The Human Side of an Export Enterprise
Create an Environment Where People Will Flourish
If you have the wrong people on [your] bus, nothing else matters. You may be headed in the right direction, but you still won’t achieve greatness. Great vision with mediocre people still produces mediocre results.
—Jim Collins, business consultant, best-selling author and lecturer (2001)1
Jim Collins has it right. No matter what brilliant idea or well-organized plan you have in place for exporting, the basic and most important side of your enterprise is still the human side. It starts with getting the right people on your export bus. Whether you hire employees with full benefits and perks or independent contractors, you want excellent people around you who are as passionate about your company’s prospects as you are and who can do something you can’t do that will help transform your export business. Complementary values help, but accumulating talent with qualities unlike your own fortifies achieving a vision faster. Although the vision is yours, the talent will be ones with the skill set to get things done.
At the start of running a business, it’s about you, your people, and your company’s capabilities. You’d be surprised at how long you can go without too much being accomplished—with all talk and no action. But as you expand internationally, you will discover that success becomes less about talk and more about execution. Executing anything requires highly motivated people. Luckily for you, due to technology, hiring globally to get the work done isn’t difficult and allows you to broaden your pool of exceptional candidates.
In Chapter 1, I provided a shortlist of twelve personal characteristics that I find work in the export marketplace. These are based on my own hands-on experiences and the observations of others who have achieved success in crossing boundaries in the business world. Some of those characteristics are: the ability to adapt, to sustain a high level of cultural and emotional intelligence, and to get things done with people from diverse backgrounds. If you skipped Chapter 1, go back and read it. That’s where I highlight the fundamentals of what you need as a leader to bring out the best in others. It starts with developing a global mindset. Next, it’s about finding and developing your people.
Tip To fully allow people to realize their personal goals–and thereby contribute to the goals of your organization–you must provide them clear objectives, rewards, and the freedom to use creativity and imagination.
So, how do you find great people to, as Jim would say, get on your export bus? How can you make sure they remain happy and motivated? We’ll find out here. I will help you to create a functional team that thinks globally yet communicates locally with cultural sensitivity, to find the best places to outsource work, and to develop a plan to work effectively with others and nurture talent.
Creating a Functional Team
The first big characteristic to look for in people destined to do international work is their ability to be comfortable and confident in their own skin, along with a heightened sensitivity to others. After that, focus on integrity: can you trust them? To assess a person’s integrity requires frequent dealings over time. You can’t rush that. There are, however, other qualities you should seek from job candidates that are easier to ascertain in a limited time, including:
Last, the individual must be sensitive to the human behavior of all races, cultures, and ethnicities. They must have emotional intelligence beyond reproach. Meaning, the individual must care. If you find part or most of these characteristics in a person, hire her.
Caution The best education in the world will not always produce the ideal hire. Initiative and international experience matter more.
A typical hiring scenario might unfold like this: Six people diverse in ethnicity and from different parts of the world are situated in a conference room. I invite a potential hire, Steve, into the room for a preliminary interview. Steve is wearing casual clothes with sandals and no socks and immediately starts talking to everyone. He even manages to slip in a joke about his lousy plane flight. He plops down on his chair, gulps his water, and says, “I am sure you want to know how I am qualified for the job.” And from there, he jumps into talking about everything he has done during the past five years without taking a breath or ever noticing if anyone in the room was paying the least bit of attention to what he is saying. He fumbles for his business cards and then tosses one out on the table to each person and asks, “Any questions?” Later, you notice that his application had numerous unanswered questions, signaling his lack of attention to detail.
We don’t need to concern ourselves as to whether Steve is qualified for the job. Even if he has terrific skills in certain areas, he won’t cut it on manners and cultural sensitivity.
See how easy it is to spot immediately when someone falls short on manners and cultural sensitivity and etiquette?
You can see how this same scenario could play out on a Skype video call with a trade partner or client. Steve would sign in late, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and, after fifteen minutes, abruptly leave for a moment to get a soft drink while the client wonders what just happened.
Would you want to have someone like Steve handling a critical part of your export business, like prospecting for new overseas customers? You need someone with an obsessive attention to details coupled with hypersensitivity to those around them. That’s what helps fuel an incredible export business.
Contrast Steve with Bob, the second candidate. Bob is invited the next day to a similar meeting. He responds politely when introduced to each person but does not say too much until called upon. You like that; you know that being a good listener only helps navigate complex issues in the global marketplace. Bob shares his experience as it relates to the job at hand but only after being asked. That conveys his discipline and decisiveness.
