Founders: The American who built his business in China
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Asioita, joista on epävarma. Onko nyt hyvä hetki muuttaa uusiin tiloihin? Entäs sitten, kun markkina taas kääntyy? Tarvitaako me enemmän tilaa etätyölle, lähityölle, hybridille? No, sitten asioita, joista olen varma. Meidän olisi hyvä vuokrata tilat sellaiselta, joka on varmaa. Kun ajat ovat epävarmat, mitä jos vuokranantaja olisi varma? Niinpä. Kysy toimitilaa alan suositelluimalta vuokranantajalta toimitilat.varma.fi. Tänäänkin Suomessa on tuhansia rahoittamisen arvoisia yrityksiä. Nyt niillä on varaa kasvaa. Me OP-pohjalassa avasimme juuri satojen miljoonien kasvurahoituksen. Lue lisää O.fi kautta kasvurahoitus. Yrityslaina myöntää osuuspankki tai OP-yrityspankki Oj.
Hello, this is Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Luke Wilson. With trade tensions running high between the world's two biggest economies, what's it like to run a Chinese business as an American founder? That's the situation Jacob Rothman finds himself in, the co founder of V Long Enterprises, which manufactures and exports cooking equipment from its headquarters in Shanghai, some of the world's biggest retailers. Taylors. Welcome to the programme, Jacob. So we're talking a lot about the US and China this week because of the meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. We want to talk about your experience running a business in China for more than two decades, but we'll start as you did, I guess, in the US.
You grew up in California and didn't you, and helped out with your parents' business. Can you tell us a bit about that?
My family had a manufacturing business. And when I was a kid, I grew up watching my father move his factory from Carpentria, California, which is right outside where I grew up in Santa Barbara, to Knoxville, Tennessee, then eventually to Laredo, Texas, in the McHiladora. So the early part of my life oddly mirrors what I'm going through now, which is change in manufacturing and government policy. Um eventually. um uh NAFTA uh end up changing everything for us. And um that's how I how I got to China originally.
Yeah, and w what did you learn from that business? It was a brut
Broom and brush business, is that right? Yeah, brooms, mops, and brushes. Really, how I got to China was I got thrown out of college. And in that time, in the interim, I went to go work in the factory in Stockton, California. I really learned uh quite a bit that's applicable today. Um, you know, my father, as you might imagine, wasn't pleased with me. So he gave me a uh really a broken down station wagon, loaded the back of the station wagon full of product, and I went around northern. California is selling uh brooms and mups and brushes to hardware stores and chasing around uh family owned businesses, uh, because hardware stores in the United States are usually owned by, you know, mom and pop type of operations and chasing them around on their lunch breaks, trying to get them interested in selling my product um is not much different from what I do today, just on a larger scale.
Absolutely. And not to make you dwell on it too much, but let's talk a bit about college because you didn't go to study anything business related, did you?
No, not at all. I thought when I got out of school that um I actually was going to be a rabbi, which didn't work out. So, you know, I didn't actually become a rabbi. But I think being a liberal arts major in college was actually perfect for what I was experiencing when I first got to China. I first went in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And I I think what kept me here and got me fascinated with China was all of the social change and what I was watching on the ground. And I actually think a liberal arts education was a perfect uh training for coming here at that time.
Did you go down that route with that in mind or are you kind of looking back now thinking, Yeah, that did prepare me quite well for this?
No, absolutely not. I mean, uh, we never know where life is gonna take us. And um I think when I was uh in college and studying, I I never thought that I would end up in China, but um what I learned there and studying religion and psychology and uh philosophy got me fascinated to be in China and and uh actually more recently in India where I'm surrounded by the religions that I studied when I was in college.
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