Best Practices to Grow Your Business Globally

A guide to help you deploy practices and processes for expanding your business to a global scale.

Expanding your business to a global scale and catering to an international audience helps increase sales, gain brand recognition, rise in revenues, and many other benefits. But as exciting as it sounds it entails a lot of planning, foresight, and homework.

Expanding Business to Global Scale

In this guide, we help you with factors to take your business to an international scale. We further take a look at some of the essential practices that you should follow when expanding your business abroad.

• Learn from past experience

If you or your peers have already tried expanding your business to a global scale, learn from those experiences. Take a look at the success factors as well as mistakes made by your peers from a similar industry. While every country has its own distinct legal, socioeconomic, and cultural context some things do remain constant and you can apply them with minor adjustments everywhere.

• Compliance with all legal and taxation requirements

First and foremost, you must abide by all the regulations regarding the inception of your business in the host country. You should be aware of all the legal requirements that are expected from you as a business entity. Secondly, the matter of taxation should be crystal clear. What will be the tax tariff applicable to you? Are you going to get certain concessions, or tax holidays because of your foreign status? It is necessary that you research all these methods before you expand your business to a global scale.

• Finding a local partner

Working in collaboration with a local partner can bring benefits to your business. It will help you in adapting to the process. You might get some tax relief too. Additionally, your local partner will walk you through all the legal formalities and it can save your time, energy, and money. You should be careful to partner with a reputable local company though. Before entering into an alliance with anyone, perform their background checks and get to know them thoroughly.

• Awareness regarding your product or service

Before going overseas, conduct a survey of the popularity and awareness of your product or service in that country. It will give you an estimate of your position in that country and how much effort you will have to make to popularize your brand further. You might need to create extra efforts if local people are not aware of your product or service.

• Study the local market

It is important to conduct a comprehensive survey of the local market. Some parameters that can be included in your survey include:

• The size of the local market.

• The size of your target market.

• The expected average rate of return.

• Cash flow projections

• The extent of competition.

• Consumer demand analysis.

These will prepare you for what to expect and prepare for any difficult situation.

• Business Plan

Formulate a business plan before expanding your business operations to a global scale or another country. Your business plan should detail how you plan to cater to an audience from another country. What will be the marketing strategy, financial plan, goal setting, key performance indicators, revenue streams, product description, administrative structure, operational readiness, supply chain management, and any other matter related to the working of your business? Remember, the more detailed, realistic, and solid a business plan the better are your chances of success in the business.

• Raising the Workforce

Human resource is vital for the success or failure of any business. How do you intend to recruit the workforce? Will it be handled exclusively by the local workforce? Or will it be a mixed affair? What will be the ratio of the foreign and local workforce and what would be beneficial for the business in the long run? You should prepare for employing your workforce beforehand.

• Payments

Having a payment structure in place is another key factor in expanding your business. It is necessary to ensure a payment infrastructure that caters to the local audience from another country as well as your business operations. Moreover, cross border payment service providers charge a heavy transaction fee and the overall process is slow. Therefore, it is necessary to opt for a payment solution which offers payments in local currencies, has a low transaction fee, and ensures an efficient process for transfers.

• Localization of Policies

Every country differs in its working environment. They have their own norms, practices, value system, and beliefs. You will have to tweak your company’s policies and programs to suit the local policies. Your policies must align with the ground realities. Otherwise, the local employees will be in conflict with the company’s policies and the productivity would suffer. You should have a fair awareness of the localization of policies that would be required to achieve a harmonious working environment.

• Organizational Readiness

Lastly, we would like to emphasize that you should fancy an international expansion only when you are truly ready for it. There should not be any roadblocks along the way. Minor hiccups are expected but the flow should not stop. Everything from the product to the operational capacity, finances, manpower, marketing strategy, etc. should be just ready for action. This would give your business a solid platform to really take off in a big way.

Bottom Line

We have outlined some of the practices that may be helpful to consider while you are choosing to expand your business to a global scale. It is necessary that you conduct your own research before investing in global expansion.