Let the experts lead you through the details of processing the order. First, remember that your customers probably are importing something on a daily basis. They know about letters of credit, customs officials, freight forwarders, the best couriers, and the best places to stay. Your customers know the ropes. Let them teach you.
Take letters of credit, which are how most of your customers will pay you. No need for you to read books, go to classes, or spend your time trying to interpret obtuse legalese. Instead, find a banker who has experience with international letters of credit and let him or her check to be sure all the requirements are met.
In other areas of business follow the same pattern. Companies new to exporting worry unnecessarily about shipping, customs documents, and the like. But there's a whole business segment of international shipping facilitators -- freight forwarders -- whose goal in life is to get your product where you want it to go, on time and with the right paperwork. Customers, bankers, your state's export department, and the U.S. Department of Commerce are all there to help.
Once you get an order, service it. Go overboard. Do things your foreign customers ask for that sound crazy. Do things for them that you really feel they should do themselves. Don't ever cause your customers to lose face. It's not easy to disguise poor service in a small country. People talk. They know one another. The biggest complaints I heard overseas about Americans were that we don't answer our faxes -- the international-business tool, which should be answered within 24 hours; that we expect to sell our products without leaving home; and that we take a one-shot-order approach and say to heck with the future. Mostly, though, I found that international businesspeople prefer to deal with Americans. We are the model. They love our culture, our pragmatism, our movies. They want personal and business ties with us.
Keep your initial market-entry costs low, low, low. What costs you have should be in direct sales: travel and promotional expenses (brochures, faxes, phone calls, mailings). Stay away from renting or buying office space, setting up formal joint ventures, large capital investments, and so on. Those items come after you have a stream of orders.
On ELF's first visit to the United Kingdom, for example, when we wrote orders, we sent all our equipment from the United States by airfreight. That was expensive but allowed us to maintain our 10-day-delivery promise and really impress our customers. Within a year we had a warehouse for storing and staging the large volume of equipment we were now shipping by sea. The rented warehouse was an investment that followed the upward sales line.
Similarly, your export "department" can be minimal and still process millions of dollars' worth of orders. You don't need to hire anybody at first so long as you have your international tiger and a fax machine. The time to hire new people is when the volume of orders becomes overwhelming and you're having trouble keeping up.
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The rewards of going international are many. It's exciting to be part of a much wider world, a world shown to you personally by your overseas customers. And it's a great way to grow your business. There are unexpected benefits as well. For one, you'll be able to hire better people. We found that having an international department and overseas offices helped us attract aggressive go-getters -- just what we needed for fast-track management positions. There's something sexy about an international company that appeals to top-notch candidates. We also found that some of our best ideas for U.S. markets came from international sources.
The lean efficiency of our U.K. office, for example, has become a model for how to run our U.S. sales regions as profit centers. Before our U.K. experience, we often got in the way of our best Stateside people. In England we learned the power of assigning a good manager and then getting out of his way. We also changed our manner of selling at home after our experience with international reps and agents. We had relied entirely on our own direct sales force, but now we've added independent sales reps to our marketing endeavors here.
Our international business also drove technical and quality progress at ELF at a much faster rate than would otherwise have happened. By learning how to meet the higher standards in such places as Japan and Germany, we brought improvements to our customers at home in areas such as safety, reliability, speed, and aesthetics.
Finally, being a player in international business gives you a certain worldly confidence, a belief that as a company you can tackle any market and any project head-on as well as anybody else can. You say good-bye to feeling like an embattled U.S. company groping to find the secrets of Japanese management or German efficiency. You see what the Japanese and Germans are doing -- and they have some great ideas -- and you know how you'll have to compete to win. It's downright exciting and invigorating to be a truly global competitor doing your part for your customers, your employees, your town, your country, and your world.
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Jeffrey J. Ake is vice-president of sales and marketing at Electronic Liquid Fillers, a $14-million liquid-packaging-equipment manufacturer in LaPorte, Indiana. In 1989 he founded ELF-UK Ltd., and in the past three years he has traveled to 42 countries. ELF, an Inc. 500 company in 1988 and 1989, was named Exporter of the Year by the Northern Indiana Small Business Development Center in 1991 and the Small Business Admin-istration's Exporter of the Year for the State of Indiana in 1992.
