It doesn’t matter what your company does. An international team is a game changer

More and more each year, there is nothing more powerful and strategic than an international understanding and presence in an increasingly global world.

Whether your company has been operating for years or you’ve just founded a startup, a global mindset is now something that needs to be considered from the start. The internet essentially makes almost any company a global company. Companies are much more likely to serve markets in other locations and from other cultures than in the past.

Making a conscious effort to focus on an international perspective towards all areas of business will help make growth and marketing for expansion much easier from the start. And, undoubtedly, your best tool for successful global presence is your team.

It’s easy for companies to fall into the routine of hiring from the same cultures, areas, and even schools. This unintentionally stifles growth in a few different ways.

It’s hard to replicate cultural experience

The best ways to handle sales, marketing, and business practices with other countries and cultures usually aren’t a Google search away. It’s incredibly difficult to connect with other cultures enough to build good customer relationships without having someone on your team with the proper experience to guide you.

At Hibox, we have employees from the US, Germany, France, Argentina, Brazil, the UK, Sweden, and Australia. Connecting with international companies for us comes naturally. No matter where we’re calling and connecting with new customers, we can have a personal connection and cultural understanding.

You can’t underestimate how important this is. Authenticity goes beyond screens. A personal, cultural touch can be the difference between wildfire growth and acceptance internationally and a struggle to overcome a growth plateau.

Even in our email marketing and content creation, it’s noticeable when we have someone on our side to tweak it to be just right across markets.

Diversity is the biggest drive of innovation

Knowing how to communicate and connect personally across the globe is not the only game-changing perk of hiring internationally. You expand your access to different perspectives that could help create new ideas and solutions you wouldn’t with a more homogeneous team.

The goal for many companies is innovation but many don’t realize that homogenous thinking is what creates stagnant growth. Having a team that has worked in different cultures and markets entirely is bringing a wealth of ideas together. The world’s most innovative companies are made up of international teams, no matter how big. It’s a huge strategic advantage, even if your company competes only on a national or local level.

You don’t need to have international offices or sponsor visas to be an international company anymore

One of the barriers to bringing together an international team or having a hand in international markets is the actual logistical process. But most of them are now obsolete. There are so many tools that can help you work with people and for people across the globe without spending and risking any more.

At Hibox, even though we’re an international team in office, we also have an international team around the world that we can expand easily. Other innovative companies like Buffer benefit from over 80 employees working together from 6 continents and 50 cities. Here are a few tools that you would start using for close to nothing to bring international experience and perspectives to your company:

• Hibox: manage remote work with integrated chat, tasks, and video calling.
• Upwork: find freelance work across the world for short-term projects.This is cool for new product launches and moving into new markets. You can have a few freelancers help with global experience. Having a local touch with keep you leagues ahead of competitors.
• Angel.co: we find international students, interns, and employees looking to work with our growing company here. We’ve come to amass a team from many nations, meeting them all here!
• Fiverr: Have a native language speaker translate an email, blog post, or portion of your site to make getting in touch with your new markets personal and effective.

Once you go international, the possibilities for growth are endless. This strategic advantage is not just for large companies anymore. It can even be argued that international perspectives are becoming less of a choice for success and more of a requirement. Start thinking bigger now.

Originally published at www.hibox.co on October 27, 2017.