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After living in Shenyang for 4 years, my wife and I headed down a different path with lives here and took on the new, overwhelmingly challenging, and wonderfully rewarding direction of having opened a small factory in this city. Shenyang has always had such a great appeal to me for so many reasons, but having opened a business here I have truly grown to love the city.

What separates our factory from most foreign invested companies is that we are a small business. We deal primarily in custom-made textile and clothing items, handmade crafts, wood products, and other assembly based products. I find it’s an uncommon model to just jump into owning a business in a country you don’t know, in a production based business model, in an industry you have no clue about, and with little money (minimum capital allowed by law for a joint venture). It’s kind of like jumping into the swimming pool head first before checking if there’s any water.

As a small foreign owned business, I have run into many challenges. One of which is the expectations around me. Chinese I meet expect that our company should be huge. When I go to order supplies, suppliers often can’t understand why I need such small quantities. I’m also caught between the expectations that a small Chinese business is not always expected to live up to the letter of the law and those that say that large foreign companies are expected “to pay their fair share” by following every letter of the law; furthermore, I am at the disadvantage of not being able to afford international caliber legal and accounting staff and don’t enjoy the connections and attention from government bureaus that a company like BMW enjoys. The worst of all struggles is that a certain percentage of people feel that it’s ok to take advantage of foreign companies because they are getting so rich already and “they are not one of us.” I have fired 3 employees for dishonesty so far and had one very messy situation where one threatened to hire a gang of thugs. It has been almost impossible to run a business that maintains active sales and production and accurate financial accountability without doing all the purchasing myself. Our finances were even more complicated as 2 major domestic customers refused to pay for their significant orders.

Running a small business has not been easy. Over the first year I often found myself going home at 10 PM, waking up at 5 AM to do purchasing at the market, and frustrated by the reality that I was still running an unproductive company that was loosing money. I’d wished several times I had never opened a business, and I became very thankful for the blessing of my wife who was there to support and comfort me (and keep working to support our personal finances).

Nevertheless, our company has managed to still be around after a year and 5 months. We really felt a turning point after a year in business. We got the right staff in, my Chinese finally reached a point that I felt comfortable directly overseeing most parts of the business and became familiar with the industry vocabulary, we developed a few new successful products and found our niche, we won a law suit against one of our non-paying customers (the other is still in the courts), and we started to turn a small profit. I can’t say our company supports all our personal financial needs yet, but our business is growing every month and our company has made strong investments in building itself for the future.

We do feel very blessed to have opened a factory here in Shenyang. At my company I am surrounded by employees that care for me like a member of their family and look after our business like it was their own, as I often have to fight with them to leave at the end of the work day if a project is not yet done. We have been accepted as part of our employees’ families and treasure the memories and work together.

We expect many more challenges yet to come, but we now can say (most days of the week) that we love having a production business in Shenyang and all the blessings it has brought. We are looking forward with expectation about our plans for the next year. Please feel free to take a look at our website at www.syxiuqiu.com to learn a little more about our company.

Ryan Shaffett works part time as a consultant for Liaoning Gateway and has been a leader in rallying support for the foreign small business community in Shenyang and Liaoning.

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