Small Business Exporting Podcast

International trade is something many small business owners wish they could get into and usually don’t because they assume the paperwork and administrative issues are too costly – timewise, and money-wise.

Florida is conveniently located to do business with a number of countries around the world – and not just those within 500 miles of it’s shores. The port of Miami receives and sends international goods by the tens of millions each year.

In this podcast these two business specialists touch on the massive opportunities that await the US small businesses choosing to tackled the international marketplace  – and the SBA’s (Small Business Administration’s) role in it.

Some highlights from this podcast:

Ron Johnson: Now Richard, what are the advantages of exporting and what might be required of a small business that wants to perhaps enter into the export marketplace?

Richard Ginsburg: Two thirds of the world’s purchasing power is in the hands of 96 percent of the world’s population, these two statistics should be incentive enough. Developing foreign markets provides a diversity of customers that generates significantly more transactions — that means sales — that surely will increase revenues and profits. Small businesses that export typically stay in business longer, create more jobs and pay higher wages to their employees. Exporters also can mitigate adverse economic conditions at home by having market penetration of foreign markets that still demand U.S. goods.

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Competing in the Global Market: SBA’s International Trade Programs
Featuring Ron Johnson interviewing Richard Ginsburg, Senior International Trade Specialist, SBA’s Office of International Trade.

( Transcript )

This was a podcast full of information. Hope you enjoyed it!

Starting a Florida Business: Pricing Your Product

Pricing your Florida business products or services might seem like a shot in the dark. It shouldn’t.

Pricing your business goods and services for the market is one of the most important areas of focus you’ll spend time on. You’ll continually revise prices until you find that balance where Florida consumer and Florida provider (you) come to an agreement about what your product or services are worth.

Here are some steps to go about figuring out pricing your products online. Luckily for you the internet has made competitive pricing research quite easy. Here are some tips for researching prices for similar items or services your Florida business will focus on:

Start your research on pricing your Florida business products / services at Google.com. Create very specific searches for your product. A search composed this way: “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale best price” will give you a slew of results that you can pick through. As you’re picking through you might notice that the prices seem high and you might want to find out what the lowest prices are… change your query to:  “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale lowest price” or “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale unbeatable price” or “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale lowest prices guaranteed”. Google allows for removing words from your query too. If you notice you’re getting a lot of results that don’t fit what you want to see – use a minus in front of the word that would get rid of those results like, use this query “nokia e71 mobile phone for sale best price -france”.

Have a look at EBay.com. Realize that these are often bottom rate prices and don’t include everything that you might expect to get with the product. A careful read of the description will point out any missing accessories or any special weirdness about the sale. Maybe it’s a 2nd hand item. Maybe it’s being shipped from Romania (beware of scams!). A little research on Ebay will quickly show you the bottom rate price others are selling for. Many buyers are afraid to complete Ebay transactions because of the number of scams going on. You may decide to try Ebay to help market your Florida products or services. Expect cutthroat competition.

Find your competition online. Companies give a lot of information away on their websites that would take you a lot of time to ask on the phone. Often times the real deals and sales happen over the phone once you’re talking to a salesperson that’s empowered to sell the items at a bigger discount than you see online. This might be a strategy you also employ with your Florida corporation.

Check prices for your items in Google Checkout, Yahoo Shopping, and major outlets like BestBuy or wherever similar goods and services are sold.

Value add. A very strong business practice is the value add. If you are able to come up with something to add to the Florida products and services your company offers you could jump ahead of the competition and create quite a profitable business just based on this simple idea. What would sell well with your product? If your product is the Nokia e71 mobile phone how could you really sell a lot of them? Offer a short tutorial booklet on how to unlock the phone when they receive it so they’re not tied to any one mobile carrier? Maybe offer a subscription to a mobile phone application software developer for a year for 1/3rd of the typical price? (you’d work it out with the developer so you’re still making a good profit)

Note: Make sure you have a good idea about the pattern of price drops for your items if you’re buying them from a supplier. You might purchase a phone at 60% discount from retail because you’re buying 50 of them. For a couple months you do fine, selling at 60% profit. Then, because Nokia comes out with the e81, price points for the e71′s drop substantially. Now you’re only making 20% from each Nokia e71 you sell. Can you live on that? Be careful especially with electronics devices since they are updated and outdated so quickly.

Pricing your Florida products and services is a tricky game. If you price close to what you’re competitors are charging you may be fine with that – you may not. Your competitors, other Florida companies may be buying 100 times what you’re buying from the supplier and getting a much better discount. What you don’t see can hurt you. Be cautious and smart when pricing your items for sale with your new Florida business! Pricing can make or break you.

Starting an Online Business

Since computers became prominent as a tool for business, and sometimes as the focus of the business entirely – the dream of starting an online business that makes money while you sleep has become a goal for a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs.

