Taking your business into a foreign market can be risky. If your company wants to hit it big internationally, Craig Maginness, author of Go Glocal, believes you need to think globally and act locally.
Craig is the managing member of Exin Global Strategies, which advices businesses looking to grow in foreign markets. He’s also an adjunct professor at Johnson and Wales and in 2013, he was named International Trade Educator of the year by Nasbite International.
In this episode, Craig lays out the framework that your business needs to follow in order to succeed abroad. By the end, you’ll know the factors you need to consider for an entry into a foreign market to payoff for your business.
Get Craig’s new book Go Global on Amazon.
Find out more at Exin Global Strategies.
Craig Maginness: I myself an example personally in my career that got ahead of this, sort of accidentally and then I was working for a Fortune 1,000 company and I knew the COO quite well.
I was focused entirely on domestic sorts of things. We were flying back from a business trip and the company had just bought a company for its operation in the United States, but it had a business in Mexico that was dysfunctional in many respects.
At the same time we were trying to buy a second company, again for its united states operations principally. It also had a Mexican operation, and the Mexican partner was making closing the deal very difficult.
Anyway, we were talking about this and he was ruminating about some of the issues and problems and checking this out.
I’m a curious guy and interested in things. I’m kind of a problem solver by nature. I was just asking questions about, “I don’t understand, why are we doing this, why don’t we do that?”
After a bit, he looked at me and said, “Craig, you ought to run this business in Mexico.”
I laughed because frankly the idea was completely ludicrous. He took a little more serious tone, he said “No, I’m serious.”
He said, and I quote fairly precisely, “You can’t screw it up worse than we’re screwing it up now.”
Learning on the Job
Craig Maginness: After some more discussions and things, I moved into my next part of my career and became the director of Mexican Operations and ultimately the Director of Latin American operations. I was the president of our Mexican subsidiary and frankly, that operation turned out going very well.
We consolidated some things in Mexico, we expanded it into an export venture into other places in South American and Central America, and then they asked me to take on a business in Italy and that got me into Europe and then they asked me to figure out how to get a footprint in China, so that produced my first trips to China back in the mid-1990s.
The whole thing was a learning experience, starting literally from a blank slate.
It’s funny, actually, when I got home, after we’d sort of agreed that this was going to be my new job running this operation in Mexico, I came home and I tell my wife I said, “I got a new job at the company,” she said “Really? What’s that?”
I said, “Well, I’m going to be the director of Mexican operations,” and she said, “Isn’t there someone at the company that knows more about this than you do?”
You know, it’s nice to have that kind of confidence building. But the fact is, maybe, maybe not.
Sometimes it helps to be in the right place at the right time.
As importantly, sometimes, it helps to just say yes to opportunities that everything in you might be telling you this could be a really bad idea.
But it turned out to be really good idea, had a tremendous career, I’ve traveled all over the world. I go to people’s plants where they make stuff and I go to their offices and I go to lunch where they go to lunch and you do enough and you get invited home to have dinner with their family.
You know, there are many major cities in the world from the Shanghai to Buenos Aries, to Dublin Ireland where I know someone well enough that you know, I’ve had the pleasure of not just working with them but having dinner at their home with their families.
It’s a chance to really get to know the world and our fellow humans. That kind of direct concrete way, doing what it is we all do every day.
Global Businesses Foster Hope
Charlie Hoehn:Before we get into the actual content in your book, I’m personally curious, with all your travels, how has it shaped you as a person?
Craig Maginness: Absolutely. Particularly of course in today’s fractured political environment. I work on projects here in town as well. I am very involved with a non-profit that what we’re doing is creating economic opportunities and job opportunities for people trying to get out of the gang life in Northeast Denver.
I work with a lot of people who come from a different world.
You know, I’ve worked with so many people in so many different contexts. I guess another experience you have doing this whether you’re doing business in Japan, in China, you know, some other country, you’re frequently the odd person out.
You’re trying to play catch up and figure out what’s going on, what are the cultural norms, how do you behave, how do you get ahead, what’s the right thing to say.
