Earn More by Exporting

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Martha Montoya has found a way to grow her small business: She exports. While "exporting" conjures up images of vast shipyards and warehouses, Montoya, a comic-strip artist in Santa Ana, Calif., sells her colorful cartoon characters (shown in B/W) for use on snack packages in China, Ecuador, Colombia and other far-away places. She tells other entrepreneurs — no matter their business — to think about going global.

Read the inspiring article here.

Top 10 Best Blogs and Best Podcast of 2006

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Although we did not win, we sure were happy to be nominated and make the cut. Thank you to all of you who voted for us. Your support means the world to us. Maybe next year MarketingSherpa will include a new category on "Global Marketing." Congratulations to all the winners. (Note:  link may have changed since the original publication of this post.)  Way to go!

It's a Small Business World After All

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Lou Hoffman used to share the common misperception that overseas markets are only open to the big guys like McDonalds, Coca-Cola and Proctor & Gamble. Not anymore. It's the little guys who are slowly taking over the planet.

Learn more about Lou's story and how you can go global too. Read the article here.

P.S. Voting ends today at midnight for the MarketingSherpa Reader's Choice Blog and Podcasting Awards ... see our nomination in category No. 9!

French Blogging: Why (Global) Marketers Should Start Paying Attention

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It was when The Global Small Business Blog was nominated and made the cut for the BIG MarketingSherpa Reader's Choice Blog and Podcasting Awards -- yes you read that right! -- for best in its class for category No. 9 Small Business Marketing (cast your vote of "Excellent!" for us ... deadline is Monday, June 26 at midnight) that I discovered Eric Kintz's The Marketing Excellence Blog. And what a blog it is. Here's an entry I particularly liked: French blogging -- why marketers should start paying attention.

The only thing missing from both the contest and Kintz's entry is this: global. Someday, everyone will have a worldview.

P.S. Since we are Chicago-based, we are trying to work with Oprah to see if Pontiac or maybe Peugeot will give each of you a new car for voting EXCELLENT for The Global Small Business Blog! There are no guarantees ... stay tuned.

Global Marketing 101 Lesson

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Your global marketing test for today consists of two questions.

1). Why do most companies want to globalize their operations?
2). What’s the best way to reach global markets?

Find the answers here.

How to Take Your Small Business Global

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Okay ... every once in a while I have to do a little shameless self-promotion and this is one of those times. Jennifer LeClaire did such a great job with this article for E-Commerce Times that I had to share it with you. It sings the gospel on globalization!

Read it here and then take action!

Make Globalization Work For You

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The outsourcing trend almost killed Kalexsyn -- until its founders made globalization work in their favor.

The timing could not have been worse for Robert Gadwood and David Zimmermann. After being laid off by drug giant Pfizer in 2003, the scientists founded Kalexsyn, a chemical research company in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Kalexsyn's plan was to help large pharmaceutical companies create new drugs by examining thousands of molecules to pinpoint the ones that had medicinal potential.

But by the time Gadwood and Zimmermann built a lab, bought equipment, and hired 10 employees, the strategy had become obsolete. "All of our customers disappeared," Gadwood says.

What did they do? Find out here.

The Thinking Man's Outsourcing

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Globe Trotter CEO Brian Reale (center) outsourced his R&D (and himself) to Bolivia.

A surprising number of U.S. companies are sending their most complex activities overseas. Read the article here.

A Quest for the Global Best: America

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Globalization has been a boon for some U.S. service companies. Last year, a surplus of $58 billion in services was outsourced overseas. Here is a selection of recent data on cross-border trade from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Read the article here: America, At Your Service.

Opportunities in Globalization

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Smart innovation is key to long-term prosperity. Nations won't thrive by just accepting low pay.

The seed of globalization germinated 60 years ago at the University of Pennsylvania, where ENIAC, the first operational general-purpose electronic digital computer, was unveiled in 1946. That single 11-ton machine has spawned more than 200 million computers worldwide, a number growing at 20 percent per year. Its stepchild, the cell phone, has grown to more than 1 billion units in one-quarter the time, and that number will at least double in the next 10 years. We can now connect with anyone, anywhere, at any time. This on-demand world fulfills the vision of a "global village" Marshall McLuhan put forward in 1964.

