S.A.F.E. INITIATIVE ADVANTAGES:

The S.A.F.E. Initiative advantages are several fold:

  • It puts you and your product in front of your preferred clients one on one
  • It allows you to control your time on the ground
  • It ensures you know all your costs up front
  • It provides the best means of accurately informing the market about your product
  • It protects your edge in an overseas market

LONGER TERM

A wide range of issues face any potential exporter yet the appeal of this market to many small businesses is great. The potential to have diverse revenue streams from a product or opportunity you have developed is both financially attractive and personally rewarding. The tenacity and patience to succeed in a geographic and culturally different environment is however, significantly less.

The SAFE Initiative ensures that you and your product enter a foreign market from a secure and well supported position.

Export Issues :

The most significant issue facing any exporter is justifying the very real and actual cost of the exercise against any potential return. The real dollar cost of an "in market" exercise such as a trade show, mission etc should be calculated very carefully and then like many aspects of the proposed export plan, doubled and possibly tripled as a bare minimum.

Relevant Person Access:

In addition to the cost this is probably the second most important aspect facing the potential exporter. Identifying and isolating a customer, then securing his un-distracted attention whilst delivering your key information can be a hit and miss affair. With current techniques a meeting may be organised between you and the "buyer" but more often than not the buyer is not the user and therefore, although appreciative of the pitch, and may never swallow the hook.

IP Concerns:

Although significant, this issue can often be well managed, although the cost is usually either in time and/or money, two aspects already under considerable pressure. Protection of the exporters IP in foreign markets is often crucial long before any business scale is achieved. This is an aspect that can be far better managed with relatively simple assistance.

Logistics-In country:

More often than not this aspect is not fully appreciated until experienced. To have equipment en route to a potential buyer only to go MIA disrupts the entire program. If you have overcome the first three issues to loose your all important potential buyer at this point can often have repercussions not truly felt until much later in your program. First impressions ALLWAYS count, especially when you're exporting.

Capacity to Demonstrate:

Not critical if your buyer is already across the line, but if your not, it's usually the one feature that will get them there, as "seeing is, believing". Having the sufficient time to pitch and demonstrate to your market whilst under the pressure of the need to succeed is usually a big ask. Minor location distractions, unforseen environmental issues can disrupt and dissolve the enthusiasm of a potential buyer in a nano second.

Effective Time on the Ground:

Co-ordinating your time with several others when operating within an unfamiliar market will more often than not, diminish potential results. Effective use of time on the ground requires that whilst in a foreign market, you maximise your presence and impact on your buyer, wether it be only one, or several. One on one time achieves this best; facilitating this is often difficult when taking into account all the other issues listed above.

Time Away from Operation:

Certainly factoring strongly in a small exporters mind is the time spent not paying attention to the business at home. Critical man concerns and the very fact of just being away from both home and the disorientation of travelling and working in foreign locations can lesson the focus essential to the core business.