When Dan Epstein welcomes you to a conference room in his New York office, it's likely that he won't just offer you a cup of coffee. “We also have some Chinese tea,” he said before a recent interview in the New York headquarters of his company, ReSource Pro–highlighting a cultural tie to the fact that most of his employees don't work in New York, but in Qingdao, China.

Mr. Epstein is chief executive officer of ReSource Pro, which he describes as a “remote staffing” company that performs back-office processing tasks for managing general agents, program managers and retail broker clients using a staff based in China. Yet the CEO also reveals that he only knows about 10 words of Chinese.

There is no need to know more, even though roughly 120 of ReSource Pro's 125 employees work in Qingdao, according to Mr. Epstein–who explains that the Chinese staffers are bright college students who speak fluent English.