Global Trade Base Trends
February 16, 2009 - Domestic Business Continues to Drop - Patrick Donnell, President.
- We cannot pick up a paper or turn on the news without hearing about another company downsizing hundreds if not thousands of people. My staff continues to hear that sales of domestically produced food and HBA items are dropping. If a company's sales are flat compared to last year then they are doing well right now. What a sad state of affairs.
- The Global Trade Base staff works diligently to keep up with all the business trends. It is a statistic bordering on an order of magnitude. CNN Money announced on January 30, 2009 that there were 277,229 people who lost their jobs during that month. There has been several since then. Another report listed the 300 companies targeted to go out of business in 2009. Some of the companies have been American icons and household names.
- Our country's efforts to revitalize the economy involve accumulating almost a trillion in debt that will take generations to repay. Sadly enough, there is little faith in the effort and most expect it to fail since almost none of it is directed at the private sector and strengthening the free market economy. In fact, it is borderline socialist in nature here in the world's strongest democracy.
- Please understand that I am not a politician nor have any desire to undertake that path. Simply put, I am a businessman. I seek to do business, create jobs and put profit back into the U.S. economy. In this day and age it is needed more than ever.
- Most of our growing client base is from small to medium size companies who are penetrating the international marketplace. The common theme among them all is that they know there is no immunity from the domestic economic direction. Small to medium size companies will fall faster than the large institutional corporations. Their only saving grace is that they can make decisions faster and move into better markets with less time outmaneuvering the larger companies. Nature has proven that it is not the large that eat the small but rather the fast that eat the slow.
- There is no need to agitate the emotional feelings about the downturn in the U.S. economy. The media does well enough at that. However, the best fishing is found where the average fisherman does not go. In this case the largely unfished deep water is in the arena of international trade. During the worst economy in decades, the export market GREW by $252 Billion. This makes it difficult to not make a sale somewhere. There is no guarantee on sales overseas or domestically. But the growth is not domestic. It is international. The only decision that needs to be put in place is whether to go international or to weather the domestic economic storm.
- My advice is this. Focus on penetrating international markets while continuing to maintain domestic business. Diversify your market portfolio. Do everything in your power to tap into the hundreds of billions in growth. Even the smallest international sale exceeds multimillion dollar revenue streams in the right markets. This is a simple decision. You will not go international if you do not take action to do so. Doing the same things will only reinforce what is not working in our economy and in your domestic sales.