Justin Mandelbaum was born in Des Moines. Lijuan Zhao was born in Nanning, China. Their start-up company was born out of their common desire to facilitate business between their respective homelands.

China Iowa Consulting LLC, which launched in April, is an import and export advisory firm focused on securing Chinese buyers for U.S. products and services.

In addition to offering comprehensive consulting services for trade, the West Des Moines-based company handles product and vendor sourcing and market-entry research for businesses and trade associations in the United States and in China. It also caters to governments and educational institutions and provides translation and interpretation services.

Mandelbaum and Zhao, who met in February 2009 at a Greater Des Moines Young Professionals Connection event, have each traveled the world in pursuit of cross-cultural experiences and higher education.

Now, as China’s economy mushrooms, the business partners are drawing on their diverse backgrounds and strong local ties in order to build relationships and secure clients.

“Our goal is to be the go-to company when businesses here are looking to explore China,” Mandelbaum said. One of the company’s objectives is to help Iowa companies realize the benefits of trading with Chinese companies.

“Once a Chinese company decides it wants to import an American product, the demand seems almost insatiable because the market is so big,” he said. “People oftentimes don’t think about other potential markets out there. I would say any U.S. brand, no matter how nice or how not-nice it is, has an automatic cachet in China.”

The Iowa connection

Mandelbaum’s German-born great-great-grandfather, Julius, moved with an associate to Des Moines from New York in 1864 and opened a dry goods store on the corner of Second and Court avenues.

“I’ve been told that they were coming here in a covered wagon and selling pots and pans,” Mandelbaum said, adding that at some point, Goldstone & Mandelbaum evolved into J. Mandelbaum & Sons, which in the mid-1920s merged with Younkers.

In the 1980s, Justin’s father, John, exited the day-to-day operations of the business to forge a career as a commercial real estate broker.

Justin Mandelbaum is a pioneer in his own right.

In 1998, Mandelbaum left Iowa to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated magna cum laude from the school’s Huntsman Program in International Studies & Business.

In the past decade, he has visited 25 countries, which included a one-year stint working in the Tokyo office of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. while still in college.

He has also been to China several times, most recently in 2008 when he spent three and a half weeks touring cities such as Shanghai and Beijing.

From 2002 to 2008, Mandelbaum worked in Connecticut at Starwood Capital Group LLC and Vespera Investments LLC before returning to Iowa to form Mandelbaum Properties LLC, a real estate development, acquisition and management firm.

“My family will always be in real estate, and I’ll always have a hand in real estate,” Mandelbaum said.

The China connection

“My parents were among the earliest Chinese to have their own shop at the end of the 1980s,” Zhao said, noting that her home country has become much more accustomed to free trade in the past 10 years.

China joined the World Trade Organization in 2000, the same year Zhao moved to Changsha, a province in south central China, where she spent six and a half years while earning a bachelor’s degree in international trade and global marketing and a master’s degree in international trade and economics.

Her resume includes summer programs in Forli, Italy, and Vienna, Austria, as well as postgraduate research in consumer behavior and marketing at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

In 2007, Zhao joined the Netherlands-based office of De Jang Landen Leasing Ltd., a subsidiary of international financial services provider the Rabobank Group. She followed that with a nine-month stint in De Jang Landen’s office in the United Kingdom, where she conducted market research to identify business opportunities in India.

“I was in the United Kingdom, and I always wanted to come to the United States,” Zhao said. So in October 2008, she accepted a position with Agricredit Acceptance LLC, a Johnston-based subsidiary of Rabobank, and stepped on U.S. soil for the first time.

Zhao, who is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and English, said she has always been a go-getter.

“I started my first business when I was 8 years old as a street vendor selling ice cream,” Zhao said, noting that her family liked to refer to her as “little boss.” And though she quickly ate up all the profits, the experience stuck with her.

“I’ve always had this entrepreneurial spirit with me,” she said.

Working together

Mandelbaum, 30, and Zhao, 28, have worked for months to get in front of potential clients.

They met recently with officials from the Iowa Department of Economic Development and the U.S. Department of Commerce. They’ve reached out to the Iowa Soybean Association and the Food Export Association of the Midwest USA.

They have made several trips to Chicago to meet with the Chinese Consulate General’s office and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office.

Zhao recently spent a day at the Iowa Capitol with state senators.

“I realized this could be a great, unique opportunity,” Zhao said, noting that the Midwest doesn’t yet have a lot of Chinese businesses or investors, compared with the East Coast or California.

She also said some business owners are intimidated by the process of international trade, which could hinder them from exploring the Chinese market.

That mindset is “good news for us,” Zhao said. “I felt like this was going to be a niche and a great, golden opportunity.”

In fact, soon after relocating to the United States, Zhao began to receive calls from friends, family and associates in China asking her to find American products for them. Some, she said, were exploring the possibility of marketing a Chinese product here.

China Iowa Consulting has at least three potential clients lined up, including a Chinese company that wants to import 500 to 1,000 tons of chicken feet each month. The so-called “chicken paws” are a delicacy in some cultures.

It also has a Chinese buyer looking to purchase dried distilled grains and a large Chinese state-owned enterprise that hopes to obtain the exclusive distribution rights to a well-known American product.

“U.S. brand names still carry a very prestigious image in China,” Zhao said.

But it is agriculture that the company is most excited about.

Market potential

“Agricultural products are doing extremely well in China,” said Erin Ennis, vice president of the US-China Business Council (USCBC) in Washington, D.C.

According to the USCBC, crop production was Iowa’s No. 1 export to China last year, and Iowa exports to China grew 0.2 percent in 2009, compared with a decline of 26 percent to the rest of the world.

“China has come out of this recession faster than a lot of other countries in the world,” Ennis said, noting that demand for products such as meat and corn is increasing in the country as its middle-class population grows.

China is Iowa’s fifth-largest export market, behind Canada, Mexico, Japan and Germany.

“A lot of people know China was the manufacturing center of the world for the past decade,” Zhao said. “The next decade will be the decade of U.S. agricultural products, because America has the most efficient (agriculture) and the most fertile soil in the whole world.”

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s economy surged at a 11.9 percent rate in the first quarter of 2010, compared with the year-earlier period.

“There is a bright future ahead for China,” Mandelbaum said. “We’re working it as hard as we can.”