Another thing you notice: Out of respect and politeness, Bob sits down last to ensure each person has a seat at the table even without knowing whether there are enough seats in the room. People attending the interview witness that he is sensitive to others, even when it could put him in an uncomfortable position (left him standing up, for instance, due to the lack of chairs). Also, he doesn’t prompt the exchange of business cards. He pays attention to how business cards are presented to him—with two hands and the card in English with a person’s credentials facing up—similar to Japanese-business-card etiquette and that of many other cultures as well. He responds exactly the same way and waits for others to step over to him to exchange cards—and responds in kind. Exhibiting confidence, Bob asks if he can get water for everyone during a break. Only after serving another person water does he sip his. Also impressive, he wore a button-down, long-sleeved blue shirt and khaki-colored pants with dark socks and loafers. It’s clear that he had found out well in advance of the interview what the appropriate attire would be.
As the interview progresses, Bob answers all questions posed to him in a seemingly honest and forthright manner. At one point, he even offers to get back to the team on a matter he is unsure about. The upshot: whatever is thrown Bob’s way, he keeps his cool, acts his true self, and proves effortlessly through the course of conversations that he has vast experience in export trade.
Before hiring a person to be in charge of any responsibility within your firm, besides the usual questions you ask in doing your due diligence, also ask these questions:
In response to the last question, someone might answer, “I get joy from finding export opportunities in our brave new world” or “I particularly enjoy traveling internationally.” Surprisingly, they may also offer answers like “Watching thriller movies is my passion” or “Drinking Jack Daniel’s is my main source of enjoyment.”
It’s usually pretty easy to assess who will fit in and who won’t. Look for the person with the “Let’s go take on the world” label planted on his forehead. Then grab ’em.
When it’s time to negotiate a salary, research the rates (you can use www.payscale.com or www.salary.com) that you are willing to pay for a full-time employee so you don’t make an offer that’s too low (cheap) or too extravagant. Find out what real people are earning in the market relative to the job you need done and vary your offer up or down by 10 percent. After settling on a reasonable figure, stick to it and nurture the relationship from there. Help your employees get everything they deserve and it will come back to you a hundred times over in the growth and success of your export business.
Hiring is one of the biggest challenges for business owners and particularly for exporters. Accept that you will never get it right all of the time. The stories in this section were included simply to help you see how a certain kind of person will help further your export goals while many other candidates will keep you from them.
My advice: Take it slow. Resist the temptation to fill a position quickly. Check references thoroughly. You can mitigate your risks by getting a second opinion on a candidate (internally or externally), and developing recruitment strategies that avoid costly hiring mistakes.
Caution If someone you hire cannot do the job, eliminate them. If they are incompetent, eliminate them. If they are inaccessible, eliminate them. If they are rude, eliminate them. The longer you wait to let someone go, the longer the organization and others suffer. There’s a saying: “Hire slow and fire fast”!
Now that you’ve seen a couple of examples of how to assess whether someone has what you think it takes to succeed on your export bus, let’s take a look at what roles need to be filled as you grow your export business.
Success in exporting is directly related to a companywide commitment. That commitment is the responsibility of you alone if you are a sole proprietor, or in the case of a larger enterprise, of the executive committee as well as the heads of finance, operations, sales and marketing, legal, logistics, research, technology, and culture departments. Assuming you manage an organization that is already in place, you need to be sure each of these people is on the export bus and ready and willing to make the journey with you and happy about it. If they are not, you must get the wrong people off the bus and reassign new people to their seats.
Once you recognize the human resources available to you and what it takes to export a product or service, you’ll need to prepare a list of what is required from each of the functional areas of your company. Then it’s up to you to develop your world-class team, which will work in concert. Keep in mind that many if not most of these positions can be outsourced until you are ready to bring them in-house; I’ll say more about this later in the chapter. The team might look like this:
Note Don’t be put off by the presumable number of people it takes to export. A friend and colleague of mine, Barbara Roberts, once told me that you don’t necessarily need a dozen people to pull off growing an international company successfully. Over a seven-year period, she grew a stock-photography business from a $7 million to a $45 million, world-renowned, and technologically state-of-the-art company—all with just a handful of people. You can do this too, provided you take it one market at a time, hire on an as-needed basis, and persevere.
