Communication In A Global Market

Purpose

The purpose of our presentation is to improve our company’s lines of communication with our International subsidiaries and the countries we work in, promoting our companies growth and values.

Summary

Smiley Sailor International has benefited from outstanding growth in our domestic markets since being established in 1994. Since becoming an international company in 2003, the company’s growth has slowed in a time that it should be thriving. The primary reasons for the company’s inability to succeed in these new markets can be attributed to cultural differences, language barriers, and time barriers that have stunted our international productivity. The way to solve these problems is through the utilization of cross-cultural consultants for the creation of company cultural synergy. These consultants will help to create awareness in home and host cultures, understand the difference between home and host cultures, and help the company function in an appropriate way.

Overview

Background

When Smiley Sailor International was founded in 1994, during the expanding age of technology, no one could have anticipated the companies amazing growth. Originally, set up to do business in the US, now the company has set up operations in 10 Countries worldwide and is looking to expand on its amazing name brand to five additional countries in the next decade. Offering a wealth of information to current and retired sailors alike, the Smiley Sailor name brand, like the people that it serves, has no boundary that can contain it.

In the 1990’s, Smiley Sailor was able to grow its revenues by an average of 50% annually by marketing to its US market. The company accomplished its great US growth with an incredible work ethic from its founders, tremendous organization, and a state of the art way of communicating that was able to connect all areas of the business including the sales, finance, marketing, and technology departments. With Sailors all over the world in demand of our services, it only made sense to expand our business to reach sailors all over the world.

The Company became international in 1999 with an aggressive plan to expand its service and capture the amazing growth that it experienced in the US. The aggressive plan experienced many road blocks that were attributed to doing business in new cultures.

The company maintained solid revenue growth of between 10% and 15% domestically, but as a whole saw revenues grow very little out of the area that we had expected the most growth out of, the international market. We believe that the reason for such poor results have been a companywide have been widely due to the way that the company communicates with the International subsidiaries and not adapting its core values to the countries it now serves.

Cultural differences have made our brand name almost anonymous to our customer base and in some cases insulted the very people we are doing business with and the people that are doing the business for us. Not being able to adapt to the different languages has slowed our efforts and has slowed operations. International time barriers have, in some cases, has crippled our operations. The lack of productivity has been the result of the company’s inability to communicate with our International Subsidiaries.

Cultural Differences

The lack of our company adapting to the cultures it does business in has hurt us with our customer base and our employees. When the company started the aggressive growth campaign, it did not consider the cultures differences we were going to encounter. Because we forced our company culture onto these drastically different cultures, they have not welcomed our companies methods, thus poor sales has been the result. Two examples can illustrate this issue in our Sweden and Hong Kong subsidiaries.

Our advertising revenues in Hong Kong have been lacking since day one. To fix this issue, we sent out our most aggressive sales executive, Vito Corleone, a man that seemingly can make offers that no one can refuse to Hong Kong in 2001. Vito used the same vigor and straightforward language that made him our top producer in the 1990’s, working endlessly to get our business name out in a growing free market. Vito ran into one barrier, people were refusing his offers.

This issue has not plagued Hong Kong alone, but is a good illustration of what the company has been encountering. In this example, the feedback that we have received from our networking sources is that Vito is too aggressive and is too straightforward in his communication. The Chinese culture finds this approach to be very insulting thus not willing to give Vito their business.

In our subsidiary in Sweden, we have been consistently behind on meeting important deadlines. To address this issue we sent Rocky Balboa, our most motivated, task oriented executive to get this operation in shape. Rocky demanded the same work ethic of his employees that he demanded of himself, even trying to implement a daily group 4AM jog to get the general energy levels up. The group did not participate.

Sweden does not have the same ideals of work as the US. The workweek in Sweden is only 37.5 weeks and the country allows its citizens extended time away from the job. Rocky’s plan to get the people in line did not work. He had not been accustomed to people that valued personal time over work. This subsidiary would never be able to meet the time schedules of the home office.

Language Barriers

Currently we are doing business in countries that speak 7 to 8 different languages. When we first went into these countries, we sent some of our top executives and coupled them with area interpreters that were masters in the languages from their home countries but not masters in the language of our corporation. We are finding that not having employees that speak the native language a problem.

In our Indian subsidiary, we sent Tom Jones to be our Chief Operating Officer. Tom is a master of financial reporting and well known for his ability to get to his point across using language and abbreviations known to company personnel. Through his interpreter, he would ask his co-workers for the D.A.I.T, the Daily Average Index Table, which is our company’s way of knowing an up to date return on our investments. Through the interpreter, Tom’s co-workers thought that he was asking for the day in which they would kindly give to Tom. Tom thought that he would have it on that day and would