How a ‘borderless business’ approach helps businesses expand globally

Expanding your business to a global audience has never been easier, but it can be overwhelming to figure out where to begin. Chris Dahl, director of Sales and Growth at Pin Payments shares his tips for a ‘borderless’ business approach.

The way business is conducted has radically transformed these past two years, with the pandemic reshaping operations and opportunities across the globe. With the world quickly embracing the shift to digital, business leaders have started to adopt a globalised approach to business, which is not reliant on borders or physical expansion plans.

This period of immense change has given rise to a new concept of global expansion called ‘borderless business’ which sees teams hired remotely and business leads pursued digitally, regardless of location.

Four tips for taking your business global

With 45 per cent of global businesses currently planning to expand overseas, a borderless approach presents many advantages. But where do businesses start?

Here are a few tips to help you embrace borderless business.

1. Be driven by your customers

Expansion plans are frequently driven by customer or client demands to markets you may not have considered before. If you are getting demand to service new markets, lean on your customers’ expertise to adapt your service accordingly. Your customers are the ideal pilot customer, as they are vested to ensure your service is successful.

With business interactions now being predominantly conducted online, digital marketing can assist you to promote your services in countries you’re not yet located. Alternatively, offering freemium products or models to new market areas can assist you to test out the demand in certain geographical locations.

Taking a borderless approach to business expansion means examining new markets and audiences from a digital perspective, in order to build a following in a new region. While sometimes this happens organically, you may also need to work on building a borderless/global online presence to raise your brand awareness for potential customers.

expanding to global markets is good for business

2. Create your expansion strategy first

Before making any digital moves in an overseas market, it’s important that you first create a strategy which addresses your goals, the locations you’re hoping to target, your audiences and your estimated budget.

Be sure to set realistic goals by choosing a few target locations to begin with. While it will really depend on your budget, limiting your efforts to one or two concentrated regions to begin with, will allow you to test out your expansion strategy before going too broad.

Similarly, make sure you’ve mapped out the brand personas for your target customers, according to region, as they may vary significantly depending on location and cultural differences.

3. Utilise digital technology

As your digital strategy will be the driver for a borderless business expansion, audit your tools and business partners to see if they can help your global efforts. Services you might take for granted in Australia, such as your bank, might not be suitable for your global business.

Where you can, leverage your existing infrastructure to reduce your expansion cost. Some popular business platforms have in-built localisation as part of their offering to allow different currencies or tax localisation.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help, especially from other businesses who have recently expanded internationally. Associations and industry groups are also a valuable source of information.

4. Consider hiring remote team members

Borderless business is about more than just selling, it also involves internal HR policies. Many digital-first businesses now hire talent from anywhere in the world. This flexibility allows businesses to find the best possible candidate regardless of their culture, gender or background.

Hiring borderless teams brings diversity, rich cultural differences and innovation and creativity to businesses. Furthermore, if you’re considering expanding globally, having team members in different time zones can be beneficial from a customer support and local knowledge perspective.

While it may seem daunting, adopting a borderless digital business approach to expansion removes unnecessary burdens and costs associated with physically setting up in a new region. It allows you to test different approaches in a more cost effective and timely manner, and ultimately could help you expand to entirely new regions digitally.

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