Mark Miller – President – Xplor Western Canada Chapter

Have you ever considered expanding your business outside of Canada and are not sure what it would take? I have been fotunate to have the opportunity to work with companies around the world deploying CCM systems and have a few interesting/challenging experiences to share. While the focus of this topic is on businesses based in Canada, the same ideas hold true for customers going from the USA into new markets.

First of all – when we talk about going international with your business there are a number of considerations that must be understood:

  • What is your motivation for expanding your business internationally?
  • What countries are you targeting?
  • How will you support business in the remote country?

Why go International?
This is an important question that dictates your strategy for expanding your business into the international markets. Are you expanding for the financial opportunity? Is it to get more market exposure and industry recognition? Do you have personal reasons for branching out, i.e. you have a desire to relocate to another country? Are you part of a larger organization that has an international presence and can open the door to new opportunity?

Your motivation for expanding into new countries will guide the strategy for how you get there.

Where are you going?
The next question is where you plan to expand into. When you look at the target markets outside of your home country, there are many considerations that must be worked through and each country has it’s own opportunities and challenges.

How hard can it really be?
How bad can it be to expand business into a new country? You have vacationed in many countries and figured things out just fine, how much different can this be? Lots!

  • Time Zone
    While maintaining sales, support and account management during your normal business hours of 8am – 5pm has some challenges when spanning 2-3 time zones across one country, this becomes a whole new can of worms when your customer is in Taiwan and your days are 14 hours apart. Now your normal business hours become 6pm – 2am to match the Taipei business day (and your day now starts Sunday, not Monday).That is a tough challenge with a remote customer – what happens when you throw in a remote development office and a remote customer? I worked with a company that had a development team in London, UK, our customer was in Sydney, AU, and I was providing account management support from Edmonton, AB. When we had conference calls, our customer would call in late in their day which matches the start of the work day in London, which left me joining at 2am-4am. Why the span of 2 hours? Daylight savings time north of the equator changes opposite from south of the equator. While we are going ahead one hour in spring, that is fall in Australia and they are going back one hour.
  • Currency
    While negotiating contracts with companies in remote countries, you can be guaranteed that they will fight for all payments to be in their currency. Now you have just become a foreign currency speculator, since the money markets can be extremely volatile. While you have a support contract that pays a fixed annual amount that does not mean you will get a fixed amount in your local currency. We have had situations where payment on our fixed value contracts fluctuated 50{dea9ef5f0dc871ef9226bb8b0ce00dbc688362be5d75596cdab6734c3777d8ff} in one year. Sometimes it is good – sometimes not so good.
  • Law
    This one is similar to the currency issue where you can be assured that your customers will want the legal venue of the contract to be their country. This way if there is a dispute, they are familiar with the local laws and can engage their legal team to represent them. If the venue is your customers’ country and you enter into a dispute – good luck! Again, based on experience, I have found that local courts tend to favour local companies.
  • Culture
    It is interesting travelling around the world, meeting new people, and learning new cultures. At the same time – when travelling for business purposes you need to be careful not to embarrass yourself, or worse your customer. Did you know that in Japan you do not blow your nose in public, and always wave underhand when beckoning someone? What would it mean to a person in London when you let them know that you are just heading back to the hotel to change your pants (almost definitely not what you had intended)? When working in Brazil and showing support for the local language, did you know that while Portuguese and Spanish are very similar, Brazilians can be insulted when you mix Spanish words into your (broken) Portuguese phrases by mistake? I also have a new 80/20 rule for Poland, where you need to get 80{dea9ef5f0dc871ef9226bb8b0ce00dbc688362be5d75596cdab6734c3777d8ff} of your work done in the morning – just in case vodka shots come out at lunch time.

Lesson one – always invest in the Lonely Planet guide for the country where you are going, and check out their Foreign Affairs website for updates and local advisories.

