This article is the eleventh in the Startup Series on FirstPost’s Tech2 section and first appeared on March the 1st, 2017.
As we have discussed earlier in this column series, founders benefit from creating a scaffold, a structure that enables future success at scale, without them needing to come back later and fix things that should have been done right the first time.
This includes thinking global from the beginning.
Does this sound crazy? It really isn’t! The question “what if I want to go global?” is asked more often than you might think.
As always, the questions a founder asks will shape the business and ready it for taking on the world.
As a first step, validate your offering in your target market. One of my advisee founders is currently doing customer surveys and undertaking competitive assessments in another market to understand if her product offering makes sense and can be offered competitively, and if she may need some form of a local outpost to sell and offer post-sales service. Yet another founder, with a slightly complex healthcare related offering, is negotiating an overseas alliance with a research partner, who can help her set up a significant proof-of-concept study to obtain local data that may go down well with the regulators in that market.
Prima facie, services that can be offered remotely have a slightly easier time “going global” but may hit the buffers fairly quickly in some sectors. For instance, if you are a producer of conceptual films for advertising and public relations, can you really deliver the goods if you do not understand the idiom of the overseas market of your client? How good are the language skills available to your company if you are to serve a non-English speaking client? How might that impact your costs and margins?
Second, assess your assets and organisational readiness for serving customers globally. For instance, if your intellectual property is crucial to your startup’s success, is it adequately protected in the new territory? If yours is a product company, are you ready to deal with the logistics of shipping, returns, and associated processes? The latter is a harder question than it looks. It is tough enough sometimes to serve a customer within a massive country such as India or the USA, where states may have different local taxes, octroi and other levies. Delivering products across national borders takes more preparation. Can you deliver in various regions with different sales tax or customs regulations? Can your delivery partner deliver not only the goods but also the customer experience you are promising? Crucially though, you must work backwards to figure out the pricing of your products in different markets and communicating them clearly. Sometimes a customer abroad may be required to pay VAT and customs duty on the goods they have ordered. The landed cost could be so high as to make the product purchase unenjoyable. Is the communication on your website clear and transparent in shaping these customer expectations?
While on communication, there may be an additional consideration of website language(s). Are you comfortable signalling readiness to deal with customers who may be use a language other than English? Can you consistently support all website content being available in all the other languages? At what cost?
These concerns apply whether you sell products or services.
Further if for any reason, the customer wishes to return the goods, how easy have you made it to make those returns? Who will bear the cost of returns? Will your delivery partner also make the collection for returns? Is your returns process therefore clearly communicated to the customer on the invoice or accompanying papers? How do your internal processes work for checking the returned goods and restocking? For planning purposes, you may need to include an estimate of returns in your financial projections. If they are off by a considerable margin, you could have some significant trouble on your hands.
Each customer transaction, including returns, will generate a footprint for your invoicing and accounting system, as well as a corresponding entry into the bank account. Have you clearly thought of the process and tested that it works and can cope with selling in diverse regions?
A well-run, fine-tuned operation is essential to serving customers in many countries around the world.
A vital, final point here is about people. Do you, your employees, your service providers, indeed your board directors, mentors and advisors have experience of “going global”? Can they help you avoid common mistakes and help build a business ready to serve the world?
More crucially, if you yourself do not have the experience, how will you assess whether their skills and experience are right for your startup’s ambitions? We shall address this often asked question in the next column.