You're aching to start a business in college-and you're
already thinking global. If you want a company with an
international presence, listen to the experts: It's going to
take serious research and planning. "No two nations or
international market opportunities are the same," says Sherry
Hoskinson, associate director of the Karl Eller Center/ McGuire
Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
She notes that students starting international businesses face the
typical startup challenges as well as issues concerning taxes,
trade law, currency conversion, language translation and cultural
understanding (just to name a few).
Lin Miao and Blake Liguori are familiar with those challenges.
Miao and Liguori, both 19-year-old sophomores at Babson College in
Babson Park, Massachusetts, decided to go global when they
officially launched 7DollarStuff.com, an online emporium of posters that
sell for about $7, in July 2005. They then opened an eBay Store for
added exposure. While marketing the low-cost décor to their
fellow U.S. dormitory dwellers, they wanted to sell to young people
in the United Kingdom as well. "[We thought], If this works so
well in the U.S., why can't we do this internationally?"
says Miao. In fact, eBay users often asked the pair if they would
ship internationally to places like Canada, the UK and other
European countries.
Securing a drop-ship supplier in the UK was the first
challenge--Miao and Ligouri found one by contacting their U.S.
supplier and asking for a referral. But stocking the right products
to appeal to their UK customers was a bigger challenge. They
quickly found that selling the exact same products wouldn't
work for this different culture. "Most of our U.S. products
were art-related, but we found that the UK customers are a pop
[culture] community--they love music and movies more than the U.S.
customers," says Miao. Based on some additional surveys and
research, the pair tweaked their offering to be more pop-culture
oriented for their 7DollarStuff.co.uk customers.
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And though the pair kept their "7 Dollar" moniker the
same for branding reasons, they found their magic price point
overseas to be £3.99 (around $7 USD). The strategy seems to be
working, as sales are robust just a few months into the
venture--the pair projects revenue for their first full year to hit
between $100,000 and $150,000.
Cultural understanding is key to any successful international
venture. A big mistake is just assuming that a business idea will
transfer over, says Manuel G. Serapio, associate professor of
international business at the Bard Center for Entrepreneurship at
the University of Colorado, Denver. "Do holistic-type
research-identify the countries, opportunities, markets and
business practices in those markets," he advises. "There
are tons of resources--government sources both from the U.S. and in
target countries, [as well as] companies and entrepreneurs that are
already doing business there."
Hoskinson adds that aspiring international entrepreneurs should
also glean information from their campus offerings, including
international business professors, international students and
international business programs. Also, check out the online listing
of the Center for International Business Education and Research at
http://ciberweb.msu.edu. CIBER has branches at 30
different universities across the U.S., including Columbia
University, Duke University and the University of California, Los
Angeles. The centers provide information and research about
international business to both students and the business community
at large.