You just need to be really sensitive and open to what people’s value systems are and understand that the fact that someone sees the world differently is not a function of being a good or bad person, usually. It’s a f unction of having a different cultural orientation to how they see the world.
I talk about this a little bit in the conclusion of the book, and I get a little teary eyed when I talk about this:
I honestly believe that international business may be humankind’s last great hope.
I say that because if you look at the international dialogue between the United States and China for example or whoever. You know, you would think we were on the verge of armed conflict and all hell is breaking loose in the world.
Obviously, there are a lot of tensions and problems in the world, but if you’re doing business around the world, what you find is the people you do business with, and this is pretty universal, we’re all trying to do the same thing, you know? We’re trying to solve a problem, we’re trying to make a deal that’s mutually beneficial, we’re trying to support our families, we’re trying to leave the world a better place than we found it. People do that by what they do for livelihood, by what they do in business.
There’s such a disconnect between the political dialogue of how governments talk about each other and how people relate to each other.
And then you just have the practical fact of course that you know, for example, again, with China to the extent that we are China’s largest single market and China is our largest single creditor.
Whatever political tensions the government wants to focus on, there is a tremendous practical disincentive to see things go completely downhill. Because the fact is, we’re kind of tied together at the hands and ankles in many ways.
You combine sort of that practicality that’s created by business relationships with the many personal relationships that are created by doing international business, and that’s where my optimism lies.
We’re all going to be just fine.
Common Mistakes in Global Expansion
Charlie Hoehn: Let’s give some examples of companies that you would think would get this right but do it wrong. Could you break down what they’re doing wrong?
Craig Maginness: Yeah, well let me start with this. I’d say 80% of companies wind up in the wrong place or with the wrong partner. That’s small companies, that’s big companies.
If you step back and think about how we actually do business, it makes sense when you see it play out in the sense that whether you’re a big company with a product line or a small business, you have a website. Your website has a contact us form, people can find you, see you, see what you do. And someone somewhere looks and sees you have a product and it’s attractive to them for some reason. They may see some potential strategic advantage to them to get some of this product, maybe distribute the product, rep the product, whatever.
The next thing you know, you get a contact us call or ping on your website or an email from somebody who says, “I’m in Bangkok, Thailand, and I’m interested in your product.”
This thing takes over in people’s heads.
For a brief moment, they forget why they’re doing business, and they just get excited about selling something in some place new.
The next thing you know, that’s what you’re doing, and you got your people figuring out how to price stuff in Thai bahts and how to containerize products or, “Can I ship it air freight and how do I do that? What’s the cost and what’s the documentation requirements?” and my God, regulatory compliance issues.
If you stepped back from it, you might realize that for my business, Thailand isn’t where I ought to be.
I mean, it’s fun, it’s great, but I’m using up a lot of time and resources on something that’s not furthering my strategic business objectives. If I did this correctly, I might decide I should be in France or Argentina or Sweden or somewhere else.
And another thing I’ve seen happen is your CEO or the President of your company attends a confab in New York or LA and everybody there for the weekend seems to have joint venture in China.
They come back and want to know why we don’t have a joint venture in China.
It seems like this is the thing to do, and the next thing you know, you got a team working on putting together a joint venture in China. You don’t even know what it is you’re really going to sell or do with the business, we just need a joint venture in China.
It’s like deciding we’re going to take a vacation in the car but we don’t’ know where we’re going. That might be practical, or it might not be practical.
Another experience I’ve had is sales reps come back from a trade show or something and they’re trading stories and they say that, “One of your competitors, you realize they’re doing 30% of their sales in Taiwan?”
They’re like, “Really? Wow, we’re not even in Taiwan. Why aren’t we in Taiwan?”
The next thing you know, you’re chasing sales in Taiwan.
Well, they may have gone there for the same reason the company went to Thailand, somebody called them, suddenly they’re shipping to Taiwan and good for them but that doesn’t mean that’s where you want to be.