Read Rocco Leonard Martino's provocative article in its entirety here.

Stop Fakes, That Is, Global Intellectual Ones

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Are you a small business? Well I sure hope so if you are reading this blog. As we are learning, success in a global economy depends more and more on intellectual property (IP) assets. In fact, IP-based businesses and entrepreneurs drive more economic growth in the United States than any other single sector.

Unfortunately, intellectual property has captured the attention of pirates and organized crime. Today, piracy, counterfeiting and the theft of intellectual property pose a serious threat to all U.S. businesses. Industry estimates of the cost of such theft range from $250 billion to 750,000 jobs per year. These threats to ongoing invention and innovation make it important to consider securing IP protection, whether you're a major multinational firm or a 1-person home business.

Stop fakes (fraud) and start taking action. Visit the site here.

Web Sites for Discerning Global Finance Students

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John Wachowicz, Jr., Ph.D., CPA and Professor of Finance at The University of Tennessee contacted me in response to a letter I wrote in February to the editor of CEO Magazine. (Wo)Man did I sound off! He apparently liked the horn-blowing so much that he decided to link it -- Globetrade.com not the letter! -- to his own educational financial management website. Seeing that John is a Ph.D. and CPA, I paid a visit to his site and found it to be quite good. You might like it too.

Wachowicz's Web World

Thanks John!

Brilliance At Its Best

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WOW -- what a post! Read it to appreciate it but it's not simple. Here's an excerpt from the ending:

Investment banks like Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, technology companies like Microsoft and Google and many others are creating captive organizations in many parts of the globe to get access to this local talent pool. Why is this important? Well very few of the thinking workers "trade" on a global basis. Put another way, of the millions of engineers in Russia or India, few of them can move to where the work is -- so the smart companies, who have models where they can create high leverage for thinking work, are moving to that local supply of talent. The challenge is, very few organizations analyze who their thinking workers are, and which ones add the most leverage. Fewer yet ask, do we have the best in the world?

The immortal word of the founder of IBM, Thomas Watson, Sr. , was "THINK." If he were alive today he might say, "THINK! BUT WHERE?"

Catch the post by John Sviokla here: Thinking About the Thinking Class: Outsource low leverage thinking work, offshore high leverage thinking work

An Interview with Thomas Friedman

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Business Strategies Magazine conducts an interview with Thomas J. Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of "The World Is Flat."

"I've been at the right place and the right time to see a lot of things ... What that's made me is very much someone who is aware of the important role that America plays in the world."

Read the interview here.

Is Your Business On The Verge of Extinction?

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Going global is no longer an either / or proposition. Propelling your business globally could be as simple as setting up a Website to market your goods and services.

To find out if your business is on the verge of extinction read the article here. Then let me know.

Foreign Exchange Precautions for Exporters

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Canada perspective: Virtually every business in Canada is affected by the ever-changing value of the dollar. While many of us consider this unpredictability a nuisance, the volatility of the Canadian dollar and other currencies around the world can mean the difference between success and failure for many exporters.

Read the article here.

United States perspective: Exports are improving. The Bush administration hopes a falling dollar will boost export trade by making U.S. exports cheaper for foreigners and goods made abroad more expensive for Americans. The dollar began falling late last year. Since the start of April, its drop has accelerated against a variety of currencies, from the euro to the yen.

Bottom line: Understanding foreign exchange risk is critical to any export venture.

Global Experience Talks

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"Small companies often are able to respond to market changes more quickly than large firms, giving them an edge as the pace of global change quickens."

Read the article here.

Global Brain: A Small Business Must Have One

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Shop around to find global trends, ideas and insights at one of my favorite futuristic places: Trendwatching.com

Headlining the World's Greatest Marketing Blog!

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Going Global!

Globalization in a Can

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Read the review here.  Note:  Can refers to a shipping container.