and close business with a high level of certainty.”

That event, according to Wolf, also gave him the confidence to turn down a seductive offer for a senior executive position with a large U.S. software company in favor of running his own show.

Wolf Group Asia now counts a senior, five-person team that assists clients like Motorola with strategic corporate communications counsel in the world’s most competitive marketplace. “It’s easy to spend lots of marketing money quickly in China,” says Wolf, who is a proponent of Al and Laura Ries’s book, The Fall of Advertising and Rise of PR. “You have to understand that though Chinese consumers were among the last to experience traditional advertising, they’ve rapidly become adept at tuning it out.”

With decades of Chinese business experience under their belts, Wolf and his team advise a more effective, less expensive, PR-based go-to-market approach, and work alongside their corporate clients to create strategic alignment up to and including supervising quality assurance and campaign implementation by local Chinese agencies.

Wolf’s team members also rely on Daylite to manage their own individual and work-group productivity. “The feedback I get back from them,” says Wolf, “is that Daylite’s like an onion, or a parfait. There are layers and layers that open up new possibilities. You can use it as a straight PIM and it kicks booty on anything out there. But when you start using the business development, CRM, and project management features, it just knocks your socks off. The more time you spend with it the more you get out of it.”

“On the Mac, you expect ‘easy’, but you don’t always expect ‘powerful’ when it comes to business software,” says Wolf. “Daylite’s both. With a couple of clicks I can tell you exactly what my business looks like 18 months out. It helps with everything from tax planning to capital investment and human resources planning. And when I have a client, I can find out right away from Daylite whether I can take on a project three months out, or if we have a hole in our project schedule, I can step in and start selling. To be able to have that kind of detailed forward view of the business with a couple of clicks is of inestimable value for my business.”

As someone who typically spends more time at client offices than his own, Daylite Mail Integration (DMI) is a particularly invaluable feature for Wolf. “Wireless email allows me the mobility I need, but before Daylite my inbox acted as a second to-do list. If you pick up a book on personal productivity like David Allen’s Getting Things Done, he recommends having one bucket. Daylite DMI gives you that one-bucket, allowing you to capture contacts or assign tasks and appointments directly from email.”

As satisfied as he is with Daylite, Wolf is always looking for a sharper edge with his productivity. “It seems every time I have a need for something, someone at Marketcircle is working on it. I love having that kind of relationship with a software vendor. They know their customer and are very fast at anticipating new needs.”

“Honestly, I don’t know why it’s not part of a small business pack from Apple that comes with every Mac. I constantly tell people running their own show it’s every bit as essential as a word processor. Wolf Group Asia’s literally grown up with Daylite, and I can’t imagine running my business without it.”