I have invested most of my career writing and editing client-facing reports for my employers in different professional fields: state finance and funds management, audit, financial advisory services, and real estate. As an El Paso Chamber volunteer, I have analyzed highway project allocation criteria, pipelines, and funding, and charted fund allocations among fourteen districts of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). In October 2023, the Chamber delivered my findings to the Governor of Texas, the Texas Transportation Commission, TxDOT, and the Federal Highway Administration.

As a Governor’s Executive Fellow at the beginning of my career, my employers were senior executives in the Washington State Department of Transportation. Their clients were transportation commissioners, legislators, and key transportation constituencies. My products were publications and reports aimed at informing and shaping the decisions of these clients.

During nearly ten of my twelve years in China, my employers were audit partners at KPMG Huazhen, and later financial advisory services practice partners at Deloitte. Their clients were global corporations and occasionally closely held private firms with an existing presence in China, or seeking opportunities there. My products included a wide range of finished reports of findings of professional engagements for these clients, and proposals for further engagements. These engagements were in audit, internal audit, financial due diligence, commercial due diligence, valuation, reorganization services, and forensic and dispute services including fraud investigation.

At these firms, I was occasionally assigned to other practices and tasks. I trained professional staff in reporting standards, to relieve partners of such tasks. This enabled those partners to concentrate their working hours on business development. I also edited a series of 50-60 page promotional reports for six new development zones in China, including Pudong, Shenzhen, Suzhou, and Wuhan.

I was invited to report from Bo’ao Forum for Asia (BFA) in each of three consecutive years. Deloitte was the official reporting partner for Bo’ao Forum. These events lasted four days, and hosted heads of state and world-renowned opinion leaders. I enjoyed the honor of reporting Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first plenary session speech just days after his accession to the Presidency in 2013.
I attended several panel sessions each day, and my reports from these discussions were compiled with those of a few other reporters into a final report co-published by BFA and Deloitte. Those final reports are linked below:

In-between my appointments at these two Big Four audit and advisory firms, I stood in for the Washington State Trade Representative at Shanghai during her pregnancy leave. We promoted the State of Washington as a destination for investment by Chinese companies.

One of my assignments for the trade representative was a personal contract with the historic Chinese river town of Nanxun (population: 119,300). The purpose was to evaluate the town as a potential destination for foot traffic along their riverfront, similar to other Chinese water towns such as Wuzhen and Zhouzhuang; and analogous to San Antonio’s River Walk. In Nanxun, this effort was complicated by a lack of service routes parallel to the river, but opposite the frontage, putting service vehicles in the same space as pedestrians. We reported this and other issues to the town’s government for resolution.

In the last six years before moving to El Paso, my principal client was a leading global residential real estate affiliate in Seattle, Washington. For this client, the targets were luxury real estate buyers and sellers, luxury builders, and notably among these, Chinese real estate investors. My products for these clients were a WeChat channel targeting those with a Chinese-language preference, populated with translations of regular monthly and annual reports that I wrote for all clients of my employer. Many of my public reports are still searchable at their website: https://www.rsir.com/blog/author/williamhillisauthor/

Key to preparation for the annual reports was compilation of a database of more than half a million records of closed real estate transactions among fifteen counties over several years. I extracted these records from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service database, and analyzed them using Tableau to generate insights for the annual report. In each report, I prefaced the discussion of subregional trends with a narrative of relevant events occurring that year.

See the About page for more details as to what I do here at Emelessence.

William Hillis