Map Data: Xiamen, China
Google Earth, Google Maxar Technologies
Wayne Merrick has been helping organizations with international expansion since the early 1980s. He has developed particular expertise in greater China, as the region is often a target for clients and as it requires strong local knowledge to penetrate. BYG Advantage owes the second half of its name to a merger with Wayne’s organization, Pacific Advantage Limited (PAL).
In 1993, Wayne had been in Asia for 6 years already. He and his wife Hali started PAL when they recognized an opportunity to help fast-growing internet companies enter Asia. At the time, many of Wayne’s and Hali’s contacts were joining firms like SynOptics and other small companies that were doing interesting things to pave the way for the tech industry to come. Wayne and Hali saw recurring frustration as these firms attempted to expand into Asia, and many of the challenges were things that the two had seen and solved before. The opportunity to help these firms was clear.
The venture was one of the pioneers of outsourced sales and BD. Rather than help firms hire locally to expand as a first step, PAL instead took over the operation directly, putting their own veteran sales and business development teams to work. As each client earned a foothold in Asia, the option arose for PAL to then help the client develop their own devoted local presence, including an office and a team.
PAL thrived and was eventually bought out by Juniper Networks. Wayne stayed on until retirement. By then, his and Hali’s expertise had grown to the point that they could very quickly assess prospective clients and derive the ideal market entry and growth strategy. Clients kept reaching out, and the development of the technology world and the Asian markets were too interesting to step away from, so Wayne and Hali returned from retirement to reboot PAL.
Wayne and Hali met many other organizations working to help clients expand internationally. One that stood out was BYG. BYG excelled at the technical components of representing software organizations, including striking deals involving custom integrations of software solutions to fit the needs of Asian customers. BYG was growing quickly, and a merger between the new and dynamic BYG and the established and proven PAL showed considerable promise. BYG Adtantage was born, and this promise has been realized.
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John Fargis is a senior executive with over twenty-five years of general management experience in the China market. He has run Asia for a range of US and European software companies. Google purchased three of these companies. John is the Co-founder and Principal for BYG Advantage, focused on market acceleration with international technology firms across APAC, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. John’s management experience includes bridging dozens of technology companies into new global market opportunities. Until recently he was also an adjunct professor at the Hult International Business School Shanghai campus where he taught courses on Emerging Markets, Leadership and Chinese History. He is an independent director on the NASDAQ listed technology company, Ispire. (ISPR) and a Board of Managers at the Oakwood Friends School.
John first went to China as a Henry Luce Scholar in 1993 when he worked in Shanghai. He was the first foreigner in the modern era, allowed permission to work in a Chinese reform school. Prior to this assignment he had worked for four years as a New York City, special education schoolteacher in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
John has a B.A. with Honors in Medieval Studies from Wesleyan University, a Masters of Special Education from Hunter College and a Masters of Law and Diplomacy with a focus on international business and Chinese history from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. After resideing for decades in China, John currently lives in New Paltz, New York, not far from where he grew up.