Practical Advice for Small Company CEOs Going Global

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  Blackhawk0101/17/08 Report as spam
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  Go Global but plan for long term success

  you can do it. study your products and pick you most immediate target opportunities. know what it takes to ship your products to that company.
  sales are the easy part keeping the back end support and serives from shipping correctly to billing correctly, invoicing can all be deal killers if your back end support services do not keep up or in place
  make sure you know if your products have any export restrictions and seek customs product classifications for your products so you know what you have to do to export within US DOS and DOC req's

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  rweeter01/19/08 Report as spam
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  RE: Practical Advice for Small Company CEOs Going Global

  This post is spot on. As vp of global sales, not having top down buy in and commitment to a global strategy is a recipe for failure. Too many company executives today are in love with the ???idea??? of going global but have no concept of the actual commitment it takes to accomplish it.

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  reafoto@...01/24/08 Report as spam
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  Recouping money for the investment in setting up exports

  If you get to a point where you are doing over 3 million a year of sales in exporting, there are substantial incentives offered by the government to help companies recoup the investment in setting up an offshore network of buyer and re-sellers. I recently found almost 1 million dollars for a company that exports only about 30% of their sales. These programs exist but many accountants do not realized they exist. In fact about 96% of the time in a business between 50 million and 500 million the companies do not realize this. Of the 4% who realize these programs exist, 75% of those have not maximized these benefits and have lots of money potentially coming to them. I have even found companies that qualify for these incentives but many times CEO's are not interested in it because it sounds too good to be true.

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  bholstein01/25/08 Report as spam
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  Come on. Dish.

  Tell us what programs you're talking about. Ex-Im Bank? OPIC?

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  carolyn grillo01/28/08 Report as spam
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  RE: Practical Advice for Small Company CEOs Going Global

  "HE'LL come back from a trip...."???
  "Time to take the WIFE on a vacation..."???
  
  Before you start to dish out advice on how to go global, you might think a little more about how to go cross-cultural...starting here at home. In the US, lots of CEOs and owners of small to middle size businesses - not to mention SVPs of international operations/ marketing/ divisions - are women. Without an organic acceptance of diversity - and I mean ALL forms of diversity - you are not likely to go very far for very long in our own country, never mind overseas. Given that the US workplace is already richly diverse; and that cpotential customers in international markets often think, act, and feel differently than we do about everything from relationship-building with suppliers and partners to the symbolism and meaning of logos and brand images, every CEO (and that would be women and men!) needs sensitivity and cross cultural sensitivity to succeed at home AND abroad.

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  bholstein01/29/08 Report as spam
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  PC police

  One basic fact of doing business internationally is that almost no one has patience for America's politically correct nostrums. Very truly. Bill Holstein