Companies with Internet Sales Need to Consider Global Perspective.

Byline: Jan Norman

May 19--If your small business has a website, you're a de facto global entrepreneur.

That's the word from Robert Price, founder of the Global Entrepreneurship Institute. GEI is a nonprofit, Internet-based source of free information on starting a business. The site attracts U.S. business owners looking t o export their products and services as well as entrepreneurs from 55 foreign countries.

"When entrepreneurs first learn that they have to create a global business plan, most have no clue how to do that," Price said. "We help them through the process of researching and creating their first plan for doing business in the multinational arena." A recent study for the National Federation of Independent Business found that companies with Internet presence are twice as likely to consider their market to be global.

Here are some tips on going global:

--Think from a global perspective from the beginning.

"If you and I are sitting around the kitchen table brainstorming a business idea, we can no longer just think in terms of a small, lifestyle business; we must start from a global mindset," he said. "This idea will work in Helsinki as well as in Orange County." Web sites have become as ubiquitous as business cards. But if you manufacture your mom's chili sauce, promote it on the Internet and get orders from Finland, what will you do? The founders of eBay initially didn't anticipate that Germans would want to sell to residents of Idaho, Price said, but they should have.