Most of us have some experience using computers – I know this because you’re on a computer right now reading this. The line dividing between computers and phone and other gadgets is blurring. There are already computers in everyday items like your refrigerator and oven.

Starting an online business requires these steps:

Step 1: The Online Business Idea – You might take an existing product you’re manufacturing in Florida and turn it into an e-product. You might leave it unchanged and sell it as a retail product online. You could create something digital… an e-book; an information packet; a website to accomplish some service or task that works online.

The possibilities are endless. You probably have some ideas what you would like to learn more about or try. Research like your life depended on it – copy an idea and change it slightly. Make it better.

Step 2: Your Domain Name – You may have one or multiple domains showcasing your products or services. Choosing a domain name is important, you should choose a name that is brandable. A memorable name that contains some keywords related to whatever your business is focused on.

If you’re selling snails by air… you could call it “escargotbyairmail.com”. Researching what the major keywords are you’re going to target online is an essential step. Don’t buy a domain name before you research everything there is to know about choosing one. There are some excellent bloggers tips out there about choosing domain names!

Some rules about choosing a domain name:

1. Keep it short. No more than 25 characters unless it’s really memorable.

2. Keep it memorable. Is it easily remembered?

3. Don’t use trademarked words or phrases in your name. Check the Trademark office!

4. Don’t use someone else’s domain name and add an “s” or a 1 at the end. You might have your name taken from you by the registrar for being too similar to someone else’s business.

5. Buy the .com and the .net and .info and .org domains at the same time. It will cost you another $50-60 but protect you from squatters hoping to sell the name to you later for a premium price.

Step 3: Website Hosting – Good hosts are easy to come by – and they’re cheap too. Competition has really brought down the price of a host. This site, Start Florida Business .com is hosted at Godaddy.com for about $90 per year. Yes, per year. Don’t let your web developer charge you $500 per year for bandwidth because Godaddy will offer you more bandwidth than your new site could find in 3 years – all for $90.

Step 4: Designing Your Online Business Site – Do yourself a big favor and don’t choose now to learn how to create your own website and hosting. This is a job best left to experts. As cool as you think it is to design your own site you will fail miserably the first 10 times you create a site. Don’t make your business fail because you don’t want to pay for a decent site. Think of how unprofessional some sites appear to you – and then picture your new business that you’re so proud of – with a lame site representing it. Your site is your business card presentation to the WORLD. Don’t cut corners, have it done right.

Step 5: Online Marketing – If there is anything that is more crucial to the success of your online business I haven’t found it. Online marketing is the absolute key to your success. It can make or break your company.

You will learn a whole lot about how to market online – from getting your company mentioned in directories such as mozilla.org and yahoo.com to getting links from other websites to your website. You really need to have a PhD level knowledge of internet marketing if you’re going to do it all yourself. A Bachelors degree at minimum if you’re going to hire someone else to take care of it.

Step 6: Search Engine Marketing – This gets a category separate from the previous because it’s of the ultimate importance for many businesses starting online. Search engines are so important because they give you free, targeted traffic to your site. Well, sort of free. The game has become a lot higher-stakes and there is competition for almost every phrase nowadays.

Hire a competent and fairly priced SEO / SEM specialist to optimize your site for the keywords your online business is focused on. Retain that person with a monthly fee to handle maintenance of your site and constant re-optimization for Google and Yahoo search engines. Nearly everyone just focuses on Google, but Yahoo is also important.

Or, learn it all yourself which will take about a year of full-time effort. You might still not be anywhere near as good as the SEO/SEM experts that have done it for 10 years though.

Step 7: Interactive Websites – You may just need some way for customers to complete a transaction online. This would be a minimum requirement. You need to decide early on what role your online presence – your website will play for your business. Are you trying to attract new customers? Is that the goal? If yes, you’ll need a way to capture their contact information online so you can contact them later. There are easy ways to do this and complicated ways to this. Most companies will offer something for free if the customer will sign up for their email blast. They collect email, phone, and other information to contact that customer later.

You might need a website that does the entire process for you – without any effort from you. These web sites typically rely on a database programmed by an expert web developer and are costly and buggy. Assess what you need and plan a way to get there. Be careful about investing too much in your online business up front. Probably you can do it for less for a couple months or years until you know a $20,000 website is what you can’t live without.

Step 8: Building a Customer Base – If your customers will come from mostly online efforts – how will you optimize that? There are whole sites dedicated to helping you do this. There are quite a few spammy sites too. Focus on the Small Business Administration of America’s site and other quality sites like business.com and that level of site. Basically all information is free about how to go about this – but, you might do well to pay someone to teach you about it. Up to you – and how you learn best.

Don’t forget – past customers can be a great source of new customers since they already know you. An email list of your customers is essential!

Step 9: Repeat Business – Current and past customers can be a significant source of business for you. Don’t forget the upsell too – when someone is purchasing something online they are much more likely to purchase something else related to the product or service at the same time. Offer a discount and you’ll likely get more sales instantly.

