A Ding

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WORKING from his home in Futian District, Michael Michelini leads a routine life of biking to pick up his son from nursery school, singing the ABCs on the ride back and then working on content creation and Internet marketing in the afternoon.

Michelini is an American who founded and hosts a weekly podcast called Global From Asia to help businesses understand how to do business in Hong Kong, the Chinese mainland and other parts of Asia. Global From Asia is an online platform for cross-border trading and business networking. It hosts regular expert meetups and workshops in China.

Encouraged by a speaker at the annual conference of Dynamite Circle, a group of Internet business owners from around the world, in Bangkok in 2013, Michelini registered a domain for starting a podcast, and put up a simple home page. The initial site was simple, a one-page site with the Hong Kong skyline and an email subscription box. Immediately people began to sign up, and the pressure was on.

Gary Lam, a good friend of Michelini, had serendipitously given him a professional microphone, so luckily for him he was already partially prepared to begin recording. Within a week he had recorded the first episode of his soon-to-be burgeoning podcast.

The key to the podcast was that Michelini had to keep it going weekly. “Starting something is always pretty straight forward and easy, but how to keep it going is the real challenge. A weekly show needs comprehensive preparation and requires the process of finding guests, editing audio files, creating the website post and promoting the show, etc. Many times it was Sunday night or even Monday and I was rushing to get the editing done,” he said.

This April, with 200 attendees from 32 countries around the world visiting the Pearl River Delta area for the trade show season, the team at Global From Asia completed its second annual conference Cross Border Summit in Shenzhen. For Michelini, growth is the goal and the third annual Cross Border Summit is already scheduled for April 20-21, 2018 right here in Shenzhen.

“What started as a podcast has grown to guide books, training classes and premiere events. After the Cross Border Summit, we launched a private membership club where members could connect with one another and help each other with their businesses,” Michelini said.

Michelini and his wife feel Shenzhen is a great place. “While my business is called ‘Global From Asia,’ it could also be focused down to ‘Global from Shenzhen,’ as Shenzhen is growing up more and more to be a truly global metropolis. I’m proud to be a part of it,” Michelini said.