What to Remember When Taking Your Business Overseas

The past few years have posed challenging times for many businesses across multiple sectors. After the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, many businesses needed to adapt rapidly to hybrid and remote forms of work to comply with lockdowns and restrictions on movements. The worst effects of the pandemic seem to have subsided, and most businesses are now operating as normal. However, high inflation rates and pressures on consumer spending are posing new challenges.

Whilst the outlook is becoming more positive for business, there is a need to cultivate growth to ensure long-term profitability and survival. One key way to achieve growth is to take your business overseas and enter new foreign markets.

If your business is ready for this, then it is important to consider some key points so that it is fully prepared for the transition.

In this article, three important factors to consider when taking your business overseas will be considered.

Consider Payroll Solutions

A growing business that has new overseas operations will need to consider streamlining its payroll solutions. With premises in its native country and new sites abroad, the payroll system needs to work effectively and efficiently across territories.

It can be inefficient to use different systems for different countries as the process of payroll can become disjointed and error-prone. It is far better to consider a truly global payroll system that is managed by a specialist external provider with expertise in this field. Put simply, outsourcing the payroll function can help to simplify your business processes when moving into overseas territories.

Using a specialist provider of these services will also ensure that you remain compliant with payroll best practice and any country-specific legislation in this field.

Adapt Your Website

It is important to recognize that taking your country overseas and cultivating business in new countries is more than just setting up new premises and managing the business in a new territory. Consideration should also be given to the company website, especially if it will be used to sell products in a range of foreign countries.

Customers who shop online prefer to do so in their own currency. This makes it easy for them to understand if they are getting a good deal and a site that provides native currency conversion will be more likely to generate improved sales. Your company website should have a currency conversion function to ensure that this is possible.

In addition, the site should also be set up to automatically detect the visitor’s host country and translate into their native language.

Hire Multi-Lingual Staff

Finally, it is incredibly important to have multi-lingual staff in key positions in your organization (sales, support, HR, etc.) when making the transition to overseas trading. Having such staff gives your company several key benefits.

Furthermore, in the first year of operating abroad there will be a wide range of actions that need to be taken to set up and secure your overseas operations, so it is vital that you have access to staff that can communicate effectively in the native language (for example, C2 level in terms of the English language).

Having multi-lingual staff will also boost the credibility of your organization overseas and will help you to foster new working relationships with a range of external clients and stakeholders.