There are too many areas where you would simply chase your competitor around as a strategy, you know, hopefully you’re trying to get a head of your competitors.
Anyway, people wind up the wrong place for the wrong reasons and so my real sort of first big point is to do this right, you need to step back and you need to understand that what we’re trying to do is to find a strategic advantage for our company.
I mean, actually, you have a classic kinda tail wagging the dog problem that winds up going on. People wind up in an international market for some reason, they have an “international market strategy.”
Suddenly, that sort of becomes a focus, and in fact, it’s disconnected from their core corporate growth strategy.
It needs to be the other way around.
Identify Your Market
Charlie Hoehn: How do we choose the right market to find success?
Craig Maginness: Here’s the deal, what a lot of people who do this focus on is sort of base market statistics. Everything from GDP per capita to sales and exports of your particular product as described simply by its performance characteristics.
They say “Okay, gee, there’s a market in wherever for this,” and that’s where you go.
I think that understates, under analyzes maybe, what really drives a business success. Here’s the way I look at it in order to do this right: If you’re looking to go international, presumably it’s because you have a business that is successful in your home market now.
It’s successful for a reason, there are things that you do right.
If you’re going to be successful in a new market, you need to be able to replicate those things in the new market.
Your business needs to be able to translate into a different market, different cultural context. In order to get a handle on that, I think about in terms of a few key dimensions of what you do and it really starts with your value proposition.
What is it you sell? I don’t mean the description of the product, its size, its shape, how fast it is, those kind of things.
What is it about the story you tell that your product embodies your service embodies that resonates with the world view of your customer? That gives them that emotional response and attraction that causes them to want to be your customer to buy your product? I mean, that’s who your customers are, right?
There are two elements to that that are important. One is it’s about value, and value is an inherent cultural phenomenon.
What people value is determined by culture.
If you think about culture, you know, I think sometimes like a tree or an iceberg or something, where there’s the stuff you see up top you know? There’s language and food and dress and religion, architecture and the things you see as a tourist when you go somewhere, right?
Underneath that driving culture is everything from you know, how people view individuality versus group context. How people view dimensions of time, how people view the importance of relationships, family. And at the core all of that is what people see is valuable, what they want to do. That’s a piece that’s cultural.
And then the other key piece about value proposition again is it’s not descriptive, it’s a story.
It’s why you brand your business the way you do. Your brand is meant to communicate your story, right? It’s what you mean when you tell your sales people, “Don’t sell on price, sell on value,” it’s to create this sticky loyalty between you and your customers.
It depends on your ability to tell a story and of course stories are cultural, you know, a story that resonates here in our context will not necessarily translate into a different cultural context.
What Do You Really Sell?
Charlie Hoehn: Could you give an example of that that you’ve personally seen?
Craig Maginness: A number of years ago, Campbell’s Soup, who we all know presumably, embarked upon a very intentional, international expansion strategy, and they decided to focus on two main markets: China and Russia, which were the number one and number two consumers per capita of soup in the world.
Just to take Russia for a minute. Russia was the number two consumers of soup per capita in the world.
If you are a soup company, you might look at that and go, “Hey, I mean, this is where we ought to go, how can you go wrong? These people are soup crazy and we sell soup, right?”
Campbell’s actually did a lot of things right, but they wound up making a significant investment in Russia. They changed all their packaging to Cyrillic and found distribution relationships and all the things you need to do.
It didn’t work.
Four or five years after embarking on this, Campbell’s completely pulled the plug and took a multi-million dollar write off of its investment. Like that kind of not work.
The reason it didn’t work is Campbell’s doesn’t sell soup.
Campbell’s sells convenience.
Campbell’s sells the ability for a crazy two working-person couple to come home and in five or 10 minutes, using the microwave or the stove top, create the smell in your kitchen that creates that same emotional energy that it used to smell like when your grandmother actually did make soup, okay? By the way, you can hopefully get some semblance of a semi-decent meal on the table for your kids or whatever.
