As some of you may know, I’m very interested in doing business in China. Earlier this year my wife (who is Chinese) and I set up Escalan Beijing, an online marketing company that helps Chinese companies with pay per click marketing.
This company is run by my wife’s cousin, but we are now considering moving to China and making this our full-time focus. We are planning to go there for a month in mid-August and, if we find a specific opportunity we can leverage, will seriously consider moving there. To that end, I’m doing everything I can to talk with Americans doing business in China and/or to schedule meetings with Chinese companies while I’m there.
Just to give you a sense of what we’re doing to maximize opportunities there, here’s a partial list of what I’ve been doing just in the past few days.
- Planning a seminar about marketing with Google – we want to do it in Beijing, Shanghai and possibly Hong Kong
- Last week I contacted the author of this insightful article about SMEs in China.He responded with an offer to help. People are usually nice if you approach them nicely.
- I’m also scheduled to talk with Laurel Delaney, who runs the Global Small Business Blog where that article was published.
- On Sunday, while surfing LinkedIn, I discovered that Jad Duwaik, an old networking contact of mine, has moved to China. What a surprise!
- The LinkedIn connection motivated me to try other services. I looked on Ryze and, lo & behold, they have a couple networks geared toward China. So I joined several of them – Shang Hai Tan, Lao Wai in China (moderated by the aforementioned Jad Duwaik), International Network in China and Cross-Strait Relations: Taiwan and China
- While doing the above, I got sidetracked and read Jad’s email about what his first 12 hours in China was like. Priceless!
- Anyhoo, I got back to browsing LinkedIn and found that many of my 2nd degree contacts in China came through Christian Mayaud, so I sent him an email asking if we can talk sometime by phone. (I don’t know him well enough to feel comfortable asking for a connection by email, and I assumed he would reject it.)
Of course, this is only scratching the surface and I’m going to keep plugging away at it. If you have interests and/or contacts in China, I’d love to talk with you, so please contact me.