By his own admission, Roger Biles – a self-described “country boy from Tennessee” – knew very little about China four years ago. But the country’s rapid growth and ascension into the World Trade Organization spurred Biles into an intense cultural and business cram session.

What Biles, who left his senior executive post at a local trucking company to start SourceMark LLC, discovered on his first trip to China was eye-opening. In a nation of 1.3 billion, even medium-sized cities dwarf some of America’s largest. Partly because of its sheer size, China can be incredibly inefficient, allowing agents to get rich as middlemen. Large companies that thought they were dealing directly with a factory were instead dealing with agents who submitted their orders to factories far from the larger cities.