Webinar: How to scale your business on a shoestring

PreFlight Odense, an activity of Business Hub Fyn, has invited me to deliver a webinar on how to bring about international growth when you only have a small budget.

I call that Going Global on a Shoestring.

The webinar, which will be delivered in English, is free of charge and takes place:

Thursday, November 3rd, 2022, at 10:00 CET (Central European Time, GMT+1)

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Asger Riis Rasmussen will host the event, and the agenda is as follows:

Why do international business?

The urge to enter the international markets is a fully understandable ambition. The Danish market makes up less than a quarter per cent of the world market for anything. This means that over 99,75 per cent of the world market is outside Denmark.

Basically, the same magnitude applies to Norway, Finland, Sweden, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Croatia and a host of other countries with domestic markets representing less than 1 per cent of global demand.

Grabbing some of the global markets is attractive to any business. However, experience shows that it is easier said than done.

In this webinar, I will give my perspectives on how you can be successful outside your domestic market even when you do not have a big budget. I will provide ideas for becoming successful and avoiding making too many mistakes.

International revenue generation

The webinar is primarily about revenue generation, but there are some product issues we normally need to fix before we can demonstrate and deliver anything outside our domestic market. I’ll talk briefly about these product requirements.

We then discuss the challenges associated with international revenue generation, and here I divide companies into two groups according to their situation: I distinguish between the physical and virtual situations.

I will discuss how we can prioritise the markets when major localisation and physical presence are required. You probably know this text bit from a famous song, “First, we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” That may be fine if you’re from New York, Connecticut, or Massachusetts, but probably not if you are from Oslo, Zagreb, Utrecht, Helsinki, or Odense. So, how do we decide in which sequence we should take the markets?

Irrespective of the situation, a shoestring approach is most effective if we can generate inbound leads. That means people calling us instead of us having to call them. It’s not quite that simple, but in general terms, that’s the difference between inbound and outbound lead generation. If we can make that work, having people call on us, we may not have to pick markets.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

I will give you a short overview of how that works.

Finally, I will say something about using business partners. They come in many forms and shapes, and my objective is to kill the myth that they are the fast lane to international growth. Not that it is impossible. If we can bring a man to the moon and get him back again in one piece, then recruiting partners abroad should be a minor challenge. If we have NASA-type budgets and timelines, then yes. But that’s hardly a shoestring approach.

Then we’ll wrap it up, and I’ll point you to more information on the topic.

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I write about international business development, sales and marketing in the information technology industry.