Business expansion. Kiss 'local' goodbye. Go big, go global

My role revolves around helping businesses identify partnerships, funding, exporting support, legal documentation, local knowledge and resources from a vast myriad of sources. Basically, I act like an engineer, pulling together components from across the world to make the best possible vessel to enable my client’s business expand.

Firstly, it’s not as hard as you might think, but it almost certainly has more complexity than you’d hope! But that’s where we do our best work: taking the pain away from your business so you can focus on being as successful as possible.

The key to being “global ready” for international market expansion is being able to put yourself and your business into the context of the country and countries you’re looking to work with. You will need to:

1. Decide why you’re looking to work with the particular country. Are you exporting? Do you need a presence and workforce there? If so, we’ll need to know what you want that presence to achieve as we’ll then be able to set you up with the right local expertise.
2. The size, need and often most importantly, culture, of the market in the country you want to sell to. We can help you attain market insights if you haven’t already got them.
3. Creating a new business plan. Remember, although your business may be mature, you’re launching something completely new, in a new territory, where they won’t know you. Once you have this, we’ll be able to work with you to refine it local experts, to ensure that you have the best possible chance of success.
4. Understand and investigate the financial landscape if you’re looking for funding and grants.There are tonnes of funding options out there, and we’ll work with you to have navigate them.
5. Check if your IP actually extends to the countries you wish to trade in. IP is handled very differently in different countries. We’ll help you understand what steps you’ll need to take (such as trademarks, trading names, designs) to safeguard your products and services.
6. Go and visit the country. Nothing can trump physically experiencing the country and people you wish to work with. We can arrange trade missions and visits where you’ll be able to meet local experts and potential partner businesses to help you scale internationally, quickly and easily.

Naturally, this is just a top level view of some of the big questions we ask before working with someone, and it’s not a “No” from us if they’re not complete. What we look for are businesses with the “right stuff”, be that innovative products, strong leadership, a unique service offering… whatever makes your business exceptional is what you do. Making it successful and scaling up is where we can help.