Defining Your Readiness
Much like the business plan you devised when establishing your business, an export plan or strategy is essential in minimising risk.
Start your plan by assessing where your business is currently at, your product’s competitive advantages and the financial strength of your business. You may want to visit other areas of the SBDC website where you will find useful information to help you to assess your business. The SBDC bookshop also provides a range of publications which may be of assistance.
The SBDC also delivers the TradeStart program – a package of free services to assist in preparing your business for export.
Step One
Assess your business’s capabilities in terms of its capacity to support the impact exporting will have on staff, cash flow, and production volumes.
The section of this website titled Financing Your Activities details the financial aspects that require consideration.
There are a number of questions you will need to consider:
- Do I have the time, money and resources to sustain a long term effort to break into an overseas market?
- Do I have well-developed marketing knowledge and experience that has been proven domestically?
- Does my management team have the capacity to break into and maintain a new overseas market?
- Will this impact on my capacity to service existing markets?
- Is the business well-positioned to respond rapidly to an export order?
- What scope does the business have to expand supply capacity?
- Does the business have the financial foundations to support all export related activities including not only the manufacture and supply but also travel, marketing, employment and training requirements?
Step Two
Critically assess your product or service’s competitiveness and determine whether or not it possesses enough advantages over other products or services already available in terms of quality, price and uniqueness. Essentially, you must ascertain if overseas markets will actually buy your product or service. In any business or industry there are usually two or three critical success factors. Identifying these critical success factors is fundamental to developing an effective marketing mix. Knowing these factors in each target market, from both the customer and competitor perspective, pinpoints the likely competitive advantage for your product or service.
- Can my product or service meet and better its overseas competition?
- Do I have the capacity to tailor it to the requirements of the target market?
A framework for conducting your internal review can be found at the Vic Export Website. Click on ‘Your Export Strategy’ to open the document.
This downloadable export strategy document also can be used for completing the external review outlined in the following pages.
Once you have an understanding of your business’s current situation
you will be ready to start researching prospective markets.
