MBA885 The Working While Traveling Experiment P6: What Makes a Business a Great Global Business?

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast that delivers practical real world business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA and webinar Ninja. It's part six of our Working While Traveling experiment and I'm in Naples. This is our last city in Italy before we move on to Germany in this experiment. And I love Naples. It's gritty, it's down to earth. It's what my man Rick Steves calls lovable chaos. If you're just joining us on this eight part series, Nicole and I are embarking on an eight week trip. An eight week experiment to see if you can really travel the world while running and growing a business. Previously in our last episode, in part five we were in Venice and I shared with you the challenges I faced so far. Trying to work while traveling. Trying to run and grow our business while being out and about, traveling the world. It wasn't easy sharing those challenges. But hey, that's what this experiment is all about. Having you come along with me on this experiment. Make sure you tune in to part five of that lesson if you haven't listened to it yet. Again, in today's episode we're in Naples, Italy and in today's lesson I want to share with you what I've learned about what it takes to make a great global business. If you have an online business, a software business, even a service business, your business is not limited to your local area or even your country. You can serve the world, but only if you build a business that serves the world, or what I like to call a global business. So how do you make sure your business is global proof? How can you compete with the world's economy? That's what this episode is all about. Part of traveling is also learning how the world does business and how you can take those learnings, how you could take those things you're learning along the way and apply them to your own business so you can serve that market. Now, this is not some overambitious pie in the sky talk here. There are over 7.3 billion people in the world and 3.2 billion of them have an Internet connection. So how do you reach them? How do you connect with them across the globe? How do you offer your products and services to them? How do you. When you make that offer, it makes sense to them and it's a good fit. That's what today's episode is all about. And I'll be sharing my own examples from our own business and previous businesses as well. This is not an overnight thing. You can do this step by step, but you have to start taking the steps or honestly, you're leaving money on the table. So get ready to start building your global business. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Nicole, I run two businesses with a team of 23 now. And yes, we've traveled before, up to three weeks before. But in this experiment, we're going all in eight weeks of travel, 15 cities to see if we can run a business and travel the world at the same time. You've been along with us on the journey so far. There's been some ups, there's been some downs. We've been sharing it all. We've been to Milan, Florence, Rome, Sicily, Sardinia, Venice, and now Naples. And in today's episode, I want to share with you what I've learned about becoming a global business that serves the world. Now, I want to begin this lesson by saying this is a choice. You don't have to do this. If you'd like to serve your local community or your local region or county, or even just stay national within your country, that's completely fine. But understand, it's a choice. This is especially true when it comes to having an online business. One of the biggest Advantages of having a online business where people actually make their transactions online. Whether they're buying a course or buying a software, they're buying clothing online, they're buying services like web design services or graphic design, they're making the transaction. If they're giving you their money online, you can serve anyone in the world. That's an option. So if you do choose, if you make that choice, say, hey, I want to be able to serve. I want to make sure that my presence is all over the place. Then I got some tips for you in today's lesson. Now, I'm going to go into detail, but just off the bat, I want to let you know that this doesn't happen overnight. By making this choice doesn't mean that you're going to be serving the world tomorrow. You're going to take some steps or baby steps. And I love using this analogy when it comes to big goals. And this analogy has to do with American football, like the NFL, right? In American football, everybody wants to score a touchdown, right? That's the goal. You need to score a touchdown. You need to put points on the board. When players are in a huddle before a play, they don't say, let's get a touchdown. They say, let's get the first down. And that means advancing the field 10 yards, getting 10 yards closer to a touchdown. So in essence, they are setting up micro goals to get to the ultimate goal. And even scoring the touchdown is not the ultimate goal, but they understand that they need to score touchdowns to win. But they set themselves up with these little micro goals. 10 yards. 10 yards. 