Taking your business from a small startup to a world leader won’t happen overnight – it’ll take many years of hard work, investment, and innovation – but it is possible. Globalizing your business might seem like an insurmountable task, but it really isn’t that difficult, and once you have a great product or services to offer, it can be quite simple.
Hire a translation service
If you’re trading internationally, you’re going to have dealings with other businesspeople and customers who don’t speak English. That’s why you should invest in a good translation service as soon as possible. Not only will they be able to translate business calls and legal documents, but they will be able to ensure that your website and social media accounts can be understood by people all over the world.
You will need a legal team
In most cases, you can’t just set up business in another country without having to meet certain conditions and file a lot of paperwork. For example, investors looking to manage companies here in the United States will usually have to hire a lawyer specifically for EB-5 investors, who can help them to apply for an investment visa, and that’s just to manage a business.
If you’re going to run your own corporation, you’ll need to dot a lot more I’s and cross a bundle of T’s before you can get up and running. A good lawyer, or legal team, is, therefore, essential to your success.
Processing payments
Truly global companies need to be able to process payments from anywhere in the world. Luckily, it is easier to do that today than it has ever been before. Most popular payment portals now offer options in numerous currencies, but you need to be careful because many also charge excessive fees for doing so.
When you’re starting out Paypal might be just fine, but when you’re processing hundreds and thousands of transactions daily, a portal like WorldPay will cost you less and streamline your sales process more effectively.
Finances
All businesses need to be funded, and whereas you can run a successful startup with a personal business loan and a small amount of independent finance, a global business requires more capital, and that means looking towards capital groups, SBA export loans and other, bigger means of funding your world domination.
Marketing
You might be well known in your local area, your country or several territories already, but to the rest of the world, your brand means nothing. If you want to be successful, you need to change that, which means you need to put a broad-reaching marketing plan into place.
These days, social media and viral marketing are a good place to start. If you can create one successful viral video, millions of people all over the world will watch, and your name will be known. But, that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to invest some serious time and money into market research and data analysis into each and every country you hope to trade in – it’s essential that you do so if you want to break into their markets.
Doing all of the above, step by step, along with attending trade shows and making global connections, could be all it takes to break into new markets and work your way towards becoming a world leader, work hard and work smart and your business dreams might just come true.