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This article was written by Keith Rayner, Download article in PDF
format Ensuring your First Success
in International Business Development First steps … So bravo, you’ve made it big in your home market! You started as a small company with a novel idea, worked diligently with those first loyal customers to overcome teething problems and get things up and running, and from these humble beginnings you’ve finally crossed the sales and marketing chasm to arrive on the up-side with a mature, proven product or service. After you’ve gone through all that, attempting to bridge the international divide and expanding abroad should be child’s play - you’ve done all the hard stuff already. But don’t get so gung-ho about that big leap that you ignore some of the pitfalls that may await you at your new destination. Now, don’t get me wrong, international expansion can be the best decision any company ever made to increase its revenues and market share, even though globalization has got a lot of ill-defined negative press recently. As a quick comment on this hot issue, to my mind the opposite of globalization is isolation, which long-term never benefits any economy. I’ve never heard of anybody complaining about being able to buy a bottle of French champagne in a U.S. supermarket, so go global! You can do it! However, cautious optimism and detailed planning is the best way to ensure success, and of course learning from other people’s mistakes is a more relaxing and less expensive way of conducting business than devising your own trial and error crash course. As a global expansion company that provides a range of services to help you along the road to success, we can assure you that there is a wealth of expert guidance out there that understands your current position and can evaluate and facilitate your future goals. So let’s look at three general pitfalls, and how to side-step them. There are certainly a lot more specific issues out there, but three is always a good number for broad blanket categories, and this is a short article, not a novel, so here we go! Download entire article in PDF format © January 2003, Keith Rayner |