That’s what makes it work and it’s a great product and it works for a lot of people in a lot of contexts, but that’s their value proposition. That’s what they sell.
Here’s the thing, soup in Russia is not about convenience. In fact, it’s just to the opposite.
Soup in Russia is about going to the market that day to see what ingredients are available to make soup. More importantly, soup is about the time you spend in the kitchen with three generations of people telling and sharing the family’s stories that create what’s important, what’s valuable to you in this culture.
That’s not what Campbell’s sells.
That’s not to say that there were no people in Russia for whom Campbell’s Soup worked or resonated. It’s to say that the market was not for their real customers, who is not nearly as big as they thought it was, and it didn’t justify the venture.
Where Campbell’s needed to go, frankly, was some place where their value proposition would resonate. They needed to go a place where people are crazy hair on fire like people like we are here. You know, they need to get the dinner on the table.
It’s Easy to Miss the Obvious
Charlie Hoehn: How did they miss the mark?
Craig Maginness: Well, I guess the best I can say is I think it’s an example, classic example of confirmation bias. Because Campbell’s actually did a number of things really right.
One thing they did is that before they went there, they actually hired cultural anthropologists to go study the market in Russia and they came back and reported things like one quote I saw, they reported things that people in Russia described soup “like children.”
And the interpretation with the confirmation bias of these people back in marketing at Campbell’s headquarters who, you know, we’re trying to make a drive to grow, they’re trying to expand, they found the market where people eat a lot of soup and they hear that and it’s a confirmation that these people are soup crazy. “They’re so soup crazy that they think of soup like children.”
I mean, how can you miss?
My whole point is, you forget what it is you really sell, you sort of get focused on moving product, you get focused on we’re trying to sell stuff and you begin to lose track of what is my real connection to my customers?
What causes people to buy my products? What’s my value proposition, what’s the story I tell that has to resonate and translate?
That’s what we’re trying to look for. It’s the thing that somewhere along the line, you know, companies miss.
The other piece is how you deliver that value to your customers.
I mean, this sort of gets the old story that there’s only three business in the world. You know, there’s manufacturing, there’s sales/marketing, distribution and there’s customer service and you know, no matter what you do, you’re in one of those three business. That again, understanding that becomes critical to, “Can I replicate this in a new market?”
Take Starbucks, which is obviously the iconic customer service business. You think Howard Shultz will be the first person to tell you that Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee.
Starbucks creates a community experience in their stores, and that’s why they are second to none in training their people to create that customer service experience. To know your drink, to greet you by name. You know your drink is made in any way you don’t like it, no questions ask, we throw it out, we remake it.
It’s why Starbucks was one of the first places to have free WiFi.
It’s why they don’t care how long you stay in the store.
You know it’s all those things about it, so that’s what Starbucks has to do to be successful and if that’s your gain, customer service, then you know for example for them, it is not so much about where people drink a lot of coffee, it’s where is there a need and where can you create that customer service experience.
And so that’s again the kind of story mismatch that a lot of companies in doing this sort of failed to look at.
They just start looking at statistics about where do people buy my product or service as described by characteristics and they start thinking, “Well that’s where I ought to go.”
That may not be where your company’s going to be successful or where your company is going to be able to leverage itself to actually get a strategic advantage or a competitive advantage that will allow you to grow going forward.
Pitfalls of Expanding Internationally
Charlie Hoehn: What kind of problems are companies going to face when they go abroad?
Craig Maginness: When you start looking at cultural context where you’re going to be selling your product, one of the first things you are going to have to ask yourself is, “Can we sell our product really exactly the way it is here, or do we have to modify it in some way?”
There are different tastes culturally in terms of taste preferences literally, if you’re in the food or consumable industry. But there’s issues around color. There’s issues around the size and shape of things.
There’s obviously some practical issues like if you make a product that requires that it would be plugged into an electrical outlet, you’re going to need a different kind of plug on at the end of the thing.
So it starts with just what are the changes you need to make to make your product or service work over there, and then that starts to cascade throughout your operation in lots of different ways.
