Insight piece
Key insights
International and exporting
As this report highlights, family businesses are exporters and expand overseas where there’s a key business opportunity; this is exemplified by new family generation businesses such as Absolute Collagen, Saint and Sofia and Strathberry and in more established businesses such as W&R Barnett. Strathberry’s biggest market is North America. “While the US tariffs presented challenges last year, we didn’t pivot away; we pushed forward,” says Leeanne. “We accelerated our plan to open a US warehouse, which will be operational from this Spring. Even with dampened consumer sentiment in the US, we are bucking the trend. The Middle East remains incredibly strong. Our biggest challenge isn’t a lack of opportunity; it’s focus. We have a lot of virgin territory, like the EU, which we haven’t strategically tackled yet. We have to ensure we don’t stretch ourselves too thin or get distracted. Because we are a direct-to-consumer business built on Kickstarter, our outlook has been global from day one. The UK has always been a smaller percentage of our business, so we aren’t frightened by global challenges. We are operationally agile; when new regulations arise, we assess, adapt and move forward.” William Barnett at W&R Barnett has set rules when it comes to overseas expansion: “We have a global trading business based in London, operating across most of Western Europe, Asia, and Central America. However, in the grand scheme of things, we are primarily focused on the UK and Ireland markets. In our history, we have been reluctant to enter a new business and a new geography at the same time; you can call that risk-averse, but we don’t tend to do it. Going abroad is like playing an away football match; you shouldn’t be surprised that you have to be really, really good to win. If you have a strong local team who knows the market, you can do well. But when it goes wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong. Once you lose that local insight, it is very hard to find the right people to fix it. In our business, two or three percent is the difference between being a competitive business and bankruptcy.” “While the theory of the business – listening to customers and giving them what they want – shouldn’t be difficult, it is much harder to execute abroad. To go broader in scale, we would need a stable management team that truly knows what they are doing.”
“We are operationally agile; when new regulations arise, we assess, adapt and move forward.”
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