Business without Borders, Small Companies Can Go Global, Too
Dolly Penland, Correspondent
No longer does a company have to be a giant multi-national conglomerate to take advantage of the world marketplace. As technology has made physical location increasingly irrelevant, many more small businesses are finding they can do business globally just as well as they do locally. “Whether the client is located next door or on the other side of the world, we phone and e-mail regularly,” said Chris Patterson, CEO of Interchanges.com, a Web development and Internet marketing firm in Jacksonville that has created and launched Web sites for other companies internationally, such as in England and Canada, as well as companies located in North Florida.
Patterson says the company regularly gets inquiries from its Web site, but on Oct. 10, it got its first request for more information from Africa.
It was “from a gentleman named Sunday Ekozin in Nigeria. We followed up, and he said he’d like to meet us in person,” said Patterson. “I didn’t take it quite as seriously as I maybe should have. I said, ‘Sure, when you’re in town, here’s our address. Feel free to come and visit us.’ A week later my receptionist came into my office and said ‘Mr. Ekozin from Nigeria wants to speak with you.’ “The two companies inked a contract on Oct. 21.
Ekozin regularly travels around the globe for industry conferences and business meetings. “He had a conference for the mining industry and wanted to do business with someone here,” said Patterson.
“I find Interchanges.com on the Internet while browsing for Web site designer in the state of Florida,” said Ekozin, director of Geo-Mineral and Resources in Nigeria. The “Web site is so important and critical to me because this is the window to the world. We have [been] in international business for well over 10 years. All we do is to mine, process and export concentrates of mineral overseas and we continue to do just this.”
Nelson Bruton, Internet consultant with Interchanges.com, said that aside from the cool factor of working with someone on the other side of the ocean, it is just business as usual. “I was pretty fascinated by the fact that someone from the other side of the world was in our office days after finding us on the Internet,” he said. “Other than that, it was the normal analysis that I do, trying to understand what people are going after, their goals. Once we learn more, we then do our analysis on the search engines, and an industry analysis to find out what opportunities are available to them [on the Internet]. It took six weeks to develop [Ekozin’s] Web site. We e-mailed back and forth any questions and conversations. Any time something arose, we just let each other know. That was the easiest and most efficient way to communicate.”
Doing business without borders isn’t limited to tech firms. “Everybody who imports has a contact overseas,” said Robert Hampton, import broker with C. Martin Taylor Customs Broker Inc. in Jacksonville. “One local electronics company hired a full-time worker out of a factory in China, doing the shipping and finding sources and any contractual arrangements. Another client just hops on a plane and flies over and finds contacts that way.”
Hampton says importers who do business with contacts made strictly through the Internet do so cautiously. “People will make arrangements for overseas purchases through contacts they meet online, but generally these are small shipments.” An initial shipment is used to test the quality and reliability of the source. “Once they find out their reliability, they start placing larger orders. That’s the pattern I see. One box, then 10, then 100, then a small container and then larger containers as they build their business and determine the reliability of their sources overseas.”
Mary Combs, co-owner of Mary’s Imports with her husband, Phillip, and son, John, has been in the business for 15 years now. “I started buying a lot of furniture overseas and everybody who would come to my house would want to buy my furniture.”
Today, Mary’s Imports has two retail locations and four warehouses, selling to more than 300 wholesale and retail clients a day. The company imports and sells products from China, Indonesia, Egypt and Japan, as well as name-brand products made in America.
To find their wares, the Combses fly overseas twice a year. “I go all over China and all over Indonesia,” Mary Combs said. They use the same guides they have used in each country for years. “I go to a lot of flea markets in China. They have huge, huge flea markets in some of the small cities, but you have to go to out-of-the-way places. You can’t go to Hong Kong. It’s very expensive. You have to go to the out-of-the-way places.”
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