Suddenly, if I am just making a product, I have all the manufacturing issues of now I have to make something a little bit different, in a different color, in a different size, with a different electrical plug on it. What does that do to my manufacturing efficiencies? What do I have to do with my manufacturing line? How do I train my people to get that done? Do I have more shutdowns? Do I have more turnover?
And then the next thing that starts to drive is your inventory issues.
Because now I’ve got additional raw material inventory because I have to source other stuff to make my product differently and I have different finish product inventory because I have stuff made for particular places sitting on the warehouse floor.
In any business, one of the key challenges is managing your working capital.
How much cash you have tied up in currently unproductive activities which is typically your inventory and your collectibles, your receivables.
So you’re expanding that, you are starting to tie up more cash in the working capital. So that starts to create an issue, obviously, for your finance people.
And obviously marketing has a lot of challenges here. You know at its base, you have to translate literature, instruction manuals, you’ve got to figure out how am I going to price this thing, a lot of companies sort of figure, “Hey I sell I for this year, all I got to do is convert that to a different currency.”
Well it’s more complicated than that.
Your competitive environment is different, people’s cultural willingness to accept substitute is different, which affects your ability to set prices. And you have a different cost structure because just the shear the cost of getting something from here to half way around the world changes the cost structure you have to cover. And if you are trying to earn a return, I’ve got to look at margin, I’ve got to look at velocity. I’ve got a lot of other moving parts here I’ve got to get a handle on.
Customer service obviously has challenges, you know? I am starting to get calls from people in Spanish, in German, in Chinese, how do I answer that? Do I hire people here? Do I outsource that someplace?
If I outsource it, how do I train those people to understand my product and my approach to customer service?
You obviously have time zone issues. If your customer is having a problem with your product in the middle of their day but it’s the middle of your night and you’ve been doing eight to six customer service. Now you’ve got 24 hour problems, how do you handle that?
Obviously, all sorts of shipping logistics issues. You have a host of legal issues if your product depends on intellectual property, whether it’s patents or trademark, trade names. That kind of protection is only good in the country in which you file that perfected it.
So every new market you look at, you have to figure out how to make that work, and then you also have a host of compliance issues. Everything you face here around fire safety codes, consumer disclosure regulations. Every new country and market you go to has its own set of those things that you need to comply with, and you need to know how are we going to comply with this.
So anyway, it is just a host of issues, and the key to this is here’s the big picture to suggest the solution.
Companies get into this a little bit by accident.
It creates problems for manufacturing, for customer service, for finance, for legal, and so it gets back to this need to not be reactive, not be the accidental exporter. Be proactive and understand these issues you have to get together and create your strategic market entry plan.
I mean it’s really like launching a new business, a new business plan. Where you bring all of these pieces together upfront and you understand the ramifications.
What are the ripple through effects of this in my business? How do I get by in with the people who are going to be affected by it? Both obviously to get their expertise and what’s the solution but also so they know what is coming down the pike when they see this start to happen. So you can put together a plan again where we’re not just making sales, we’re making money.
Contact Craig Maginness
Charlie Hoehn: Normally I ask this at the end of the interview but at this point it seems relevant, what’s the best way for listeners to contact you?
Craig Maginness: Through my website, which is exinglobalstrategies.com. but let me say this and here’s the thing, you can hire a consultant like me to help you certainly figure out market matches to identify where these problems are particularly going to resonate in your organization and all of those things.
But at the end of the day, the solution to some of these things, particularly the operational company cultural issues, are obviously dependent upon the management message, the culture, and the buy in of the people in your organization.
So that’s a hard thing to outsource.
I mean certainly in terms of understanding, “Wow, what are the issues, what is coming down the pike, how do I understand this in the framework of my business, help me figure out who are the people we need to make sure are on board because where going to be my problem areas?”
Yeah, absolutely help with that. But at the end of the day, you can’t just outsource, “Hey solve this problem for me.”
