0:05 Think of globalizing your business as planting a new garden.

0:10 The first phase is planting a seed.

0:13 The second stage is when the seed sprouts and you see some shoots of green

0:18 What are you going to do to fertilize it, water it,

0:20 irrigate it, protect it from excess sun and wind? In other words, in business speak, not

0:25 put too many onerous demands of the sort that you would put on your mature operations, while

0:30 simultaneously disciplining it in a different way to make sure that it has a chance to strengthen

0:35 its bond with the soil in which it’s planted and become a robust plant.

0:38 You want to have a sense for how long you’re

0:43 going to have a protective umbrella over this effort that you’ve just launched in presumably

0:49 a very unfamiliar geography. This is very important because you should expect that it’s

0:55 going to take a little bit of time before your efforts begin to bear fruit. Don’t

1:01 be seduced, if you will, by an immediate success. For instance, if you had a readymade contract

1:08 or you were following your customers from one location to another, which is a very common

1:12 thing, you might get some immediate payables coming back and you might feel that your business

1:16 has been validated. That’s probably not likely to be the case because at some point you will

1:21 need to put some investments in there at local to build up the system in that geography in

1:26 order for it to make it worth your time ultimately. That will mean that there will be some time

1:32 before you get a net return on the capital that you’re investing in that place.

1:36 Part of nurturing a seedling is understanding what are the support systems around the seedling

1:42 such as sheltering them from the immediate return on capital measures for a little bit

1:45 of time that are necessary.

1:49 What’s tricky about it is that you don’t want to give carte blanche to your team that’s

1:53 out in a remote geography. Just say that you don’t even need to worry

1:56 about returning capital. You still need metrics and discipline to make sure that you’re making

2:01  progress. It’s just that the same financial metrics might not be judiciously applied in

2:07 the first two or three or four years.

2:09 Decide what you’re comfortable with will at least give you some aggregate benchmarks against

2:14 which you can measure progress. think about what are the data that you’re

2:17 going to need to measure progress. It won’t be very many data items. Then go out and generate

2:21 your own data, collect your own data. Of course there’s no harm in validating it

2:25 with other data providers so that you then determine which of the data providers are

2:29 likely to be more useful to the business in the long run, but just don’t count on it

2:34 being the easiest part. I think part of nurturing is also understanding how to begin to extract

2:39 relevant bits and pieces of information from the ambience that you can then use to run,

2:45 if you will, a scientific nurturing program.

2:48 Making sure that there is a communication path between headquarters and subsidiary to

2:53 make sure that both you’re learning adequately from what’s going on in the new geography

2:59 and also holding your team members proverbial feet to the fire, but not suffocating them

3:05 by saying that you have to meet this metric immediately. That’s a very important part

3:09 of nurturing.