What do I do for work?

My sister Johanna's (my 2nd little sister) boyfriend Jakob asked me what I do for work. I will try to explain.

This is how I got the job. I answered an ad on That's Beijing's job-site and went for an interview for the company working halftime with PR. I'm not a PR guy but the company seemed interesting.

The company helps foreign telecom and IT-companies, usually small start-up firms, to do business in China. We start out doing initial market assessments and if the costumer decides to make the move, they usually let us becomes their representatives. That means that we hire people that works for us but are payed through their account. If their operation grows they might in the end choose to start their own office, and then they finish their account with us. It is usually huge Venture Capitalists that introduces these smaller start-ups. If a small company did this themselves it would take a very long time, be very risky, and very expensive. We can hire people in a couple of weeks, don't need to find office spaces and we can get started right away. Since most of the work is done by Chinese it is more effective (no culture and language barriers) and cheaper.

They called me for an interview and pretty soon it became clear to them too that I wasn't a PR guy either. It seemed like they would be more interested in having me coordinate and managing their various accounts. They already have an American guy that does that, but they might soon need a new person to do this. Since they probably won't have enough accounts until spring they offered me doing a part-time freelance project so I could get to know them and the company better.

My little project is to do a market assessment for an American fabless chip maker. They produce a chip that can enables a handset to use both the GSM network and WiFi. I will suggest to them possible clients and prepare meetings with them.

Basically I sit and surf, write business proposals, SWOT analysis, PowerPoint slides, drink coffee, and chat with the secretaries. All the thing that you might not understand from this, I didn't understand either when I started. Use google if you want to find out.

I think this will be a very useful experience. This all is very different from everything I have done before and I'm smack down in the middle of a huge business-culture-clash in progress.