Bridging Cultural Gaps
Charlie Hoehn: What does allow you to sleep at night as a business owner expanding into an international market?
Craig Maginness: Okay so that sort of leads into the third part in a way, which is market penetration. So if I’ve got my own internal organization lined up, we’re on the same page, we know where we’re going, we know how we’re going to manage the issues it creates for our business…Now we have to get there.
There are lots of ways you can get into international markets, but they all involve some sort of relationship building. Whether it’s a distributor, a sales rep, hiring people on the ground, however you’re going to go about doing it. So that’s where you get into this issue of contract and relationships.
So I will tell you a story on myself that illustrates this perfectly, okay?
One of the first deals I ever put together in China, we were looking to buy a plant and we were negotiating a letter of intent to buy this manufacturing facility. We felt that you have done the things that you needed to do. Been there, actually visited the facility. I did a lot of analysis around labor force, availability and necessity and what are the differences if we take on their existing labor force or find our own labor force. I did a lot around sourcing raw materials and inventory control, and obviously a lot about what the market was and all of those kinds of things.
Then putting the deal together, I had a lawyer in Denver who was sort of coordinating our legal resource.
I had lawyer in New York who was an international specialist, we had a lawyer in Shanghai who was a China specialist and you know I had a few phone calls even where I’d have to tell you I think we had, $4,000 an hour worth of lawyer on the phone, talking about how to structure this letter of intent and is that a subordinate clause or main clause, do you need a comma here, is that unclear? Do we need another bullet point under this to really spell this out.
And we wound up with a pretty tight proposed letter of intent, about 10 pages long.
We go to China for the signing of the letter of intent ceremony, and our Chinese partners had a very different idea.
They have been working on this as well, and they presented us with a one-page letter of intent entirely in Chinese. I don’t speak Mandarin, Chinese, I don’t read Chinese, they might as well handed me a Sudoku puzzle or something.
But here’s the thing, we did have a representative office in Shanghai and people from China working for us and with us. And they read it, and we huddled and talked about it, and it basically came to the conclusion that their agreement, which was sort of our deal, was either we were going to take our approach or walk from the deal.
We decided that their one page agreement more or less did a pretty good job of capturing what it was we were trying to do.
So here’s the thing, and it is sort of an extreme example which illustrates it. But the point of it is that you know one of the philosophical underpinnings in Chinese society is the Tao te Ching, if you are familiar with the Tao, and I have this version.
There are lots of translations, but I have one that I just love this simple translation of the first verse is, ‘Tao called Tao is not Tao,’ which I say is an apt description of the Chinese attitude toward contracts. A ‘contract called the contract is not the contract.’
Their attitude culturally is look, it is a piece of paper. Put together at one point in time, but what’s important is your relationship and that evolves. That evolves as you create more context as you work together, as you face a new problems you didn’t anticipate, and that’s what’s important and that’s what really is going to make this successful or not successful.
So from a lot of people’s cultural perspective, we in the United States who live in the highly evolved commercial legal environment and tend to really get focused on negotiating contracts, instead of clauses and distant set of clauses and worst case scenario go to arbitration…A lot of other countries, say half way around the world, different cultural context, different language, that’s not going to cut it.
That’s not going to get me home at the end of the day.
What I need to know is do I have a good relationship with someone based on sort of a mutual understanding of where we’re trying to get, a mutual understanding of what our value is to each other? Mutual respect, mutual trust. And that takes some cultural acumen.
It takes patience, it takes an understanding of the environment where we’re putting these deal together.
But that’s what allows you to sleep at night. What is it I am actually looking for in people I want to do business with, and how do I make sure that these are the people I want to do business with?
Success from Go Glocal Strategies
Charlie Hoehn: What has been your personal favorite success story of a client that you’ve helped make the transition into an international market?
Craig Maginness: I’ll be honest with you, I have another story on my own practice. You know in a perfect world the client who comes to me is someone who has a great business who is looking to go international and has a blank slate.
They really want to know, “Hey, help me figure out where we should go and how we should get there.”