As you expand, you might have to hire additional people as situations develop—for example, to support a growth market that takes off rapidly and unexpectedly in India, Brazil, or China. Or you may need someone to handle new customer inquiries coming in online from China—in Chinese. And that even begets more decisions to be made: can the person who speaks Chinese reside in China or does he need to be located in the United States? These are just a few of the issues and considerations you must address, and oftentimes you don’t have the answers until you are well into it.
Caution Don’t assume the individuals who manage a function locally will have the time or the capabilities to manage that same function on the export front. Ask. And gauge as best you can their enthusiasm for the expanded job responsibilities.
In the start-up stage, my recommendation is to have someone from each department set aside one hour each day just to work on an international sales strategy. It doesn’t matter if there are no sales pending; it is critical to arrange a structured amount of time for the purpose, which requires discipline, commitment, and an exchange of information. You should have meetings to give everyone the feeling of importance and team spirit that are critical for the growth and prosperity of the company.
People will also need to be trained. You must first communicate the company’s vision, goals, and objectives. This can be as simple as sitting down with each individual to discuss them: What are we going after on this project? How fast do we expect to get there? How will we get it done? Who will work on the projects as they pop up? How will we get help if we don’t know how to do something? How will we measure results?
You’ll quickly realize that the desire to expand internationally takes a team effort and commitment, which will define and shape the export process. If you are a novice exporter, your employees and independent contractors will learn as you learn. The point is to get input as often as possible and insist that team members execute their portion of the plan. You also want to convey that you are in this endeavor together to learn, grow, and make it a success!
Best Places to Outsource Work
Technology and the Internet have made it ridiculously efficient to search out people to do the tasks you don’t want to do yourself. How do you know when outsourcing is the solution? If you are seeking better-skilled workers than you currently have on your bus for less money, that’s the time to outsource. But here are a couple of questions to answer to know for sure:
Jobs that are ripe for outsourcing are those of a writer, editor, and translator; of a web developer, programmer, designer, and drafter (engineer); of a call-center operator and medical professional; of administrative support and human resources (to handle hiring, firing, and payroll); of social media experts and business development experts; of export-trading intermediaries; of public relations, marketing, and computer professionals; and of consulting.
The best way to find the right people is to vet them in a way that drills down on their capabilities to determine if they are a good fit. But before you can do that, you must create job descriptions for each position you need to fill. Be specific. You are hiring someone to get something done. What is it? Spell it out. Use the description as a basis for filling out a job request and for comparing it against a job applicant’s response.
The following sections offer a couple of places to look for good people to match the skill sets you need.
Freelancers and Independent Contractors
To reach freelancers and independent contractors, try the following resources. Be sure to inquire about fees; they are prone to change often.
Tip Another interesting global, on-demand, 24/7 online task marketplace worth checking out to see if it fits your job requirements is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome), whose system is based on taking a job and separating it out for many different people to work on in pieces. The beauty of AMT is that the tasks are quick and very simple (you might write a product review or complete a multiple-choice survey, for example) and require only tiny payments. Try it out.
You can also tap into what I consider online talent pools where people worldwide get social by making professional connections. Job candidates are only a mouse click away. These are the sites to consider when you are hiring for a full-time position:
Many universities make it easy for US employers to hire students. Some schools even seek out companies that are more amenable to sponsoring overseas hires. Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, for instance, has an international advisor to guide US employers on hiring international students (see http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/cmc/global). The school itself helps facilitate employment authorization. In certain circumstances, an immigration attorney might be required.
It can be very beneficial to hire a student from an overseas market where you are considering exporting to. International students are eager to learn, relish the notion of working with an American firm, and are on the local ground, reporting firsthand to you on what market conditions are like. So if you are about to export to China, for example, look for Chinese students studying in your country (knowing they will return home after they complete their studies) with a worldly mind, fluency in both Chinese and English, and an understanding of the Chinese culture.
Tip There are many other places to find good people. Check with peer-to-peer organizations (i.e., the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, Vistage, and the Women Presidents’ Organization); associations (i.e., the International Trade Association, the Small Business Exporter’s Association, and the American Association of Exporters and Importers); universities (you can stay connected as an alum); and online community forums (banks, small businesses, and start-ups).
