Paving the way for small exporters - includes related information about government services

Nation's Business, June, 1992 by Albert G. Holzinger

For the past 35 years, go-carts manufactured by the Bird Corp., in Elkhorn, Neb., have provided Americans with a relatively safe and inexpensive means of acting out their race-car-driving dreams. About three years ago, the company's president, Fred Schweser, decided to find out whether he could help satisfy similar fantasies elsewhere in the world.

Schweser turned to Harvey Roffman, a trade specialist in the Omaha District Office of the U.S. Commerce Department, for advice on test marketing Bird's gasoline-powdered vehicles overseas. Roffman suggested advertising in Commercial News USA, a monthly magazine published by the Commerce Department to promote American products and services to about 100,000 selected foreign agents, distributors, government officials, and buyers.

The ad attracted more than 1,000 responses, which enabled Schweser to establish a dozen distributorships--from Japan to the United Kingdom. The distributors proved so effective that international customers now account for 10 to 15 percent of Bird's sales.

Export success stories like this have become increasinly common as growing numbers of small and midsized American firms have extended their sales efforts to a world market four times larger than the U.S market alone.

Obtaining useful advice and information from the federal government also has become fairly commonplace among U.S. entrepreneurs. The Bush administration has been working to integrate and streamline the sprawling trade-promotion bureaucracy to make its programs more accessible and responsive to American firms' needs.

Current statistics support the substantial economic impact of these trends. Overall foreign sales of U.S. products and services increased 7.2 percent in 1991, to a record $421.9 billion, according to the Commerce Department. Sales of manufactured products rose last year by an even more robust 9.2 percent.

In fact, the U.S. passed Germany last year as the world's leading exporter of goods, according to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the international organization that monitors world trade.

Stepped-up activities by the Bush administration to support American traders date from May 1990, when the president formed the Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee. Chaired by the secretary of commerce, the panel is composed of representatives of more than a dozen federal entities involved in export promotion.

A key initial goal of the committee was establishment of a center for "how-to" and foreign-market information for business people who seldom or never export. This goal has been achieved through creation of the Trade Information Center.

Callers to the center can obtain export counseling, international, market research, trade contacts or leads, sources of export financing, and advice on export documentation and licensing requirements.

Callers also can get details of such trade-related activities as upcoming export conferences, trade missions, and trade fairs in the United States and abroad.

Some of that information is drawn from the new National Trade Data Bank, which is updated monthly. It includes more than 100,000 documents filed by U.S. government employees worldwide. The information is also available by subscription and in many public libraries.

(For more information on the Trade Information Center and related government programs for exporters, see the box below).

Francine Lamoriello, a senior manager in the Washington, D.C., office of KPMG Peat Marwick, a leading international consulting firm, says: "The general export-promotion services that the Commerce Department now offers are very good. They can be very helpful to companies."

Lamoriello adds, however, that the quantity and quality of information provided by the Trade Information Center can vary widely by country and industry.

Information at the National Trade Data Bank has "good stuff in it" but is not easy to sort through, Lamoriello says. "There is a lot more information in that database than people can figure out how to get at--Commerce employees and ourselves included."

A second major goal of the Bush administrations' Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee has been to extol the importance of trade to American entrepreneurs who have never done business abroad. To that end, the Commerce Department and other government agencies involved in trade presented a daylong road show in 30 cities.

About 7,000 business attendees paid $95 each to hear successful exporter and receive advice from top government officials, frequently including then-Secretary of Commerce Robert A. Mosbacher. One-on-one couseling also was available to participants during the events, which were held in the 12 months ending last November.

Each program was designed to show U.S. companies how their local Commerce Department office and varius government programs work together and when and how to use them, says Cydney Louth, a Commerce Department spokeswoman. The substantial interest in the program is likely to lead to future seminars, she suggests.