10 yards. And the field's a hundred yards. So they kind of have like a 10 step program to get to a touchdown. Sometimes they accomplish it in faster than 10 steps or 10 plays. But the point here is that they set themselves up to just advance a little closer to the touchdown or to the goal. In fact, when you try to score a touchdown in one play, it's called a Hail Mary play. Basically it's a prayer, right, to try to score in one shot. So I want you to keep this analogy in mind when we talk about creating a global business, serving a global market. I'm gonna refer to it later on, but just keep that with you right now. Now I wanna get into some steps, some concrete steps I want you to follow. And these are the steps that I kind of learned the hard way. So as many of you fans of the show know, we have two businesses. We have the $100 MBA, which is our training program to help people get started in business and we have a software business called Webinar Ninja. It's a webinar software to help people create and run webinars easily. Now, if I'm going to be completely honest, Webinar Ninja, our software product, is a lot more global than the Hundred doll. Thunderlab is very well known in the States and some western countries like Australia and the uk. But Webinar Ninja definitely has a larger global footprint. And it's because we took certain steps, mindful steps, to be a global company with Webinar Ninja. Now, this wasn't the first time I took these steps. Previous to Webinar Ninja or the $100 MBA, many of you know that I had a clothing line business. This is way before I even started this podcast. But I sold physical goods, which is male clothing. It was custom tailored male clothing. And I went into this business knowing that I wanted to make it a global business, serve a global market. But of course, I didn't start there. I started with one area and then moved around. I started with one market and then expanded slowly. So I give this example of the clothing line to show you that even if you're selling physical goods, you could definitely expand and serve a global market, even if you're not selling soft goods like courses or software or services. So let's get into what I call my seven steps of building a global business. The first step is 100% mindset. You have to have the right mindset going into this. We talked about this, making the decision, making the choice to be global. You got to keep reminding yourself throughout the creation of your business and your products and your services that you will eventually serve a global market. So keep that in mind in your decisions as you're building the business. Now remember, you're not going to do this all at once, but it's better for you to think big at the start so you don't limit yourself or box yourself in and make some decisions that will make it a lot harder for you later on to be a global business. All right, step two, you're going to take the world one region at a time or one country at a time. You start with the country you're in. So if you're in the us, Start there. If you're in France, start in France. If you're in Belarus, start in Belarus. Why do I say start there? Because you know that economy well, you know that market very well. You know how to appeal to that market very well because you are one of them. But as you're building your market in that region, in that country, start thinking, what's the next region? What's the next country we want to really take on? So for us at Webinar Ninja, now for us at Webinar Ninja, we started in the U.S. we wanted to make sure that we had a presence in the US market for webinar software. And then we made a conscious choice to really focus on Australia. Australia is an emerging market when it comes to startups and small businesses. They're an underserved market and we really wanted to take them on. We want to make them a part of our community, make sure they know that we have their back, that we can serve them. So that means making some effort to market to that economy, to that market that could be targeted Facebook ads that could be doing some webinars in that time zone. You know, a lot of people in Australia can't stand all these webinars that are just catered to the US and they have to be up in the middle of the night to actually watch it or they'll watch the replay. It's not the same, it's not interactive. So that was something that we made a conscious choice of and even maybe making a trip over there to speak at some events. Markets that are underserved, like Australia, like New Zealand, like South Africa, like Malaysia and Singapore, these markets are very grateful. They're very grateful and they become very loyal when you make an effort because not a lot of people make an effort. So make a conscious choice. After that we say let's move into the UK and then Greater Europe. Currently our next step is to focus on non English speaking countries in Europe. Now before we do that, we're going to have to adjust some things in our product. And that leads me to step three which is improving your product service, website with others in mind, with other cultures and countries in mind. So we know that we want to get into the greater Europe economy, non English speaking economy. Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, these economies. But in order to do that, we need to be able to cater to that country, to that culture. Now, even though the national language is not English, many of them do speak English. But. But if you really want to cater to them, you need to make sure that you cater to their language. How do you expect to connect with them if you don't speak their language or you don't offer their language? So one of the things that we're working on now is having multi language capabilities with our software with Webinar Ninja. So as a webinar host you could set your Language preferences and use the software in that language as well as display your webinars in that language. Now, that takes some investment of time and money and resources, but it's a conscious choice because we want to get into that market and have a competitive advantage. We also know that there's other companies that are just not doing that and they're just happy serving another market that's just English speaking. So that's something that we have in mind. But we have to make some changes. We have to make some improvements. Now, I mentioned improving your website. Now, you can have different versions of your website being displayed depending on where that IP address is, where somebody's actually looking at your website. So if somebody's looking at your website in France, you can show a different landing page, a different site, a different homepage that caters to that market. Now, it