Too soon to go international?

I started out selling Widgets and Grommets early on in my IT career. Almost always the solutions were physical and, more often than not, the only real software was the management system, which sat in a datacentre run by the customer. ASIC’s were the cool new solution with speeds and feeds all the rage where software was embedded onto a chip in a factory and then plugged into a metal case and sold for many times it’s individual build cost, where all the investment had been paid for up front in creating this piece of silicon.

Way back then international business was a risky business with directly acquired costs and impacts that needed to be foreseen before the choice was taken to actually make the first move.

Now though, many aspects of selling and supporting internationally have changed. The only real constant has been translation but, even then, many companies successfully maintained English as the only support language and, for the most part, customers were happy to work with that.

In my last company we were based in Boston, USA and the first 10 or so clients were local, almost all within a 20-mile radius from the office. At C View Technologies, we were all based in the UK but our first client was headquartered in Japan and our second was headquartered in Moscow, and neither thought that strange or out-of-the-ordinary, and so this is just one example of how times have changed.

Hardware sales have always had the extra issue of logistics to contend with; shipping, returns, customs, and installation services all add to the cost of doing business further from your office.

On-premise or installed software has had the advantage for decades as it could be shipped on disk, CD or DVD.

Nowadays that exact same software can be downloaded and installed straight from the internet without that extra cost. Granted, it still needs to be supported and updated over time, but in many cases this can be done online rather than on premise. The only real barrier with this model then is language.

2 or 3 years ago, this paradigm shifted in a way few expected thanks to the introduction of off-premise offerings or ‘The Cloud’, mostly notably in the form of Software-as-a-Service (or Saas) offerings.

Cloud had been a buzzword in tech for nearly a decade and analysts, vendors and industry spectators have been waiting with baited breath to see how this development would manifest itself within the industry.

The beauty of Software-as-a-Service offerings lies in that they need never be installed or updated onsite and rarely need direct support. SaaS provides a stage, not only for small start-ups, but also for tiny businesses to sell their wares on a global scale.

In a similar way to the App store from Apple or Google Play, SaaS offerings are gaining ground attaching to platforms like Salesforce.com, Microsoft Azure and others besides. This allows businesses to evolve quickly with lower risk and, because contracts can be a fraction of the cost of an installed software or hardware solution, customers take a much lower financial and physical risk trying out new solutions.

My company, C View Technologies, is a prime example of this.

When we started, it was just me and my Co-Founder working out of my home office. Yet, after only 6 months, we had a raft of customers and not a single one of them was smaller than $1b business.

And guess what? None of them cared that we were early stage or that we were only two people.

The same applied to CVT when it came to global engagement with customers. CVT now engages with customers across 23 countries on 4 continents and we are able to offer the same level of service and the same high standard across all our clients, not least because we built a product from scratch that enabled multi-lingual support.

I strongly believe that “For a region to invest in a company, the company must first invest in the region”. This ability to invest in, and focus in on, a region is the only limit to how many areas you can work in or reach.

If you are looking to expand into regions outside your own the best advice I can offer is this:

Find a sponsor or confidant in that region that can help you escape the pitfalls and traps and partner with those organisations where a win/win comes from them supporting you where you are weak, and you supporting them with a product or service that they would struggle to create themselves.

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to ask and I will answer them as soon as I can.