want help to grow your business download bring the world's first business advisor in your pocket to find out more visit brynge i or search the app store today [Music] my special guest today is international business advisor Anthony Moss and our topic for this interview is how to expand your business into international markets Anthony thanks for joining us good good morning Dale thank you yeah I'll be here before we get into some of the questions that I've got a whole bunch for you and this is particularly relevant because this is something that obviously we're looking to
do in our own business I've got lots of questions but tell me about some of your experience first of all you were born in the UK that you've worked around the world tell us some of the places that you've been pretty much all over the world I guess really but worked in the UK and Europe set up a business in the US and ran that for 10 years - and have been international in international trade I guess in all of my 25 year career in business so I've been pretty much most places I guess there's
a few I haven't but certainly quite a lot and all over the United States as well reviewers from there so is Canada okay yeah Mexico - interesting so why should even a small business think about expanding their business into international markets well I'm particularly passionate about international trade and for SMEs getting internet international trade not least because there are plenty of studies that show those businesses that are willing to expose themselves into international markets tend to grow faster make more money and have greater longevity so there's some pretty positive reasons why you should expand into
international markets I think mmm any other reasons that we should be aware of obviously for there's access to volume and stuff I mean wherever you are in the world you know you've only got your local population whereas in reality there are seven billion people in the world that you can access that's a big population absolutely even America with over 330 million compared to 7 billion is still just a relatively small market from a global perspective absolutely yeah fantastic all right now at what stage should a business be at in order to to actually start you
know pursuing this you know what about if you're in the startup mode is it possible where do you need to be I guess we way you need to be is at that stage where your business is able to apply the right resources and build the right skills to be able to access those markets so it kind of needs to fit in with your overall growth strategy so if or a business that needs that extra it needs that extra volume of access to that larger market and you've had the time to build the business to a
point where you've got the right resources whether that's finance skills and time that's the time to look at international markets all right and what's exciting now is in the past you may have had to have five or ten years experience behind you but there are now companies that are launching and they're actually not even selling domestically in their own market they're launching perhaps through the internet into other markets because they don't actually need to have necessarily people on the ground that may be required but in many cases it's not no longer required that's the reality
the world is a small place these days time travel the Internet technology has really removed all those national borders so business is global today okay now I'm thinking most people do thinking about asking the question well where do I expand and that's kind of the first thing that people say where should I go you've got any hot tips about a great market but I'm guessing that's really not the best place to start by just looking at locations what should be the first thing that you think about as a business owner before you actually start pursuing
this well I think I think thinking about a a market that is perhaps a small international market is quite a useful thing to do if you're looking to kind of expand so for example in Australia and New Zealand is next door to us and I recommend to a lot of businesses that they target the New Zealand market first when they're looking at international markets because you have all the challenges of international trade time currency different regulations all of those issues but it's a relatively small market that we can kind of manage quite well and if
you in America what would be and if you were America is indeed you know again markets where you can learn from your experience before then launching into much larger markets so you normally suggest don't kind of go to a really big market you're saying something that's maybe sort of close by for sort of travel but also something where you can make a few mistakes and no one's going to know we need we need to kind of learn we need to do we have to we have to develop a skill set and stuff so yes that's
certainly true but I think the step before that is again looking at those markets where your value proposition of the business of what you offer whether it's a service or product are distinctive enough that they'll be well-received by that particular market that's the most important stage and then the offset of how difficult is it to enter that market any few in the UK obviously you're born there so where would be a likely place to expand if you're in the UK well easy places are Scandinavian markets or a really great market for European for UK based
organizations certainly anywhere in in Europe but certainly Scandinavian markets particularly receptive to to UK products so you've got to look at those markets where your value proposition your product your service will be well-received alright now I want to talk about getting them mindset right we're gonna talk a lot about the strategy and the tactics and and also making sure that your product is distinctive enough we'll talk about having local partners and a whole bunch of different things regulations and red tape but I want to talk about what do you should be thinking about internally in
