Dynamic Export

You know the story: you met someone in a bar, or on a beach or in a taxi, and the next minute you were on a plane to Singapore making your first offshore sale. Or someone placed an order on your website and you suddenly had lots of customers in London.

If so, congratulations! You saw an opportunity, you followed up, and now you’re one of many Australian exporters who are succeeding in many different countries and markets all over the world.

However, like in all aspects of business and in life, wouldn’t it have been better if you’d started off with a plan?

There’s an old saying that we don’t plan to fail, but we often fail to plan.

This couldn’t be more true when it comes to developing an offshore strategy, yet many Australian exporters spend far more time on their local domestic planning than the much harder and more complex task of succeeding offshore.

Here are some of my observations of the mistakes Australian companies often make when they don’t have a plan:

• Sending the wrong people: The ‘indispensable’ A team remain behind to manage the local domestic business and watch the B team flounder in challenging, unfamiliar and complex offshore markets.
• The CEO stays at home: Not a good indication of commitment, particularly in hierarchical Asian countries that expect to deal with the CEO.
• Running out of money: They forget the saying that you should ‘double your budget and halve your expectations’ when entering new offshore markets, and retreat when the going gets tough.
• Running out of energy: They either forget the reasons they went offshore in the first place, or they never examined these reasons. At the first sign of trouble they retreat to home base.
• Not doing research: They get on a plane and enjoy the excitement of operating in the bright lights of new cities and expect to learn as they go along.
• Not adapting to the local market: They assume that their world class product or service will fly in the local market without any attempt to adapt to local conditions.

A ‘she’ll be right’ approach doesn’t cut it in sophisticated and competitive global markets, no matter how primitive, third world and chaotic they appear at first sight.

Successful exporters do their planning, do the research, formulate a business plan, raise capital, send the right people, are clear on their objectives and the CEO even moves offshore as a sign of commitment.

Don’t be an accidental exporter – start working on your plan now!

—David Thomas is the CEO of Think Global consulting

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