How we use it

Why this is faster

Sourcing partners in China the normal way takes months.

You brief a consultant. They scout, they cold-call, they ask around. They come back with a longlist that's usually padded out. You spend weeks taking meetings to filter it down. Half the names weren't right to begin with. You start the cycle over with a different consultant, or sometimes with a different agency. Three months gone, and often the launch window goes with them.

We don't work that way because, frankly, we don't have to. The sourcing has been done over the last fifteen years and the database is what came out of it. So when a brand comes to us, we're starting with the answer rather than starting with the search.

What we actually do

A typical engagement looks something like this:

1. 01

   Brief, 30 to 60 minutes

   You tell us your category, your stage, your channel priorities, and what you're really trying to do in China. Cross-border test, full domestic launch, distributor replacement, channel expansion, or sometimes something we haven't seen before.

2. 02

   Market map

   A clear picture of who operates in your category, channel by channel. Which TPs dominate Tmall in your space, which Douyin Partners are doing real volume on livestream versus just running shop pages, which distributors have actual offline coverage in tier-2 cities and which only really cover Shanghai and Guangzhou. The kind of overview that would normally take a consulting firm a few weeks of desk research to put together, and even then it would be less accurate, because desk research can't tell you what we know from being in the room with these people.

3. 03

   Shortlist

   Three to five partners genuinely worth talking to. Each one with a short brief (two or three pages) covering what they do well, where they fall short, the brands they've worked with, what we'd watch out for in negotiation, and how we'd structure the deal.

4. 04

   Warm introductions

   Cold intros don't really work in China. Most of the partners in BeyondCompass already know us, and many have worked with us before or with brands we've placed. So you walk into the first meeting with a relationship already behind you, which usually means you get their A-team and not their pitch team.

5. 05

   Whatever you need from there

   Some brands want us in every meeting for the first year. Others take the shortlist, run their own negotiation, and only circle back when something needs unblocking. Both are fine, honestly. The database has done its job either way.

Faster, because the work is already done

It really comes down to one fact. The work that normally takes months has been done already.

We've sat across the table from these partners, walked through their warehouses, watched how they perform on real brand projects, and listened to their other clients vent in private when things weren't going well. None of that lives in a database you can buy off the shelf, and none of it shows up on Google. The only way to get it is the slow way, which is more or less what we've been doing since 2010.

So what you actually get from us is the answer to a question that would otherwise eat up a full quarter of your year, sometimes more.