Step 10: Accounting and Taxes – Stay up to date with a good accountant familar with the intricacies of starting and maintaining your Florida online business.

Starting a Florida Business Checklist

Before you start your Florida business have a look at this checklist and print it out. This is generally the flow of events that happens when businesses are started.

Entrepreneur’s Checklist for Starting a New Business in Florida

Preliminary Research:

• Assess your interests. Ask yourself – “Am I totally invested in making this Florida business work, grow, and be successful? You must answer, “Yes!” Starting a business and making it successful is a multi-year effort in most cases. Are you ready to start your business?
• Discover your strengths. What can you do yourself? What might you need to outsource? What resources do you have to call on? What software or applications might you need to get familiar with in order to launch your business? In order to build it? In order to be very successful? Many business owners discover they need to learn new skills constantly in order to keep their Florida business moving forward. Are you ready to do that?
• Note your weaknesses. What things are you just not good at and have no interest in learning? If they’re skills essential to your new Florida business someone will need to learn them and master them. Who? Are you good at accounting and following all the IRS rules required to operate your business? Are you a “details person” or a “big picture person?” You need both to survive in the business world. Who will be the things you’re not? Businesses don’t survive as a sole proprietorship – even if that’s what it is. You must have others’ help. Figure out what you need help with before you start.
• Create your business and personal goals. New business owners often let the business destroy their personal lives in pursuit of greatness. That might be OK in your mind. Define your business goals and personal goals. Find a balance, or agree to exploit your business goals as your primary importance. Make sure your family is on-board for the ride!
• Take a realistic look at your financial resources. Can you afford to start a business at this point? Can you afford not to? Can you continue to work full time or part time for someone else in order to fund your new business until it can stand on it’s own? Or, do you have some genuine success already that will rocket you past the initial hard times intrinsic to any new business?
• Identify the  financial risk involved with starting your business. If you went completely bankrupt – what then? Have a fall back plan.
• Add up all the start-up costs that will affect you. Don’t underplay, overestimate costs if anything. One of the biggest problems with new Florida startups is that they underestimate the true costs of continuing their business during the initial months and years. Above all, be realistic about what your Florida business will cost and how much effort you’ll spend making it work.
• Choose a business location. Location. Location. Location. That’s the phrase used by real estate agents to stress the importance of home and business value. Initially though you may need to choose a less than ideal location to get started. Can you use a warehouse instead? Your apartment? Mom’s garage? You can always move up to new digs once you have the ball rolling downhill and gaining speed.
• Do competitive research. As much as possible find out what your competitors are doing and offering. Find out where their strengths and weaknesses are and exploit them. Make your business product and services better by 100%. CARE about your customers more than anything else and you will be on the way to success.
• Identify present, past, and future customers. Again, be realistic.
• Develop a traditional and online marketing plan. You can use online marketing for SOMETHING even if your business appears to have nothing to do with online activities. Yellodevelop a marketing plan

Business transactions:

• Choose a form of organization (proprietorship, partnership, or corporation, for example). We have online forms to register your Florida corporation here: Profit Corp – NonProfit Corp – Subchapter S Corp – LLC.
• Incorporate your business to protect your personal assets from being liquidated in the case of legal action. Florida incorporation will give your business certain tax benefits as well. When you’re ready to incorporate your Florida business visit us here.
• Choose an accountant that is familiar with your type of business. This person can save you hundreds and thousands of dollars and is worth their cost. Choose a business accountant based on a referral from a friend if possible.
• Create a solid, comprehensive business plan. Not only will this guide you as you move forward with your business – it shows investors that you’re serious about making your business work. If you don’t create a business plan at the start of your business you will likely not do one later and suffer in various ways because of it.
• Choose a bank with business checking – and online account management.
• Apply for business loans if needed.
• Find lines of credit
• Choose your insurance agent for the business.

Initial Steps:

• Create business cards, flyers, other promotional material you can hand out in person to potential customers or contacts.
• Create a business web presence and if creating a presence online and finding customers online is an issue – involve a search engine optimization expert at the beginning of the process, not as an after-thought.
• Research local business codes
• Secure your office lease
• Solidify supplier connections if needed.
• Choose furniture and equipment. If computers are needed you probably DON’T need top of the line technology. Don’t blow $ on tech you don’t need.
• Apply for necessary business licenses or permits from local, state and national authorities if needed.
• Get a federal employer identification number (FEIN) We can help you with this if you incorporate with us. (free)
• Get a state employer ID number if required.
• Send for federal and state tax forms
• Join professional organizations like chamber of commerce, or other groups in your local area (and online) relating to your business. The more social you are, the more your business will thrive. Many Florida business owners don’t understand this concept. Many don’t like to be social. You either need to be social or find someone that can represent your company for you.
• Choose a start date!