As an expat living overseas for nearly two years, I’ve had a great opportunity to learn a lot about how to run my business in an unpredictable environment. Living in your native culture, things just tend to work the way you’d expect them to, and it’s our nature to lean heavily on the things in our lives that seem constant.
In America, for example, we generally assume the internet will quite reliably remain up, and if for some reason it goes out, we can call someone to come and fix it or else run down Starbucks or my favorite spot, JP’s in Holland (which often times was my office anyways) to sip at a latte and make phone calls for the afternoon.
Also in America, we all have cars (for those of you who’ve never lived in America, you should understand that doing business outside a major city like New York or Chicago without a car is actually impossible), and with our cars, we have a general understanding of how long it will take us to get some place. If we’re confused, we just punch the address into Google Maps on our 3G smart phones for a quick rescue.
Moving to Morocco, I knew it wouldn’t exactly work like that. High-speed internet, although affordable and available, would not be consistent. I was not going to own a car. However, I knew they had lots of cafés and many of those cafés had great internet connection; so I figured that still seemed like a good back up. For getting around, the local public transportation system had just been overhauled with new busses, and the city was building a controversial tramline that went to most of the commercially important areas of the city.
What I found out was that Moroccan cafés are not for doing business. They’re crowded and lively with conversation and there’s always a TV or Radio blasting replays of last-night’s football match or sometimes nature shows from National Geographic Abu Dhabi. I also found out that it took me 45 minutes to go 3 miles by bus. I was spending over 2 hours each day just getting to the place where I could start doing business. On top of that, the country I was living in had a five hour time difference with the majority of my clients, which meant that I was working sometimes until 8:00 or 9:00pm just to make a few phone calls. Climbing into my rusty ’98 Sentra with the squealing breaks for an icy, Michigan 30-minute commute to work never sounded so good!
I had to adapt, and get a real plan together to reduce my daily stress level and keep my business from falling apart. So, if you’re an expat moving overseas, here are a few tips to help you avoid making some of the mistakes that I made.
Planning is Everything
Most people going to start or work for a small business overseas already know a lot about the place they’ll be going to. If you don’t, do everything you can to learn more. It’s especially helpful to contact other expats already working in your target country. Find out what works for them, but also be flexible as you may have different needs and work style.
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Get Online
It depends on your business, but for most new and growing businesses, the World Wide Web is a key part to continued growth, communications, research and more.
When my internet goes out (which it does too frequently), my business shuts down for the rest of the day. Getting online should be a top priority (right up there with “knowing your market” and “understanding the culture.” Once you get an office, find out who provides internet and has the fastest, most reliable services. This is no time to cheap out or take short cuts. A day or two of lost business in a month is not worth a few extra bucks for the best connection possible.
A lot of foreign countries, especially those in the developing world, may like to take a peek at what you do online. Additionally, there are thousands of self-proclaimed hackers whose sole purpose is to make trouble for you online; so it’s important to look for secure, trustworthy connections. Having your computer or email hacked can be an expensive, time-consuming nightmare.
As a website developer, I’ve seen two of my sites experience just minor security breaches, both of which are likely do to my using a connection with weak security. It took me literally hours to review all of the securities for those sites, including restoring backups and changing passwords just to make sure such breaches were not repeated. Thankfully, doing so on a secure connection fixed those problems.
Go Secure with a VPN
One of the best ways to guarantee your data’s security online is to use a secure Virtual Private Network (VPN). Using OpenVPN (Windows), a free software available with several VPN subscription services online, you can create what is essentially an “encrypted tunnel” of information to a server in another country. Then, you interact with the web as if your computer were based at that server.
This encrypted tunnel prevents hackers and nosy folks from looking in on your general internet business, and adds another layer of security to email and financial services, which should already be SSL encrypted. Additionally, your VPN service will manipulate your IP address to appear within your home nation, which can give you an advantage, especially if you need to access media sources like network television websites that block foreign IP addresses.
I use StrongVPN, but there are dozens of reliable VPN services, and I encourage you to do your own research.
Have a Unified Communications Plan In Place
There’s no way for you to predict everything that your’e going to need, so you’ll need to play some things by ear when you arrive. However, there’s a lot you can get in place ahead of time.
1. Start Now
Save time by putting all of your online communication tools in the same place. Task lists, contacts, emails and calendars and even docs can be unified into a single solution.
About 2 years ago, when I was visiting a friend back home, my friends home was robbed while we were out at church. I came home to find that my laptop and my portable hard drive backups were gone. I had some files backed up online, but it took me days after I purchased a new computer to get back in business.This was because I do business through about six different email addresses, depending on my client or the project. All of those emails were archived on separate servers, and I had no way to search through all of them to find the information I was looking for. The only collection of those emails was somewhere on my missing laptop, stored in and old Microsoft Outlook.
As a result of this, I highly recommend finding a cloud-based solution for communication tools, one that provides offline services as well. For me, this solution was Google, but Microsoft and others provide comparable solutions.
2. Get a phone before you go.
Wherever you arrive, it’s good to get a local land line and a mobile phone, which may be the most consistent and reliable forms of communication (better than internet anyways). However, I also recommend setting up a VOIP phone service before you go. I use Skype, but Vonage and Google Voice are also decent competitors in this business. Using a VOIP service will allow you to call and work with client, affiliates, team members and vendors back in your home country with a local number. Most of the people I call using my VOIP phone would never realize I was overseas unless I told them. Having a local phone number inspires trust, helping associates back home know that you’re doing business in their time zone and on their terms.
Although VOIP services falter when the internet becomes flaky, they can save you a lot of money on international calling fees in the long run.
3. Smart Phones/Mobile Devices/Tablets
These items aren’t necessary for a good business, but they can be great boosters for success and productivity in any business (not just one overseas). I find it invaluable to be able to manage appointments, take down contact information, and add tasks that are seamlessly synced to my Google accounts wherever I am.
These devices also serve as great tools for ad-hoc presentations. Keep a short video or PowerPoint on your phone or iPod at all times so that when you have a chance meeting with your target audience, you don’t find yourself under equipped to teach them about who you are and what you do. Videos and visual aids are especially important in cross-cultural contexts where you may find language barriers impede you from communicating clearly.
As a warning, you’ll want to have any presentations or visual aids checked by a local to be sure they contain nothing offensive in your host culture.
This work includes the photo “An overload of communications,” available under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial License, © 2012 windsordi.