doesn't have to be in French, it could be in English, but you may want to stay away from any, you know, national jargon or something that people would understand in America, maybe something that is very culturally particular to the US Market. As a rule of thumb, I like to make sure all sales copy is simple, clean and easy to understand. Any kind of sales video. I like to make sure that I'm not speaking too quickly, that I'm enunciating, that I slow down a bit. That's a little bit of a challenge for me because I do speak fast. I'm from New York, but I'm conscious of it and I may want to do some simple adjustments to make sure I'm catering to the French market. If you want to take it one step further, you can offer a French version of that website and have your page professionally translated by a translator. But it's not just language, it's also culture. Many of us, we just send the same marketing campaigns to everybody on your email list, regardless of where they're from. Once you start having more of a global business, you need to be a little bit more sensitive about that. If you're in E commerce and you're running an Easter sale, that doesn't have the same significance when you send it to your market or your customers in Indonesia, or if you run a Diwali promotion, that may be great for your market in India, but not so much in Italy. So be mindful and make sure that don't leave anybody behind, especially the markets you're trying to focus on. Step four. The best way to have a global business is to connect with the world. You need to connect with people. And in my opinion, video is One of the best ways to connect because if you're connecting with many people that don't speak English as their first language, they're going to connect with you a lot stronger through video. They may understand English, but it's a lot easier to watch a video and get what you're trying to say and really connect and resonate with you than reading a blog post. That's the power of film, right? That's why, believe it or not, the Fast and Furious franchise is one of the best selling movies of all time. There's not a lot of complicated dialogue. There is dialogue and there is a storyline, but there's a lot of action and people can see the story through visuals. So I love as a lead magnet as bringing people into our customer base or potential leads through video, through video courses. In fact, we're moving to all video with webinar Ninja with our release of our new website@webinar ninja.com come August 7th. Shameless plug there. But we're really excited about that. We're going to have lots of videos, a lot of courses, and it's part of our strategy to make sure we connect with everybody. I really believe in face to face. Interaction is one of the best connectors. So what we like to do is have a system where we start with video recorded video, whether they're video blog posts or a video course, and then invite those people that watch those videos or opt into the course to a live webinar. It's no surprise that we love webinars. We run a webinar software. But webinars are a great way to connect with a global audience. If you just make the time to make sure that you're having the actual webinar at a time that's conducive to that market, you're good as gold. People can ask questions if they don't understand something. People can see visuals, they can see your slides, they can see your face, they can see your genuine, they can build trust and they can really feel like you're reaching out to them. And I haven't found anything that converts better in terms of potential customer to sales than webinars because of that connection. And then lastly, if you can go to these markets, go to these places around the world physically, even if you're on a holiday, see if there's a chance you can go to a conference during the same time, see if you could speak at that conference, see if you can go to a meetup, see if you can organize a meetup. I find that my International speaking opportunities are a lot more effective. It makes a lot more of an impact than going to the same places that I go every year or the same marker, the same community. So if you can go and speak to them live, please do. All right, so we talked about mindset. We talked about taking one country at a time. We talked about improving your product service, website. Talk about connecting with them. All right, number five, step five. This is really important and it's a balance. Be yourself, but be mindful of your audience. So I'm not asking you to change everything about yourself and your brand and your business. Be yourself on video. Be yourself on the webinars, be yourself on stage. Be yourself in your blog posts or whatever it is in your email newsletters. But just be a little mindful that not everybody's going to understand maybe your humor or a way you phrase something. Make sure you keep in mind that not everybody comes from your culture or your background. Now if you grew up in an immigrant family like myself, my parents immigrated from Egypt to the us. I was born in the US So I was always mindful of this. Not all my jokes landed with my parents or my uncles or my aunts because they came from a different culture. They had a different humor. They would laugh at things I didn't think were so funny. So now as I'm attempting to grow a global business, I am really mindful of that. I want to be myself, but at the same time be mindful. And when I'm communicating with people, I'm not using language or references that just don't make sense to people. You get the point. Gas, snacks, tolls. 