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A germ of an idea was planted at the end of 2009. By the middle of 2010, it had not only taken hold but flourished. 

I was going to open a translation company.

Now let me preface this by saying, at the time I was not an especially qualified translator. Furthermore, I knew it. The important thing, however, other than clients who refused to take "no" for an answer, was that my competition was even worse than I was.

I took three semesters of Chinese study at Hainan University. That was enough to call myself bilingual. It was not—by any stretch of the imagination—enough to call myself a translator. The very last time I took the Chinese proficiency exam, I'd gotten a 5. Just barely good enough to enroll in some undergraduate programs taught in Chinese.
Not translator quality.
Absolutely, definitely, 100% not translator quality.

So when people would call me up and ask me to translate, I'd be honest and say "I'm not a translator."

My polite refusal wasn't what they heard, though. They heard me asking "so, how much are you going to pay?" and they'd offer me money.

Of course, knowing that I wasn't a translator, and knowing that I wasn't qualified, I'd turn them down. Again with the polite words. Again with the thankful acknowledgement that they trusted me above and beyond my skill set.

And again, they would assume I was being modest. They would assume I was being overly polite. They would assume I was trying to say "I don't want the job at that price" rather than "I am not qualified." So, they'd offer me more money.

This would go back and forth for a while. Eventually, I was getting offered quite respectable sums of money. Eventually, I'd be browbeaten into saying "I can try". Which, if I'd actually been qualified, and actually been doing the polite haggling that they thought I was doing was exactly what I would have said when they named the right price.

As a result—despite being unqualified—I was very expensive.
Very, very expensive.

Which meant that the people who hired me were psychologically determined to find a high value in what I had done for them. And, it also meant, when I started acting as an agent finding jobs for other—actually qualified—translators that I not only knew all about not taking the first offer and haggling over price, I also had a very good idea of exactly how much the market would bear.

On April 12, 2011 I got the first copy of my business license. It wouldn't be finalized until mid-September but, as of that date, I became the owner of a Chinese registered Wholly Foreign Owned Entity. If "nicely saying no" was an unintentional way to get Chinese clients to think I was some impressive hotshot who was coy at negotiations, being a foreigner who had slogged through the months of paperwork necessary to get a business license was an even better way of convincing them I was the real deal.

Because, by now, I actually was the real deal.