The reality is with a lot of people that I work with are people who are already involved in the distributor from hell problem. And so what you are really trying to do is kind of unwind and remediate and get back to better place, which is a lot messier endeavor, needless to say.
But you know, having said that, I can think of people who I worked recently who are in the table top gaming business if you know what that is. It’s like Dungeons and Dragons for example, and for various reasons was looking at China but having a difficult time getting their own ceramic. China is a vast market and a complicated market and a lot of things going on.
So we talked about cultural resonance, we talked about understanding cultural symbols in the game, some things like that. A lot of these, “What is it your selling?” How do you translate that? But the one thing we talked about is something that I think most people who do this miss, which is international trade shows.
So international trade shows are something that most people only think about after they are in a market as something they need to do to help market their product, and of course any of us have actually sat around in the trade shows anywhere know that that’s like a sentence to purgatory. But having said that, here’s the thing with international trade shows.
In almost every industry in the world, there is a major trade show in that industry in the major regions of the world. In China, in Europe, in Latin America.
They are probably the single most useful place to do market research on the ground.
So my recommendation to people is don’t wait until you’re selected in the market and now you are going to go sell your product. Go there while you are still working on these issues.
Find a trade show, get on a plane, and get there. Because it concentrates all these problems we’re talking about in one place, and it’s everything from what are the value propositions that resonate? What are people looking for? Where are they on the technology curve in terms of what they’re looking for in a product? What kinds of things are they buying, colors, shapes, sizes? Who are the competitors I’m going to run into?
It’s a great place to get pricing intelligence because you just walk around the show and talk to people. The sales people, those booths are usually bored enough, they are more than happy to talk to you about what they are selling and how they price things and stuff.
Anyway so back to this table top gaming thing. So I suggest that to them. and sure enough they found a great conference in Shanghai and it made everything work from there.
I mean they came to understand very directly how table top gaming works in China versus here, whereas here it is an activity, a lot of times people do at home. Invite friends over, gather a place.
In China, partly because of if you think about, obviously the size of the residences and what not, you know, happens in very particular places, table top gaming cafes, made a relationship with a table top gaming café in Shanghai, who became their main distributor.
And while they’re at it, they also met a manufacturer in China who not only could help them in China but ultimately became the manufacturer for their boards and pieces to come back here.
Actually, improved their supply chain to improve their business even back in the United States. I mean, that’s caveat how a specific thing can help a company really change, how they would otherwise stumble into this.
Connect with Craig Maginness
Charlie Hoehn: Is there something, particular client or any instance or story that you’re particularly proud of?
Craig Maginness: I do a lot of corporate training through various entities, put together the World Trade Center Association here in Denver.
I had a student of mine in an executive MBA program. This was a guy who had been in business for, he was probably late 40s, been in management in a couple of companies. He took my international business scores, we talked a lot about this kind of stuff. You know, then in the end he said, “Hey, can we get together and talk,” and I thought he wanted to have a conference about his final presentation, whatever.
What he wanted to tell me is the class had changed his life.
He realized in his late 40s what his passion was and what he really wanted to do, and he was going to change the entire focus of his career from being a facility manager, domestic focus, to really wanting to get into the international business and how do you do that.
We did that, we worked on that, networked on that. But back to where we sort of started this around my view of international business is you know, humankind’s last great hope.
When somebody can hear you talk about this kind of stuff and what’s important and what matters and how you do this, and then they come to you and say “Wow, you changed my whole life, you didn’t just make my business better or my career different. You changed my life.” Those are the kinds of things I guess I’m most proud of.
Charlie Hoehn: Craig, this has been great, could you restate once more where people can get in touch with you, the name of your site?
Craig Maginness: Yeah, it’s exinglobalstrategies.com and there’s contact a form on the side and they can get me through that.
Get Craig’s new book Go Global on Amazon.
Find out more at Exin Global Strategies.
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Never Split The Difference: Chris Voss
This Might Get Me Fired: Gregory Larkin
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