About Founder

Everyone has a past, so do I. Not a super glorious one, but could be interesting if you happen to be free at this moment whether you incidentally hit on this page or particularly want to check about who is this Charlie Lin guy? Is he even legit?

I was born and raised in a small county named Yudu in Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province, a province right on the north of Guangdong Province(where Shenzhen is). My hometown was the starting point of the Long March for the First Red Army. Chinese President Mr. Xi Jinping has just visited my hometown on May 20, 2019, due to its unique legacy in Chinese history.

I studied English at Jiujiang University, a college close to Mount Lu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, and a prominent summer resort at home and abroad since ancient China. The father of Pearl Buck was one of the first five missionaries to acquire property on the mountain.

I chose English to learn because I barely wanted to think too much about what to learn as I was so crazy about learning English since middle school, sorry to embarrass myself, but in China usually, only girls tend to be so. From a very early age I started to indulge in reading out loud textbooks after cassettes(sometimes pirated ones) and later in high school imitating famous English speeches, listening to Forrest Gump movie scripts(hundreds of times!), at college learning from masterpiece translation between Chinese and English essays, memorizing GRE vocabulary, digesting original English readings intensively… I made friends with a Pakistani medical doctor who at the age of 60 back then told me I had an unusually higher level of mental maturity than my real age and a French teacher who wanted me to become his business partner in organizing Chinese cultural exposure adventures for Europeans, a plan however that finally was canceled due to his personal reasons.

However, what I really became finally was a nerd 🙁 At college, I made no girlfriends, didn’t take part in any form of the student union, didn’t like hiking a lot though I was so close to a UNESCO World Heritage mountain. My plan to pursue grad school life(in becoming nerd again) failed when I sloppily took out my exam paper by mistake, a fatal zero-mark causing the error which sentenced my 1 year of exam preparation to death(reassuringly I still got 132 out of 150 in the essay translation in the afternoon same day, as dead as I was at heart).

After the Waterloo of pursuing higher education, I was crushed, emotionally, intellectually and physically thru and thru…until my elder cousin, a mechanical engineer who works in Shenzhen suggested that I could stay in his place and find a job in this city.

Within 2 weeks of job hunting, as a shy nerd, in looking to work as a foreign sales, though academically I stood out among English majors, I was rejected by almost all the interviews in the urban districts of Shenzhen.

But quickly and finally I ended up in a speaker factory, its founder a former Tsinghua graduate(like Harvard or Yale in America) spoke really high of me in personalities and English proficiency and graded me as a talent with high growth potential.

Then with the company I was short term business travelling around the world a few times in HK, Swizerland, the UK and Dubai, a practice that is absolutely seen as too premature for a fresh graduate. Back in China, once upon a time, I met an Indian customer, an educationist as well as a businessman, after his account manager a saleswoman left the company, I was entrusted to follow up all his orders. He might look quite abrupt in this paragraph but, shhh, you will read in the following this gentleman changed my life.

After that, I went to a new job, a Russian smartphone brand company in Shenzhen, I did not stay there too long however because the company decided not to sell smartphones any longer. But I was lucky to work with a couple of people that are 10-30 years older than me and that command decades of accumulated resources in the supply chain of mobile accessories industry.

Then I was between jobs. The Indian customer reached out to me to help him with translation in China because he was super impressed by my English in our past encounters, but he needed me more because we had really liked each other ever since we first connected. So I was with him for 2 weeks when I excellently delivered the task not just as a translator but more as his business associate as well as a personal friend.

The Indian customer then suggested to me that I could become a sourcing agent and offered to build a website for me by engaging a friend of his in South India that runs a web design and digital marketing firm. I liked the idea because according to my friend, I could make more money easily than in companies, really simply thinking.

Then I spent weeks in writing the website content and coordinating with the web designer to bring to life the website. Then, BizShenzhen.com was born! In the following 3-4 years, I gradually got a few happy customers, established my Shenzhen company and Hong Kong company, rent an office and hired a few people to work with me.

Because of what I do, I got a lot of opportunities to meet and work with a lot of different interesting people most of whom are super cool and amazing: