Innovation

If you’ve been following our blog series on internationalizing your company, On Your Mark, Get Set, Go Global, you will have made considerable strides by now. You’ve considered the pros and cons of exporting, weighed your chances for success and learned the importance of choosing a promising product or service. You’ve taken advantage of the wealth of information and assistance that’s available to hopeful overseas traders, and you’re moving toward putting together a viable plan for your first export trial run.

Now you are ready to think about recruiting your in-house export team. As you prepare for this new development, you must remember this above all: The success of your export venture depends on a company-wide commitment. If you’re a solo operator, that means you. If you work for a large corporation, it means the executive committee, followed by the finance, operations, marketing/sales, transportation, legal, communications, data-entry, research and service departments. You’ll be setting up a network rather than an isolated department of your own, and utilizing your company’s existing human resources as much as possible.

Once you’ve evaluated the departmental resources already in place and mapped out exactly what will be required to export your product or service, you’ll prepare a list of what is required from each of these departments. Then you’ll approach each department and present the list to someone who might be willing to be a part of your export team. To whom do you go first? Someone with great sales(wo)manship qualities, an interest in the international scene, bi- or multilingual language abilities, cross-cultural awareness, good communication skills, attentiveness to detail and persistence. Use your own salesmanship here, and frame it as a challenge they won’t be able to resist. read more

Netbook sales are exploding. Netbooks are ultra portable notebook PCs that generally cost less than $500. The form factor has become so popular that 5.6 million netbooks were sold in Q3 of 2008.

To put that number in perspective, Apple sold 4.7 million iPhones during that period.

Netbook sales are rising for several reasons. One is price. Netbooks are cheap yet meet the web surfing, email and word processing needs of many users. And with web-based software and storage becoming more common, many users simply don’t need higher end notebook PCs.

Their small form factor also makes netbooks attractive for mobile computing. All have WiFi and support cellular modems. AT&T even offers a netbook for $99 to customers who purchase a data plan. read more

Can you remember back to the days when having WiFi was a status symbol?

Just about every business person, college student and family member has WiFi built into their computers. What we are now starting to see, more and more, are PC vendors marketing mobile broadband, embedded on our notebook computers.

Notebook computer vendors are more aggressively pushing to have you buy a mobile wireless card that’s built into your computer. Nothing to lose, nothing to break - and you might just get a sweet deal on the monthly service charges.

What’s exciting about this emphasis from WiFi to mobile broadband is that not only can you access the Internet anywhere in the country, but if your travels take you across borders you can use your mobile broadband connectivity there as well. Many vendors are using dual GSM and CDMA wireless technologies, with GSM being quite popular outside of the US, in their mobile broadband platforms.

Regarding the world of cloud computing, If you are a “traditional” mobile professional you have software installed on your computer and save your data to your hard disk or USB key. You are probably more familiar with “My Documents” or your “Desktop” than you are with the local streets in your neighborhood. read more

The New Year is for resolutions, and small businesses are going to have to do some evaluation and make some resolutions to survive and thrive in the current economic crisis.

USA.gov  has a list of popular New Year’s resolutions for  the individual that can also suit  the small business owner.

Lose Weight: Slim down your business by focusing on products that are core to your business and eliminating those that are not. This may also mean scaling back existing products or developing new products scaled for a budget-conscious customer and evaluating necessary personnel.

Get educated: Take advantage of slow business times to get more training.  Attend conferences, participate in webinars or just plain read.  Developing your industry-specific skills, business acumen or studying your competition will help you survive the current financial crisis and prepare for the economic recovery . read more

So you want to take the plunge and go global with your product or service. How do you begin?

Let me give you a competitive start: Produce the highest quality product or service at the lowest cost and sell that product in every market on the face of the earth. If you do this, you will successfully globalize your company.

The real reason for exporting is to globalize your company and prosper in the 21st century and beyond. Any product or service can be exported. You just need a track (or a plan, as my colleague Tim Berry would say) to run on and a manageable process.

My track allows you to close your first export deal in your target country and worldwide markets by following five steps. It won’t happen overnight, but by the end of this blog series (if you stay with me), I guarantee you will know how to export. It will be up to you as to whether you actually do it. Each of the steps will be explained. This post covers the trial run phase. Subsequent posts will feature points 2-5:

1. Plan the trial run
2. Prepare the export team and organization
3. Enter the trial market
4. Close the first deal
5. Evaluate the trial run

Plan The Trial Run

In planning the trial run, these are the questions you must ask yourself: read more

This week I’ve been out on the West Coast meeting with various companies, and in nearly every conversation Twitter, the social media site, has come up. No doubt about it — Twitter is one of the hottest social media sites for businesses today.

Invariably, one of the questions I was asked is “what do you write about on Twitter?” So, let me take a shot at answering that question here.

First, you have to remember at all times that Twitter is a “social” media site. One definition of the word social is: “Inclined to seek out or enjoy the company of others; sociable.”

And that guiding principle — of seeking out the company of others and being sociable towards them — should be your umbrella approach. If you are spending most of your time writing about YOU or YOUR OWN BUSINESS — then you’re not being very sociable are you? “Self-centered” does not equal “sociable.” read more

I will try to give at least five reasons why America is a great place to run a business, and I want to start by giving an historical background. It is appropriate to take history as the first reason because you in America have recently celebrated Thanksgiving. But the question is whether you know how the celebration arose?

First time was on 4 December, 1619, in Berkeley Plantation, Charles City in the vicinity of Jamestown, Colony of Virginia. I would suggest that the founding of America was a business venture which was started by a group of entrepreneurs from London, the Virginia Company of London.

Here is an excerpt from The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities site:

“In June of 1606, King James I granted a charter to a group of London entrepreneurs, the Virginia Company, to establish a satellite English settlement in the Chesapeake region of North America. By December, 104 settlers sailed from London instructed to settle Virginia, find gold and a water route to the Orient.”

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One of the brightest bright spots in all eight years of the Bush Administration was Tom Sullivan, chief counsel of the U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy.

There are a lot of reasons for that, which I won’t go into right now (although, if you’re interested, feel free to check out my final podcast interview with Tom shortly before he left Advocacy for greener private-sector pastures). But one of the coolest things he left behind him was the r3 initiative.

The Regulatory Review and Reform Initiative (that is, r3) has its roots in Section 610 of the Regulatory Flexibility Act. Under that part of the law, regulatory agencies are required to occasionally blow the dust off the regulations on their books and take a look at them, to see whether they might be outdated, ineffective, duplicative or otherwise unnecessary.

That sounds a lot simpler than it is. There are hundreds of thousands of regulations on the books; just deciding where to start must be fairly overwhelming. Sullivan’s idea was to harness the experiences of small business owners who need to deal with those regulations by asking them to nominate federal regulations they believe are in need of reform.

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