Doing Business in (Country's Name Here)

Without really knowing what to do or how to do it, many in the U.S. tradeshow industry are hearing the siren song of foreign markets. They hear and believe that tomorrow's success stories will take place in China or India or Latin America and — somehow, some way — they hope there might be an opportunity for them as well.

I'm not necessarily talking about the major tradeshow organizers like IDG World Expo, CMP or Reed Exhibitions. They had global operations years before anybody else thought there was a reason to have one. Today it's the more average reader of Tradeshow Week who is getting interested. It's the consumer show organizer who wonders if he can't export his killer boat show, the exhibitor who worries that she is missing out on a market for her products, the lead-retrieval supplier who can't believe anybody in Asia or Latin America can offer something as sophisticated as he can.

And why shouldn't they be thinking this way? I don't know for certain, but I imagine a number of TSW readers have also read Thomas L. Friedman's "The World Is Flat" and have bought into his theory that business is no longer limited by geography, national borders or rudimentary communication systems.

TSW subscribers read elsewhere about the expanding consumer markets. They wonder why, if Ikea can find customers in the suburbs of Moscow or Shanghai, they can't do the same.

Of course, it isn't all that easy. Despite the fact you can now fix your jammed e-mail inbox by chatting with somebody in India, there are still important differences between doing business in Chicago or Los Angeles and Beijing, Mumbai — or Mexico City. The different obstacles to making a profit in a foreign country are not necessarily insurmountable, but they do exist.

That is what two dozen or so American tradeshow professionals learned during the recent TSW Doing Business in Mexico conference in Mexico City. The participants spent a few days learning the nuts and bolts of working in that country's tradeshow industry, visiting venues and simply getting a taste for the way business is done there.

Many who had previously been unfamiliar were surprised, both positively and negatively, by what they saw.

Some did not anticipate the high quality of the venues they visited. They had believed too long the stereotypes that surround Mexico and were surprised to discover the sophistication of its business community. They were able to see with their own eyes the vibrant consumer economy that can only get larger in a country where 31.5 percent of its 103.5 million people are under the age of 15. They enjoyed hearing the words "no labor unions."

But they also learned that, while it is not necessarily more onerous than that in the United States, there is a system of collecting taxes that requires help figuring out. They learned they would need good advice on constructing workable corporate structures for their businesses that have a much different rationale than those they are accustomed to in the United States. While there is no magic involved, there are hoops that must be jumped through if exhibitors are going to move freight from one country to the next.

They also learned that there is a different sense of time in Mexico. While a simple business negotiation can often be handled with a 30-second phone conversation or a two-sentence e-mail in the United States, sometimes a long leisurely lunch that stretches into late afternoon is required in Mexico. Business meetings might rarely be scheduled before 10:30 a.m., but the workday can stretch well into the late evening.

Not necessarily better or worse than the American status quo, just different.

Now multiply the dozens of little differences between doing business in the United States and Mexico by the number of emerging markets elsewhere in Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. Certainly the decision about whether to enter a market somewhere other than the United States is quite different from the one concerning whether a show that works well at McCormick Place would also be profitable at the Orange County Convention Center. But it's a decision that some soon may have little choice but to make.

As the business world shrinks and gets "flat," it also gets more crowded and competitive. There may be only so many ways to expand a tradeshow franchise if you limit yourself to the American marketplace.

More than 500 years ago, the king and queen of Spain sent Christopher Columbus off to find a cheaper, more efficient way to get tea to Europe — obviously a business trip gone hopelessly awry. Increasingly, the demand for more profits, more markets, more of everything will mean that — like it or not — tradeshow professionals will have to look elsewhere to grow their businesses too.