order to succeed with international markets well again it's I guess having a global mindset number one making sure that you're not you're not bound by the kind of estate boundaries that that you're in and having that perception that the world is in fact my my market the the second is to be able to have that mind share to be able to say yes I'm prepared to allocate my time my team's time into building international markets and that commitment to realize that you can actually learn so much from exposing a product into international markets that can
actually then help you in your domestic market - okay and just to make again this interview relevant for everybody these strategies can apply whether you have a physical product that you're actually shipping yeah or whether it's a service based company as well have you have you had experience with both absolutely yeah yeah and there's really no distinction between whether it's a product or a or a service it's really about how to access and market clear value propositions and then your strategy to market entry strategy okay so we're gonna talk about market entry later on also
distinctive capability as well we'll talk a bit about about that yeah tell us a little bit about the internet and the role the internet plays these days in helping you businesses expand globally from an e-commerce point of view of sure what of course it's a great liberator it's a great liberator in the sense of the information that you can access so you can do research on the internet etc you can find out it all information about particular markets and opportunities your competition etc but equally it's pretty easy to present even for a small business to
present yourself as a global operation on the internet - so I mean has both a a sales market research opportunity - and also for internet-based businesses it's a great mode of delivery - fantastic and I know that there are companies that have actually have used it as a as an entry point by selling online first for maybe 12 months finding where the what are the hottest markets where they've already got traction and there's a community of followers and then that's where they expand based on how their sales volumes are going from their online stores that's
right yeah yeah again this is local but we have a great example in an organization called Atlassian here which is now a global global organization although like it located originally in Sydney they've now launched in the US stock market stock market and are a greater than billion dollar organization and Canada by a couple students absolutely have you either examples of companies that you've worked with and for to help them expand even maybe small companies that have become global yeah absolutely so manufacturers here small manufacturers in you know in Australia that have launched into US markets
UK markets and they've done that by doing the research identifying clearly how they market their product or service is differentiated in a particular market looking at the competitive nature of a market and and then with targeted expansion and we can go through the market entry strategies of how we can kind of work them through the various levels of market entry strategy hmm and I thing is well we will talk more about this later on with the strategy you've got to decide what parts of your business you maybe want to expand you might expand just your
manufacturing or maybe you manufacturing stays local and you're going to just have a marketing team on the on the ground or you might have you know different combinations of those things as well so there are different many ways to skin a cat as they say yeah there are and again that comes down to the resources that you have available and the time and the funding that you've got available to put into that so what I find is over time small business expand organically as they can through their own resources and then as their as their
market penetration starts to increase they look at additional funding and different structures and different market entry strategies all right fantastic we're gonna take a short break and when we get back we're gonna talk about a whole bunch of things from a strategy point of view more specifically about how to do your market research how to build your distinctive capability we'll talk about your market entry strategy and also how to deal with competitors in local markets as well so all that coming up after this short break welcome back to part two of our interview we're talking
with Anthony Moss and our topic is how to expand your business into international markets let's quickly talk about lay out the the preparation steps like what do you've got to do to get kind of started and then we're going to go through these in a lot more detail so if we've now made the decision this is what we're gonna do what what's what's our plan of attack sure so we've like like any exercise of business we've got to build a plan and that's essential that we develop an export an export plan and the elements of
that really are in terms of the markets that we're going to approach what our value propositions are on their market what our market entry strategy is and how we going to fund that entry and also then of course the timeline that we're going to take to grow those markets step one I guess is really determining which markets we should we should approach and I mentioned earlier in the previous section about chooser choose a market initially that's relatively that's relatively small compared to our domestic market etc so we can learn all the skills but not expose
our to ourselves too much and then from that learning we can then develop a strategy to approach much larger to continue and join this presentation download Brin the world's first business advisor in your pocket to find out more visit Brin AI or search the App Store today [Music]
