Building Your Export Plan

By: kekepana.com/blog

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) had a very good how-to-export guide that I have recommended to clients over the years. The guide became outdated and is gone now, but has been replaced by a newer, cooler version. Go check out SBA’sExport Business Planner. The first thing you see is a slick video, but it doesn’t have much substance to it. Skip it and go right to downloadingthe Export Business Planner, a .pdf document that contains great information and, most important, forms to help guide your thinking in planning to go exporting. About as good as I have seen.

The Planner offers useful advice, but the heart of it is the planning forms, which take a neophyte exporter through a logical process to build an export plan. You can work on it as time allows – and revise it as facts and circumstance dictate. Remember, planning is always useful for figuring out how to begin and examining options and alternatives. But, as Clausewitz famously said, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Perhaps the prime lesson from export planning is that the successful company stays flexible.

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Speaking of export planning, the Hawaii Pacific Export Council (HPEC) – and a whole passel of partners – just completed an Export 101 course (called Export University) for 25 Hawaii executives from 23 local companies. An enthusiastic bunch, I expect several of them will succeed at exporting and that all will give it a good try. Building an export plan was at the heart of the process. The product mix was eclectic, but indicative of Hawaii’s export potential. We had companies that produce soaps, tea, sea asparagus, rum, cut flowers, coffee, telecom equipment and noni juice. The group was slanted towards specialty agriculture because the core financing came via a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, through the Hawaii Dept. of Agriculture, to provide export training for specialty crop producers. Other partners included Foreign Trade Zone #9 in Honolulu, the Shidler School of Business at the University of Hawaii, Federal Express, the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii, the Hawaii Small Business Development Center, and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

This course was in Honolulu and will be repeated. As you read this, a second Export University course is running at UH-Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii. More will be coming on the neighbor islands and in Honolulu. You can keep tabs on the courses at the HPEC website. There will be more export 101 courses, plus market-specific how-to-business-in workshops, and we are planning advanced courses, such as export licensing and dual-use technologies. Faculty members are experts in their fields, including volunteer teachers and mentors from HPEC.