Joining Trade Organizations

Video Transcript

"This Nikolai Pankratz with American Resource Network for Expert Village. As mentioned before, I've been involved in many, many, many different transactions. Multi-million transactions, full transactions. I ship coffee, I ship clothes, I ship all kinds of stuff. One of the things I was involved in with banking in Eastern Europe, where I was one of the first to ship product in computers and all kinds of equipment to get banking systems in Russia to the next level. Well let me start. Assuming you have set up your office, and you use the latest technology, whatever is available to you. The next thing I would recommend highly, that you join your local trade organizations. Like for example, in the state of Tennessee, that I did World Trade Council for Middle Tennessee. The reason that is important, because you're going to be able to network with a lot of experienced people, experts, that have been doing trade in different countries. You will be able to learn from them. You will be able to know what to do, what not to do. Ask questions. Get leads, but also there is a very important part of it. Most of the time, people that attend those trade organizations are freight forwarders. You will be working with freight forwarders, because they will be doing all the documentation for you: the bill of leading, the certificates, all kinds of insurance. They will save you an enormous amount of time. Not only that, they will plan out the entire movement of containers from port to port, etcetera etcetera for a fee. Be sure that you talk to many of them, because price can differ quite immense. Now another reason why you should join them, most of the time bankers participate in them. Guess what? Banks have a lot to benefit from, because they issue letters of credit on your behalf. They get a fee for that. That transfer letters of credit and then so on and so forth, and you establish good relationships with banks."