1. Shanghai is going to push back on you, all you have to do is push it back to where you want to go. Wear your emotions on your sleeve, put on your armor and jump into the fire.
2. The expat community offers a rare opportunity to meet a lot of powerful people, chances are if you’re sitting in a coffee shop and see a westerner they might just be a VP or head of accounting. Go ahead and talk to them, you’re in the same boat.
3. Save time. Put your office near your home.
4. You expect things to be a lot cheaper, but a Snapple costs 7 USD and the guy out there picking up trash is making that in a week. I wish I could look at my budget back when I started, what a joke that would be.
5. Everything costs three times more than you expect – the price of your office might be as much as an office in New York City.
6. In China the dollar does not ride everything like it does in the US. In China it’s relationships first with the dollar. A man found that a factory was grinding him to get charge $10 an hour, probably because he just didn’t like him. The guy they ended up using was $8 an hour and that’s because they took the guy out for KTV.
7. Becoming a WFOE is not as easy as it used to be, the registered capital amount has been raised to keep out foreign mom and pops. Even though the Chinese can’t keep us out, they can be more choosey.
8. On corruption and bribes in China: to get a paid during a deal – to get a red envelope is still common and if you don’t take a bribe you are sure to lose that deal – but the other side of that is once you get that envelope you’re brothers in business together. What westerns have to understand is that a lot of Chinese value loyalty more than the truth.
9. Routinely dealing with petty problems. For example, a landlord wanted to charge the same price for identically sized spaces; one however required a healthy amount of renovating including new toilet and lighting. “But you just have to figure out a way to accept their way of doing things, it takes a lot of patience. “