If you want to truly build an empire, you should take your business global. You need to look at international markets, expand to varying customer bases, and grow your brand’s reputation.
In other words, you want to take over the world with your business. You want to prepare for the global expansion of your business.
But how do you do it? How do you prepare your business from traveling across borders and targeting customers in every corner of the globe?
We’ve prepared this detailed guide on how to expand your business globally.
Your Guide to Global Expansion
So if you’re ready to take your business to the next level and expand it globally, we encourage you to follow these tips.
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Go Remote
If possible, you should have a remote business or at the very least, a remote aspect to your business. The Internet has given us the opportunity to provide services and products and share content with anyone in the world. We suggest looking into resources for working digitally and running a business digitally.
If you provide services or products online you will greatly expand your customer base. You may even find that the international market is responding better. You may write an ebook in the English language and copyright it in the United States only to find the majority of readers are in India!
Going remote greatly opens opportunities for reaching a wider customer base and expanding your profits.
2. Translation
As you want to expand globally, you also need to expand linguistically. If you promote your products/services and your brand in another language, you immediately reach a new audience.
While you can translate your content into any language of your choice, you should look into emerging markets. You should look into what parts of the world are growing economically and target those markets. For example, Asia is growing economically and Southeast Asia will likely be a great region of commerce in the future.
Among the Southeast Asian nations, Vietnam is developing rapidly. You may want to consider Vietnamese translation to reach this growing demographic.
You should also consider hiring employees who are fluent in multiple languages. These employees can serve as the link between your brand and your new global customer base.
3. Know the Laws and Regulations
Countries are jurisdictions and jurisdictions come with their own laws and regulations. Make sure you are educated in the laws and regulations of these jurisdictions and that you are compliant with them.
We suggest hiring a business lawyer for each jurisdiction who can advise your company on how to comply. You will have to also know the tax laws of the jurisdiction as well as the banking rules.
These will be quite overwhelming so we also suggest studying the laws and regulations of a jurisdiction beforehand. This can help you decide whether or not it is even worth expanding into a particular jurisdiction.
4. Learn the Culture
This should be obvious, but you would be surprised at how many businesses fail because they fail to understand a culture they are not familiar with.
Like learning the laws and regulations, we suggest learning about the culture of whatever country you wish to expand your business to. This will help you determine if you want to expand to that country at all. For example, if you are running your business in the United States, you are used to a fast-paced hard-working, and stringent work ethic.
You will find a similar work culture in places like Singapore, the United Kingdom, Northern Europe, and East Asia. But what about Latin America? The work culture there will be a bit more relaxed. As it would be in Southern Europe. You would need to adapt and understand this way of working.
If you expand to a developing country you will also have to be patient. You will have to realize that if you hire employees in a developing market, they may not have the skills that are taken for granted in the First World. You may also realize that some cultures are more autonomous whereas workers in other cultures may need to be micromanaged even if they are very talented and hardworking.
This can be very challenging but is one of the most fun aspects of expanding your business globally.
5. Seek an Advisor
Just as you will have a legal advisor for jurisdictions, you should seek an advisor for doing business in the country you expand to. As we mentioned in the previous point, you will have to learn about the culture.
An advisor can help you understand the culture, customs, and traditions of a country. This advisor can help you navigate the business landscape and can help with your business expansion.
If you hire employees overseas you will also have to put your faith into them. While you may be managing them, you will have to understand that they have a better grasp of their culture than you do. You should be open to their suggestions on how to run your business within the framework of that culture.
6. Be Flexible
When expanding your business overseas, you will undoubtedly run into many challenges. Many of these will be exciting and many of these will cause you a great headache or two.
But this is all part of the journey and to succeed with all of these hurdles, you need to be flexible. As we stated throughout this guide, you will need to learn about different cultures, learn different laws and regulations, and expand linguistically.
You need to be willing to change your course at the drop of a hot. You need to be prepared if things do not go according to your plan. You may have to alter the products/services you offer to a new market. You may have to adopt a completely different advertising approach for each market.
Embrace these challenges. If you are flexible, you will succeed.
The World is Your Oyster
Now that you know the rules of global expansion for your business, you are ready to take over the world with your brand. The world is your oyster and we are sure you’ll be able to make an impact across borders.
Be sure to read more great content on business and entrepreneurship.
