There’s Always a Business Opportunity in Localisation

Although his approach to it all is perhaps an overly-politicised one, the likes of Donald Trump could really be onto something with his proclamation that his own nation and its citizens should come first. Looking beyond the politics, there is a great lesson in business and business opportunities to be learned here.

I’m not suggesting that anti-globalisation is something which I agree with — in fact I’m an advocate for globalisation, otherwise where would I get my gluten-free granola? All I’m suggesting is that globalisation has reached a point where it needs to be consolidated on and deployed a bit more “locally” with regards to all which it brings. In other words, globalisation shouldn’t mean that one country, community or corporation should benefit and enrich itself at the expense of all the communities it “does business with”. It should be a much more even trade-off in that communities benefit from being able to trade with businesses from all over the world.

Therein lies opportunity in business which is always available because as much as consumers in your community have a far-reaching preference for products and services which are originally sourced from all over the world, if you take it upon yourself to be the provider of those products and services having sourced them from far and wide, you’ll be the local go-to source.

I’m going to give you a simple example of how I always manage to expand my operations through localisation and up to so far it has always worked out positively because I target the big numbers. I sometimes even target small numbers, but all of it adds up either way.

So I noticed that a lot of my neighbours and all the people in my community within a full 15 kilometre radius each used different Internet Service Providers (ISP), but these different ISPs broadly came down to a maximum of five to six different companies. I took it all the way and used an online market research platform to create and conduct my own survey, in which I asked people if they’re satisfied with the internet service they each get from their various service providers.

Mixed reactions all around, but one thing that stood out was the fact that everybody felt that they could be getting the service cheaper but didn’t quite know how. That’s where yours truly spotted a business opportunity in localisation and so I toyed with the idea of amalgamating all these internet services and becoming the local ISP myself.

It was very easy — I registered as a reseller and then managed to convince the ISP whose services I was to resell to upgrade the telecoms infrastructure in my neighbourhood, bringing fibre right to my home to deliver the highest internet speed capacity available at the time. I then created a Wi-Fi hotspot and littered boosters throughout the neighbourhood so that everybody within the 15 km radius could have reliable access to the internet. They now all pay me half of what they each paid to their various ISPs and dare I say, it’s a lot of money!