When to Hire; When to Outsource
How do you decide when to hire employees and when to hire contractors? Positions formerly reserved for in-house employees, such as those of a web developer, a designer, or a HR specialist, can often be done faster and more effectively with qualified remote contractors. If the following conditions don’t apply, it might be good to use a contract worker to fill a position:
If you answered “no” to all of the above questions, hiring contractors is your short-term solution. One of the single-biggest advantages for utilizing contract help is that your company is not responsible for paying benefits to the contractor. Second to that is the added flexibility of having to hire staff only when you need them. Big caution: Never treat a contractor like an employee. Misclassification of an individual as an independent contractor may have a number of costly legal consequences. Consult with your HR manager and international attorney for guidance. You don’t want to mess with the law.
Caution Be sure to thoroughly review the key provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act designed to ensure that Americans have access to quality, affordable health insurance. “Depending on whether you are self-employed, an employer with fewer than 25 employees, an employer with fewer than 50 employees, or an employer with 50 or more employees, different provisions of the Affordable Care Act may apply to you.”2 Depending on the size of your organization, you may find out it is more advantageous to hire contractors vs. more employees.
In hiring independent contractors, set expectations right at the beginning of the project. You don’t want anyone wondering if the work they are performing is adequate or not. In addition to an initial e-mail contact, consider setting up a phone appointment to further discuss your needs. This is the best way to build trust and negotiate fair compensation. If the contractor is located in another country, consider using Skype (http://www.skype.com) or Google+ (http://www.plus.google.com) to keep the costs down while you communicate.
Check in periodically with the contractor to make sure the work gets done and that it meets your expectations and is performed on time and within budget. You might set up daily, weekly, or monthly check-in points to ensure things are on track. Global projects can be coordinated on the move with your digital device, with everything stored in one place through such trusted online repositories as: Google Drive (http://www.drive.google.com), DropBox (http://www.dropbox.com), SugarSync (http://www.sugarsync.com), Box (http://www.box.com), and SkyDrive (http://www.skydrive.live.com).
The Hiring Plan
What’s the purpose of a good hiring plan? It makes the hiring and training process much easier and less stressful for all concerned. First thing’s first: decide on who will be responsible for hiring and then consider these issues:
Be specific about the skills and expertise you need from people when you interview them, and fill out a profile of the work you want done when you hire someone. Your goal is to enhance personal growth and development for each and every person you bring on board and to make each new hire feel like a stakeholder in the business. That can be accomplished by giving new hires your time, treating them with respect and care, and making sure they are an integral part of the decision-making processes that affect their job. That’s the best-kept secret to keeping employees and contractors motivated and happy and moving toward reaching unprecedented success with your export business.
Tip Delegate as much work as possible to others who can do it better than you. This will make your business life easier and your employees and independent contractors happy because you put trust and faith in their abilities. Just don’t overburden them. If you stay in constant contact, you will learn more quickly about little bumps in the road, and together you can fix them as they arise. Give employees the tools and resources to get a job done and then get out of the way so they can do it.
Outsourcing HR: Focus on Your Core Competencies
Is your export company growing so fast that the notion of handling your own HR initiatives is overwhelming to you? You’ll have to devote a large portion of your resources for the purpose of maintaining records, nurturing employees, improving employee performance, HR management (hiring and firing), administering employee benefits, training new staff, and so forth. Or will you? You could consider outsourcing the entire HR process to an independent firm. There are several online; you just need to conduct a search to find a firm that is a good match for your organization. The reason to outsource HR is to alleviate the burden associated with the administrative cost and enable you to focus on your core competencies.
I don’t recommend this route for business owners who are just starting to export because it’s good to have direct involvement in the nitty-gritty detail of hiring the right human capital for your business. This gets back to getting the right people on the export bus. If you are a $10 million-plus business and are currently generating a portion of your revenue from overseas exports and expanding rapidly, perhaps now might be a good time to consider outsourcing the global HR process to better enable you to think more strategically. Use your own best case study for hiring to gauge whether the outsourcer is a good fit for your needs and the best model for going forward.
Summary
While it takes a strong global leader and enthusiastic teamwork to achieve export success, true business victory cannot be obtained without an online social presence. After all, you want the world to find you, because without customers, there is no business. We’re on the export bus, so now we need to position ourselves for online success. Are you with me? If so, then turn the page!
1 “Good to Great,” Jim Collins, Jim Collins Web site, published in Fast Company, last modified October 2001, http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html.
2 “Health Care: Key Provisions of the Affordable Care Act,” SBA.gov, accessed October 23, 2013, http://www.sba.gov/healthcare.
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