Doing Business Internationally

This article is an authorized excerpt from Zero to One Million by Ryan P. M. Allis, a book on how to build a company to one million dollars in sales based on the authors’ experience in doing just that in fourteen months in the nutraceuticals industry. Additional information on the book and an extensive entrepreneurship resource can be found at http://www.zeromillion.com.

As I stated earlier, by the time I left the nutraceuticals company I worked with in high school, the company’s main product was being sold in over thirty countries. We had retailers in many of those countries, however most of the international orders came from individual consumers. It was a wonderful experience to know that the company’s marketing message was getting out to persons in Malaysia, Chile, and Uzbekistan. That’s what top placement in the search engines and a large network of affiliates can do for you.

Learning how the customs systems worked of individual countries was an interesting experience for me. At times it would take over four weeks for shipments to arrive in Canada sent via the U.S. Postal Service. Customs often opened the package and inspected it before sending it on. Strangely, we found that if we shipped via FedEx, packages got through in one week instead of four. Even stranger, packages would arrive in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in four days, quicker than most packages to Toronto.

As you begin to open up your sales channel to international markets, you will need to do research on the specific regulations and customs agencies of each country you wish to expand to. There are many strange regulations, tariffs, and taxes that you’ll encounter when doing business overseas. Each country seems to have a different policy.

Depending on your type of product, you may need to develop product packaging and labeling in different languages. You may also want to establish distributorships with stores in that country, or hire local sales representatives that know an area to represent your firm and products. You can also look into possibilities such as setting up subsidiaries of your company in each country or establishing official partnerships or joint ventures with existing companies. No matter how you do it, you cannot overlook the international market. If you play it right, your sales outside of your own country will soon grow to exceed those within it.

Ryan Allis, is the CEO of Broadwick Corporation, a provider of permission-based email marketing and list management software IntelliContact Pro (www.intellicontact.com) and CEO of Virante, Inc. (www.virante.com) a Chapel Hill, North Carolina based web marketing consulting firm. Ryan, who is 19, is on leave for a year from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is an economics major and Blanchard Scholar. Additional information on the author can be found at www.ryanallis.com