The China Experts: Daniel Bateman of Brit Bridge on Digital Marketing and Going Solo in China
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
In this episode of The China Experts, Kristina Koehler-Coluccia is joined by Daniel Bateman, a digital marketer, key opinion leader and podcast host based in Shanghai. Daniel took the entrepreneurial plunge the summer before this recording, which makes him something of a live case study: he is going through exactly the start-up phase that many of Woodburn's newly incorporated clients are in, and he is candid about the parts of it that are uncomfortable.
Who is Daniel Bateman?
Daniel Bateman runs Brit Bridge, a digital marketing business built around connecting UK companies with the Chinese market. His largest client is Regroup China, one of the older digital marketing agencies in the market, which handles around fifty brands across consumer, business and government-facing work. He is also a key opinion leader in his own right, with a following of roughly 300,000 across Xiaohongshu and WeChat built around a British character he describes as somewhere between James Bond and Mr Bean, and he hosts the Panda Profits podcast. He has been in and out of China since 2011 and based in Shanghai since January 2018.
What this episode covers
How a phone call to the China education office in London turned into a government scholarship
Why he was steered to Tianjin rather than Beijing or Shanghai, and why it was the right call
What actually changes when you leave employment and start your own business in China
Why secrecy between departments damages foreign-invested companies more than copying does
The practical rules around hiring interns in China, and the route he uses instead
Why the first year or two may make no money, and what that means for forecasting
Where he sees the opportunities now, from live streaming thresholds to Chinese outbound
His advice on language and on not playing it safe
From a law degree to a government scholarship
Daniel was studying law at Southampton and had already worked out he did not want to be a lawyer. Chinese friends made in his first semester pointed out the obvious: if he was that interested in China, he should go. His course had an exchange year with Hong Kong, and 2011 was the first time he had travelled anywhere alone. He used that year to travel through the mainland, and came back determined to learn the language.
The scholarship story is the best thing in this section. He rang the China education office in London to ask about funding, built a bit of rapport on the call, and was told he was the first person to ring without demanding to know where their scholarship was. He was offered a choice of cities and was steered towards Tianjin rather than Beijing or Shanghai, which he now regards as the right decision, because there were few enough foreigners that he had to actually use Chinese.
An internship in Shenzhen with a Spanish coffee bean importer followed, where he brokered deals and was offered a job, though he went to Fudan for a masters instead. A spell back in the UK at the Great Britain China Centre ended when he asked his boss where the path led and was told that thirty years of hard work might make him ambassador. He was back in Shanghai by January 2018.
What changes when you work for yourself
Daniel is honest that the first weeks alone were lonely, with nobody to bounce ideas off, and that he now works seven days a week by choice rather than obligation. His view is that staying employed would have been the riskier option, because the organisations he had worked for, including a chamber and a business council, offered little room to grow and, in his description, were not delivering on the bridging role they claimed.
He also tells one story that anyone managing across cultures will recognise. On his first day at a Chinese blockchain company on a nine-to-six contract, he left at six and was told the next morning not to do that again, because you stay until the last person leaves. He now insists his own team turn up five minutes early rather than on time, which he treats as a discipline rather than a face-saving exercise.
Transparency beats secrecy
The strongest exchange in the episode is about internal secrecy. Kristina's observation is that foreign investors often arrive expecting to be cheated or copied, and respond by withholding information inside their own company, so finance will not share numbers with sales and HR does not know which projects are running. Her point is that this is self-defeating: HR cannot tell whether more headcount is needed if it does not know what has been won.
Daniel's counterexample is his client's team of around fifty in Guangzhou, who have worked together for six years and operate as one unit, with everyone across departments aware of what is being built for which client. His practical advice is not to go entirely local, by which he means keeping a genuinely multicultural team so the bridge actually exists. He cites a British sleep products company that appointed an agent purely on price without due diligence and got burned, when paying a little more for quality would have been cheaper in the end.
The fear of being copied is real, but secrecy is not the remedy for it. Registration is. Because China grants rights to the first party to file rather than the first to use, trademark registration in China is what actually protects a brand, and it belongs at the start of a market entry rather than after a partner has begun promoting you. The same logic applies to the entity itself: doing China company registration properly gives you a legal position to negotiate from rather than a handshake with an agent.
Hiring interns without tripping over the rules
This section is genuinely useful for small foreign-invested companies. Daniel is clear that taking on interns physically in China means paying them and dealing with a significant amount of documentation, so he does not do it that way. He works instead through a remote internship platform, with interns in New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, the United States and the UK, typically for three or four hours a day around their studies.
What he gives them is deliberately not admin. They get business development, marketing, research and proposal work, with a call every week or two, on the reasoning that this is what he wanted when he was an intern himself. He is realistic about the mixed results, noting that some go well beyond what is asked and others mainly want the reference letter, and that attention to detail is the most common gap. Kristina takes the opposite position and has decided against interns, because she does not believe she has the time to train them to the standard her work requires.
Either way, once you are employing people on the ground in China the informality ends. Building a team is a recruitment in China question first, and for companies that want someone working before their entity is trading, employer-of-record hiring provides a compliant contract in the meantime. Once staff are on the books, cloud payroll services take care of the monthly filings and contributions that catch small businesses out.
The first year or two may make no money
Daniel offers a lesson he learned the hard way, which is that a China business may not make money in its first year or two. Kristina's rule of thumb is that most companies take three to five years to break even, with a volatile ride in between where one strong month can cover a year of costs and the rest of the year does not.
Her sharper point is about where the difficulty actually sits. Most people assume the hard part is getting a China project approved. It is not. Green-lighting is the easy bit; the hard part is continuing to fund the business afterwards, which is why arriving with an optimistic revenue forecast is such a common failure. She describes one client who insisted growth would come naturally and organically and who is now two years away from the numbers they projected. Daniel recalls being asked at one of her round tables whether he had budgeted for the following year, and admits the question landed.
That is the unglamorous administrative homework nobody enjoys, and it is also the only way to know whether the business is working. Monthly cloud accounting and financial reporting is what turns a forecast into something you can steer by, and annual tax and audit obligations arrive whether or not the revenue did.
What he sees for brands now
Daniel's biggest frustration with incoming companies is slow decision making. China speed is real, and a business that takes weeks to decide something will lose to local competitors who reply within minutes on WeChat. His second point is localisation: British companies in particular tend to want to run things the way they run them at home, and that is not what persuades Chinese consumers to buy.
On the opportunities, he points to live streaming, where the deposit to open a shop on Douyin has come down substantially, and to Xiaohongshu, whose live streaming capability was growing quickly at the time of recording. He also notes a clear outbound trend, with Chinese companies building social media and offline presence in Europe and the UK and actively looking for trustworthy distributors and partners on the ground.
Kristina offers a deliberate counterweight. Her own watchword for the year is slow and steady, and she is sympathetic to companies that feel the energy at a conference and then hesitate once they are back at their desks. Both positions can be true: move quickly once you have decided, but decide on evidence rather than atmosphere.
What he would tell himself on day one
Two things. Learn at least a little of the language, because even a small effort is met with disproportionate warmth. And do not play it safe. Daniel deliberately avoided the foreigner districts when he arrived, went to the local areas instead, and regards that immersion as the reason the rest of it worked.
Watch the full interview
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