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That's TommyJohn.com comfort Tommy. John Comfort. Perfected. All right, let's get into step six of building a global business. One of the best ways to get insights on different markets and how they like to be served is to hire globally. One of the advantages of having a remote team is that you can be able to hire anyone anywhere around the world. So if you want to get into a market, it may be a good idea to hire somebody for your next position in that country, in that area. It's good to have a friend in places you're trying to learn more about. We're fortunate enough at Webinar Ninja to have teammates across the U.S. in Poland, in Bulgaria, in Russia, in Belarus, in the Philippines, in Australia, in India. This gives us insights on how these economies work as well as how these cultures like to be served. And how do they not like being served? Just by working with other people around the world allows you to get those insights. And of course, they're available to you. You can ask questions, you can make sure that before you make a decision, you can run it by them. Hey, do you think that the market in France would like this kind of offer? Does this appeal to them? What about the sales copy? This will help you tremendously. All right, step seven. The last step of building your business globally is evaluate. Not every market is going to serve you. Now, you may want to get into a market, say, for example, I'd love to get into the Portuguese market. When I get into Portugal and you make your efforts, you make your attempts to get into that market. You go through these steps and, you know, you make some headway, you have some presence. But over time, you have to evaluate how well you're doing, what's your return on investment? Is it worth it for you to keep on working on growing your market in that community, or should you double down on other communities? Portugal is just an example. Nothing against Portugal, but the point here is if it's not working, if you're not getting a roi, you need to know when to reevaluate, to say, hey, I am getting an ROI in this market. I really need to focus there and maybe I'll circa back later, or maybe organically I'll get to Portugal through word of mouth or something like that. Just because you want something doesn't mean that you have to keep forcing it. So you have to evaluate how you're doing. It's really important for you to really evaluate your customer base. And you can do this easily with any, you know, advanced email marketing software, whether it's Mailchimp or ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft or Drip or whatever it is. You could find out where your customers are located via IP address. You could see all your customers and where they're located, and you could say, okay, I see that, you know, a good number of people are in this region, but, you know, I'm making all this effort and they're not converting in Portugal or where else? How many customers have you earned in the last, you know, three months in your efforts of trying to get to this marketplace? How much money have you spent? Are you making a profit? These are things you have to evaluate. Sometimes when we run a business and we start growing and we're doing okay and we're making, you know, profits and things are going fine, we start losing money without noticing. We start leaking from, you know, places we didn't know. So make sure you evaluate your efforts as you go into markets. Make sure you're profitable. Make sure that it's working. Don't just go for it and do everything you need to do and not evaluate. You need to evaluate so you could pivot, you could change. You can make decisions based on the results. All right, just to recap, the seven steps that we learned in growing a global business is one, mindset. Having the right mindset from the start. Two, taking on one region or one country at a time. Remember, go for the first down. Don't worry about the touchdown that's coming later. Number three, improve your products and service your website with being global in mind. Number four, connection tools. Make sure you connect via video, via webinar, or even via live conference sometime in person. Number five, be yourself, but be mindful of your audience. Number six, hire globally so you can have a global presence and insights in those areas. And number seven, evaluate. Guys, that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't hit subscribe on this podcast, make sure you do that right now. Whether you're on itunes, Stitcher, overcast, Google Play, by hitting subscribe, you never miss an episode. You get it delivered to you right, right to your device. And it gives you access to our backlog of over 880 episodes. This is business building gold. It's one of the reasons why we were awarded best of iTunes in 2014. So hit subscribe so you can have access to all the episodes and never miss a future episode. All right, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. In today's episode, I didn't focus too much on Naples, where I am today. Wanted to focus on building a global business. But Naples is beautiful. It's gritty, it's down to earth. It reminds me a lot of Cairo, where people are warm and they're very easily approachable and they're willing to share their culture with you. I find that amazing. I really enjoyed Italy. It's been a great journey, a great four weeks in Italy. Our next stop is Berlin, Germany. And in that episode, I want to share with you how to deal with stress in a busy time. It's very, very busy for me and Nicole right now leading up to our launch of webinar ninja 5.0. And there's a lot of stress. How do you not just get overwhelmed? How do you make sure that you stay focused and stay cool? I'm going to give you my strategies as well as share what I've learned in my time in Berlin. I'll check you then. I'll see you in the next episode. See you then. Take care. Of. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet. Yeah, but we'll be with family. You're in a good mood. What's your deal? What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got 1 line of 5D for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top tuxt and data detour to Metro. Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile. Just bring your number 31st month and 25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro T Mobile in the past 180 days.