How to Get Ahead in China

When he started looking for a Chinese general manager, Free wasn't sure someone like Jin existed. Free had hired a recruiting firm to send him candidates, and its top picks barely spoke English. "It was starting to scare me," Free says. "Not only were there language issues; there were obvious cultural issues. I was going to abort." But just before he abandoned the idea of opening a Shanghai office, Free threw a dinner for some manufacturing clients, among them a particularly serious and taciturn fellow. The next morning, Free got a call at his hotel room. "He says in perfect English, 'How can we work together?' " It was Jin; the quiet guy from the dinner had tracked him down. Free soon realized Jin would make a great general manager. He is a Beijing native who graduated from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, near Phoenix, and worked in manufacturing in the U.S. before returning to China. He also turned out to have an American-style sense of play. He calls his boss a "crack-ass cracker."

Managers like Jin, who can bridge the two cultures, are hard to find and don't come cheaply. Jin earns $250,000 a year, plus stock options; in Atlanta, Free says, he would pay someone in the same position $175,000, with about 40 percent fewer stock options. "When I started to get into negotiations with James, I was thinking 50K a year, maybe," Free says. "I was taken aback." IT managers and sales and business-development executives can expect as much as $100,000 a year, about what they would make in Atlanta. Below the top tier, though, salaries drop sharply. A sourcing engineer, who reviews design specifications, earns about $15,000 a year here. In the U.S., Free says, the same employee would earn $100,000, and in Europe, $120,000.

Another huge difference is the importance Chinese employees attach to their job titles and their promotions. Frequent promotions often count for more in China than salaries, and it's a full-time job simply managing the process of stepping people up, and down, the ladder. That's why one of Jin's first hires in China was a human resources manager. Salespeople are often eligible for promotion every three to six months. Yet if they don't meet their sales goals for three months in a row, they face demotion, a common practice in many Chinese industries. But what Chinese workers seem to care most about is having an opportunity to hone their skills. "In each interview, the first question is about your training system," says HR manager Karen Huang. "Then, 'Can I have a career path?' Then, salary." On all these criteria, MFG.com scores highly, says Huang, 32, whose career has already spanned stints with Chinese units of American, German, and Taiwanese companies. Even so, she urges Free to offer even more training and more slots for promotion, and he quickly agrees. MFG.com's Atlanta and Geneva offices, Free says, tend to think of the Chinese employees as less sophisticated, even a bit primitive. In fact, some Chinese managers are head and shoulders above their U.S. counterparts. "We've been looking for a year for a person like Karen in the States," he says.

During each of his visits to China, Free meets individually with his managers -- to glean what's happening, ensure that Jin is doing a good job, make sure no one is about to quit, and, mostly, to applaud everyone he sees. To the new sales manager: "You're a rock star. We're very happy to have you." To a new customer service rep: "I'm very proud to see you and to meet you here." To a quality-assurance specialist about whom Free barely knows a thing: "I was hearing how good you are."

Free appears genuine and sincere. But all the backslapping also serves a purpose. Free wants to keep his Chinese employees pumped up, because MFG.com is up against some stiff competition.

First and foremost is the sizzling hot and much larger Alibaba.com. But Alibaba is a more basic matchmaker that puts buyers and sellers together, leaving them to negotiate offline. Free is positioning MFG.com as a full-service provider, both for the mostly American and European manufacturers that use his service and for the contractors, which increasingly are Chinese. Unlike Alibaba.com, for example, MFG.com keeps records of all the online negotiations and design drawings between the various parties and even coaches Chinese and American companies in how best to deal with one another. Alibaba may be bigger, but Free will tell you that MFG.com goes deeper. And plenty of companies are listening. "This is an amazing, amazing market -- you can feel the energy in Shanghai and all over China," he says. "If there's one market in the world that I don't want to screw up, it's China."

Shanghai is a long way from Tyrone, Georgia, where Free grew up. Tyrone is 25 miles southwest of Atlanta on I-85, also known in some parts as the Alan Jackson Highway, for the country singer. Though it's now considered part of the Atlanta metro area, Tyrone was a town of 160 when Free was a boy. As a small-town kid, he helped haul trash for his father's construction company. Free's dad took only one three-day vacation a year, usually taking the family to Florida. While growing up, Free never traveled outside those two states.

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