You want to grow your business, but you can’t be everywhere to do it. You don’t have an unlimited budget — time or money. And so how do you make multi-metro growth more attainable?
That’s a problem we’ve been working on for two years. Yes, we’re two years old here at Global Chamber®. My, how time flies! When we started this journey, we had a somewhat vague aspiration to grow to 500 cities around the world. In our first year, we further refined that to a specific goal of 525 metro areas by 2020 and, along the way, 110 metros by the end of 2016. We just hit 115, so we’re on track!
As with your business, the challenge to grow is always tempered by the ability to staff and fund. We don’t have unlimited resources, and you don’t, either. And, like you, I’m sure we’ve had things go wrong along the way. For us, first and foremost, was choosing the wrong website technology. That slowed us down for a year. But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and we came roaring back with a Web technology from outside the U.S. that saved us. Here we keep going and growing! You can, too!
We’ve read that 85 percent of the business opportunities in the next five years will be outside the US. — 99 percent of them will be outside our metro. Cross-metro and cross-border business isn’t for everyone. But more companies need to think about it because, increasingly, the opportunity to grow comes from somewhere else.
We’ve heard some experts say that companies that aren’t global won’t survive past the next five years. That seems pretty extreme, but why wait to see if it’s true? Change your paradigm and you’ll likely have a better chance to reach 2020 and beyond a lot wealthier and happier.
Conversely, we’ve heard that “globalization is dead” as well. Not exactly. Businesses around the world are capturing more and more opportunity every hour and every second of the day. Code and key words don’t change anything … executives will do what’s right for their business. And so, if some U.S. companies think globalization is ending, then companies from another country will take their place.
What’s pretty cool is, we’re building out a worldwide system that touches every city, town and company in the world. We’re making it easier for you to grow from here to the metro across the state line or the country border. It’s hard to know what opportunities are the best, the most reliable and the ones that pay. Global Chamber supplies a lot of that information directly and indirectly — through members, connections and collaborators — and then we connect you. Want to grow? Join us!
