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Jamie Samuels still recalls some of the raised eyebrows that he saw after having completed in short order both the verbal and written portions of an exam that his future employer administered to job applicants.

Not unlike most of his fellow applicants, Samuels had been invited to take the exam after responding to a newspaper advertisement, but, unlike his peers, he had been the only foreign applicant\u2014or, more important, the only foreign applicant able to complete both portions of the exam in fluent Chinese.

\u201cAt that time, my written Chinese was very good because I had only recently completed my senior thesis,\u201d explains Samuels, who first became immersed in the Mandarin-speaking world in the early 1990s when at 18 years of age he spent 12 months in China in a gap year before returning to the U.S. and entering college as a Chinese language major.

\u201cLanguage is a tool to go do something else, so I spent a lot of my early career in trying to figure out just what that \u2018something else\u2019 was,\u201d remembers Samuels, whose stellar exam performance earned him a junior sales rep position with a Taiwanese medical device company.

\u201cWhile I was good at sales, I discovered that it wasn\u2019t for me\u2014it was too much of an emotional roller coaster,\u201d observes Samuels, who would remain in Taiwan but change companies as he migrated from sales into a corporate development role.

\xa0The job switch was enlightening.

Says Samuels: \u201cIt taught me that my financial toolbox was lacking. My response was to get myself into the most quant-oriented MBA program that I could.\u201d

Samuels returned stateside and nabbed a Wharton MBA before being recruited by Johnson & Johnson to fill a CFO role at a small Taiwanese operating company.

\u201cThey don\u2019t give CFO roles to fresh MBA grads for nothing. They had an operating company that was in a little bit of trouble in Taiwan, or so I figured out after starting the job,\u201d confesses Samuels, whose career with J&J would last more than 10 years and span a variety of senior finance positions in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.

Next, Samuels stepped into a CFO role for a privately owned manufacturer of air compressors. Based in Taiwan, the company operated six plants in the United States and Europe.

Finally, with more than 20 years abroad behind him, Samuels began considering CFO career opportunities back in the United States.

\u201cWhen you spend as much time as I did in the Far East, you risk getting pigeonholed,\u201d says Samuels, who, as CFO of EXUMA Biotech, may have finally figured out what that \u201csomething else\u201d is.

Headquartered in West Palm Beach, Fla., EXUMA produces cancer-fighting therapies largely developed at research facilities in Shanghai and Shenzhen, China\u2014a strategic advantage that Samuels seems uniquely experienced to leverage. - Jack Sweeney\xa0 Signup for our newsletter