Summary: Taking your business into a foreign market can be risky. If your company wants to hit it big internationally, Craig Maginness, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Go-Glocal-Definitive-Entering-International-ebook/dp/B07C5XQD3C/&tag=authorhour-20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Go Glocal</a>, believes you need to think globally and act locally.<br> 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.<br> 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.<br> <br> <br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Go-Glocal-Definitive-Entering-International-ebook/dp/B07C5XQD3C/&tag=authorhour-20" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a>Get Craig’s new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Go-Glocal-Definitive-Entering-International-ebook/dp/B07C5XQD3C/&tag=authorhour-20" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Go Global</a> on Amazon.<br> Find out more at <a href="exinglobalstrategies.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Exin Global Strategies</a>.<br> <br> <br> 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.<br> 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.<br> 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.<br> Anyway, we were talking about this and he was ruminating about some of the issues and problems and checking this out.<br> 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?”<br> <br> After a bit, he looked at me and said, “Craig, you ought to run this business in Mexico.” <br> <br> I laughed because frankly the idea was completely ludicrous. He took a little more serious tone, he said “No, I’m serious.”<br> He said, and I quote fairly precisely, “You can’t screw it up worse than we’re screwing it up now.”<br> <br> Learning on the Job<br> 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.<br> 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.<br> The whole thing was a learning experience, starting literally from a blank slate.<br> 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?”<br> 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?”<br> You know, it’s nice to have that kind of confidence building.