  • Travel
    This one fits into the “it sounds like fun” category right up until you spend more time in hotels than at home. Travelling for business is not the same as going on a vacation, and the stresses of planning flights and hotels, getting to the airport on time, hitting your connections, then figuring out how to get to your hotel once you get to the destination become a continuous activity. Lesson one here – stress in advance of the travel is good as it forces you to focus on the details and be prepared. Once you are in transit, if you can’t control your destiny (e.g. catching a connecting flight), don’t stress about it. You will arrive eventually, possibly late. Also, while in the trip planning stage don’t forget to check into the VISA requirements for your destination country – they are all different and can take a lot of paperwork to get through.
  • Language
    Language challenges can vary from “I know just enough of the local language and they know just enough English that we can work through things”, to “what was I thinking???”. When travelling in a remote country, I generally have a map and can match town/street names to what I see on the map. I may not know what the word is and the accents on the characters are foreign, but outside of that I can recognize and match the string of characters pretty easy.
    On one trip that I had to Japan I had a day off over the weekend and I decided to take a trip outside of Tokyo to a rural district. I had my map, I knew which train to get on, and I was ready to go. Travelling through Tokyo was ok, I could follow the names on the map with the signs going by. Outside of Tokyo the names on the signs changed from using a Roman characters to Kanji (the graphic Japanese characters). All of a sudden I was going through the countryside on a high speed train, trying to match symbols on my map that had no meaning to signs going by at 100km/hr. Not a chance. I got off the train, did my tour, went back to my hotel, and became more cautious on future trips (in my case, I learned to befriend and travel with people from the foreign country).

Product Challenges
You have a mature, scalable, and feature rich product that has been running on production systems for many years, now you just need to add a couple of simple features for the international markets, right? If you have architected your product from the start for internationalization, then you are a step ahead. If you have not, you may wind up having to replace substantial parts of your product.

Here are some of the challenges that you have to think about with respect to product architecture and internationalization:

  • Multi-byte character sets
    Techie alert! This next section gets a bit technical, time to grab an espresso (and possible a couple of aspirin). Most of us are familiar with the concept of characters being stored as one byte of data in computers. This works when you only have up to 255 unique characters, what happens when you start working in new languages that require more characters? Here come character set mappings, basically a way to stick to our limit of 255 characters in one byte, but having different mappings for different regions in the world with different character set requirements (e.g. ISO-8859-1 for North America, Western Europe, ISO-8859-2 for Eastern Europe, ISO-8859-6 for Arabic, etc). Now when you display a document, you also need to know which character map to use so that the correct characters are displayed.This worked for a period of time and for certain regions, but what about more complex character sets like Chinese? How do you work with a language that has over 50,000 characters? There have been a few solutions brought forward for representing more complex character sets, and the solution that is leading the way today is based on two parts, UTF-8 and Unicode which provide a set of standards for character set encoding and character set mapping. The UTF-8 standard provides a way to represent characters using a variable number of bytes, which means that there is no limit to the number of characters that it can represent. Unicode provides a set of standards for encoding maps that represent the specific characters that we need to display.

    Now we just need to make a couple of small changes to our software, and we have modified it to support UTF-8 (insert Dilbert cartoon here). While this sounds easy if you say it fast enough, in practice there are still some significant hurdles. What happens when you have a name field in your database that can hold 80 characters, but now you don’t know how big each character is? If you are storing the name as UTF-8 and each character is 5 bytes, now you can only support 16 characters. Uh-oh. How about displaying a list of names in a report in alphabetical order? Very easy with a single byte character set, not so easy with a multi-byte character set.

    Ok, we have completely re-engineered our product to support UTF-8 and now we are all good, right? Not quite so fast. What about countries that have not quite caught up with these new standards, for example Taiwan still uses the Big5 character set. How about UTF-16? While this all sounds incredibly complex, there are technologies available today that do a good job of simplifying this problem for us.

  • Content Design
    With designing content for electronic documents that you need to deliver, you also need to ensure that your content design application supports internationalization. You will need to be able to enter and display characters in different languages, and you will need to support characters flowing in different directions. For example Arabic and Hebrew flow right to left; Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) languages can flow either vertically (top to bottom), or horizontally (left to right). Hmm.

How will you provide support?
When you expand into a new country, ideally you would open a branch office in the new country that is staffed with some of your product and sales experts plus local employees for both technical and sales support (especially if there is a language barrier). If this is not possible, then next best option is to partner with a local firm that can provide first line technical and sales support in the remote country. I cannot understate the importance of having a local presence in the foreign country; we are not selling widgets over the internet that require no support and the web page does the selling. The solutions that we work in are complex to market, sell, and support.

Summary
This article introduces some of the challenges that you need to think about when looking at expanding into new countries. While there are a number of hurdles that you need to work through, in today’s world you can’t ignore the fact that business is quickly becoming global and we can either participate in this change, or miss the opportunity. Besides, who doesn’t like a good challenge?