There are world-class companies in China, run by exceptional business owners who are ready and willing to do business on the best possible terms. The question is: how do you find them, and how do you earn their trust?
That question had been sitting with me for over a decade.
For more than ten years I had been doing business with China from the UK, navigating the familiar frustrations that most British business owners know well. Remote relationships, communication gaps, and the nagging sense that something important was being lost in the distance between us. I knew the problem was not China. It was the distance itself, and what that distance does to trust.
My Journey to China
So in 2025, I finally flew to Shenzhen.
I had been learning Mandarin since 2018, and that decision paid off in ways I had not fully anticipated. Speaking even a working level of the language changed the dynamic in every room I walked into. It built trust quickly, opened conversations that would otherwise never have started, and allowed me to see China as it actually is rather than as a foreign buyer is usually permitted to see it.
Nothing in my experience of international business had prepared me for just how different China was, or how richly rewarding it became once I understood how to move through it.
Meeting Candy Yan
Through a trusted contact in Edinburgh I was introduced to Candy Yan, a Shenzhen-based entrepreneur who runs both a successful travel agency and a packaging manufacturing business. She became my guide, my translator, my friend, and ultimately my business partner. But what I quickly learned was that Candy's value ran far deeper than I had first understood.
For ten years, Candy had been doing something quietly remarkable. She had been organising and leading trips from China to the United Kingdom, bringing Chinese business owners, executives, and delegations to meet their British counterparts, navigate an unfamiliar culture, and build the kind of relationships that remote trading simply cannot produce. She understood, better than almost anyone, what it takes to bridge two very different business worlds. She knew the anxiety of arriving somewhere foreign without the right support. She knew what genuine hospitality looks like when the stakes are real.
When I arrived in Shenzhen in 2025, Candy brought that same knowledge to bear in reverse. She guided me through nine factory visits across Shenzhen, Dongguan, Long gang, and Guangzhou over two and a half intense weeks. She introduced me to a network of serious, accomplished Chinese business owners who had no reliable channel to connect with trustworthy UK partners. And she showed me something that stopped me in my tracks.
Foreign buyers, she explained, are routinely operating at a significant disadvantage. Not because Chinese business owners are unwilling to deal fairly, but because the visitors arrive without context, without language, and without the relationships that unlock the real conversation. The best companies, the ones running to the highest standards with the strongest ethics, are not the ones shouting loudest on trading platforms. They are the ones you find through introductions, through presence, and through trust built in person.
Why Triscor Global Exists
After many long conversations with Candy and her network, the answer became obvious. The most valuable thing we could offer UK business owners was not a service or a product. It was access. The access that comes from being in the room, understanding the culture, and arriving through the right door.
Triscor Global was built on that insight, and on a genuine partnership between two people who had each spent years learning, the hard way, what it takes to do business between Britain and China at the highest level.
We offer guided 10-day business tours through Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Beijing. You meet real business owners running world-class operations. You visit facilities that will change how you think about what is possible. You experience a country that is unlike anywhere else on earth, and you do it with people beside you who know it from the inside.
China is one of the greatest business opportunities available to UK entrepreneurs today. We built Triscor Global to make sure you walk through the right door.
Tommy Crooks
Founder, Triscor Global Corporation