Personal Data Country of Origin: USA Location: Shanghai Time in China: Shanghai 5 years, HK 6 years	Think very big. China is a big place, and entrepreneurs need to start planning to attract capital and investors from the very beginning.
Company Data Company: Enjoy China, Inc Position: Founding Partner Industry: Media Website: http://www.enjoyshanghai.com/index.asp
ENJOY the best of CHINA® is the city's premier Dining, Nightlife, Shopping and Activity Benefits club, providing cardholders with Valuable Discounts, Buy-1-Get-1-Free Deals, bonus gifts and VIP service at 300 individually selected top-tier merchants throughout Shanghai. "enjoy shanghai" is part of the enjoy® network, China's Premiere VIP Privilege Card system.

Establishing quality protocols with suppliers
The bar is set much lower in China. The process used to manage quality at factories and service companies can be very willy-nilly and not well thought out. For most Chinese companies, “hai ke yi” (good enough) is the norm. Chinese suppliers believe that customers will accept lower quality based on the strength of their personal relationships. This is because they have “tried their best”, and Chinese value harmony over strict quality standards. To the western mindset, product quality and content comes first and the relationship comes second. It’s a challenge to educate suppliers on the notion that “hai ke yi” is simply not good enough.

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Getting things of a regulatory / legal nature done through normal, non-guanxi channels.
Miles of red tape seem to stand in the way of getting anything done efficiently. Without the proper Guanxi, it is very hard to move forward. Conversely, we have been fined for all types of absurd circumstances, where the relevant authority...be that the telephone company or the local Commerce and Industry board...has absolute power and rules indiscriminately, often for less than noble motives. Every foreigner knows what Guanxi is, but it takes some time to understand how this requirement manifests. When you are flying way below the radar it doesn’t really matter. But once you have a well-known name, everyone is trying to reach into your pockets. The bottom line is that relationships are important for moving things forward, but also for not being bogged down in the muck.

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Protecting intellectual property.
IP theft has become a real problem for us. This isn’t at all exclusive to foreign invested companies—Chinese businesses face the same problems. It seems those who would misappropriate our logo or identity system see very little wrong with heir actions. I’ve been shocked at how blatantly our IP has been stolen. No attempt is made to masquerade the identity of our logo or trademarks. The offenders are knocking us off verbatim – and are completely unapologetic about it. The media says the situation is getting better, but I’ve seen no sign of progress. We’ve been knocked off by local Mom and pop shops, a few fairly wealthy and established entities, and by at least one of the country’s biggest and well known red chip companies.

We created maximum visibility with limited resources.
Working with a network of merchants, We have been able to establish a strong point of sale presence, causing people to think we are larger than we really are. That in turn has brought us business opportunities and a certain brand clout that we would have had a hard time obtaining otherwise. It hasn’t really cost us anything to establish it – we have woven it into our business operations, by making it beneficial to our partners to work with us in this way.

In China, people have a great respect for establishment. We have also had opportunity to piggyback larger brands in some of our direct marketing efforts.

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We picked some very talented and dedicated people to work with early on, and that’s made it possible to accomplish what we have.

Think very big.
China is a big place, and entrepreneurs need to think big. They need to put a plan in place to develop a product or a service that is not easy to replicate or knock off. They should be looking from the very beginning to attract VC and investors and go large-scale