California · China–U.S. hardware & operations
I help U.S. companies turn China-built equipment into products that can clear code, survive the field, and keep operating when the factory is twelve time zones away.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area · Available for select engagements
01 — Selected work
01 / First U.S. deployment
Before the first system landed, every crate had a place, an unloading order, temporary storage, waste removal, and a plan for keeping cars moving through a cramped gas-station forecourt. Two crews worked in parallel on utilities and equipment. Three weeks from container to running machine, ahead of schedule.
02 / Operating system
Hardware from overseas does not arrive with an American business attached. I built technician dispatch, spare parts, chemicals and water treatment, monitoring, payments, memberships, customer service, reporting, and the loop back to China-based engineers. I also built the internal operator platform for multi-site operations.
03 / Operator, not just advisor
At a Fremont gas-station car wash, the site and twenty-year-old equipment stayed the same. I changed the operating model: pricing, memberships, payments, service response, and accountability. Two months later, revenue had grown from $5,306 to $23,678. Monthly revenue peaked at $57,788.
02 — What I do
I can visit the factory, negotiate in Chinese, read the contract in both languages, and separate what a plant can build from what its sales team is willing to promise.
The gap between factory-ready and NEC or UL compliant is often cheap to fix before shipment and expensive to fix in a parking lot with an inspector standing there.
I turn a failure in California into evidence a China-based engineer can diagnose, trust, and redesign around — or tell you honestly when the factory will not fix it.
I am in the Bay Area: available for a site visit in the morning and a conversation with the factory that night. Someone still has to stay awake for the time zones.
03 — Background
I spent most of a decade at Oracle and Meta building cloud and machine-learning infrastructure. Then I spent three years bringing a Chinese manufacturer’s equipment into the United States: customs, compliance, installation, service, software, and the necessary arguments about what had to change before the next unit shipped. I have run the U.S. entity of a Chinese group, so I know how the same conversation sounds in each room.