New Small Business Startup Idea: Virtual Import/Export Assistant

You may speak more languages and have market segment knowledge about a certain product or service. That is a great basis for a small business startup, two scenarios spring to mind:

Virtual Export Assistant: You may know, or can find a business which has a great product, but they don’t export yet. You could offer your services for a particular country and become their Virtual Export Assistant for that country. You use your language and local knowledge skills and open up a new market for this small business.

Virtual Import Assistant: You could source - using your language and local knowledge skills - products in other countries for retailers in your country of residence. Or you could help the foreign business to import into your country.

But remember you are working with small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants, you need to keep the price low for them. To do that you can offer your services to ten or twenty businesses, each paying you a retainer of about $200 - 400/£100 - 200, this makes it affordable for them and low risk, while presenting them with sales opportunities. If they pay you a small commission on top, you are generating a nice little income for yourself.

For this kind of service it would be advisable to get a low cost telecom service for your calls abroad, sometimes you can get fixed monthly subscription pricing for unlimited calls - have a look around.

Other than that your setup cost should be low, if you have computer, ADSL, and telephone. Monthly cost including telephone could be as low as $90/£45.

You can work from home, have your work-life balance and do it on a shoe-string - these are the business ideas I like. ST.

NOTE: If you have any problems with setting something like this up, give our 24/7 live support a “click“, they can help you.

3 Responses to “New Small Business Startup Idea: Virtual Import/Export Assistant”

1. Peter Calitz
   http://noneyet
   
   Said on November 25th, 2007 at 5:52 pm

   Hi

   My name is Peter Calitz. I’m a South African ex-pat living in Spain. I currently work on a fault helpdesk for a telecomms company and ABSOLUTELY hate it with a passion. I really do want to leave this sort of work but the problem is there aren’t many jobs out there for people like myself in Spain.

   Anyway, I have a passion for wine and for my home country, South Africa. I decided about a year ago that I should put the 2 together and maybe try and start up an import business - it’s actually not that easy to get hold of foreign wines where I live. There has to be a market for SA wines here as wine connoisseurs exist all over the world. I also did a bit of research and South African wine importation has increased pretty well over the past few years. I have all the stats at home - I’m at work today, on a 12 hour Sunday shift. Did I mention how much I hate my job?

   Anyway - I decided that I had to do some homework as I knew nothing about importing wine and had no idea where to start.
   I decided that I should first ensure that I have a product to sell and then move on to phase 2 which was to ensure that I had customers who would buy my product. I sent about 70 emails to different wine farms around SA and received about 5 positive replies. I was at first quite surprised at how very few companies were interested in allowing a ‘nobody’ to distribute their wines - but by the 5th positive response, I had realised how precious these responses were.

   One of the obstacles I came up against was that I had to order wine in serious ‘bulk’. I naively thought I could order a couple of cases from a few hand picked wine farms and start my ’small business’ by selling these cases to restaurants, gaining trust and loyalty and slowly building up a customer base. I found out that I had to order at least a container as if I ordered a part-container, I had no idea when the rest would be bought buy other customers and therefore no idea when my goods would arrive.
   I then decided to begin with, I would concentrate on one specific wine farm that offered a big range of wines. As the business would grow, so I would increase the range I offered.
   So now I had my supplier with whom by this stage I had built up a good base for a trustworthy supplier by way of emails. I was very honest with them and explained my inexperience, passions and plan of action. They had even agreed to offer me a free case with a certain number purchased - a good incentive I had aimed to pass onto my prospective customers.

   I then had to find a shipping company and add on insurances and import duties, etc. With all these add ons, my wholesale unit price was increasing. My idea of offering the best price in town didn’t seem as easy as I had innitially imagined. Either way, I was not discouraged yet and decided the next step was to investigate storage options. My idea was to rent a small (100sqm) storage room with airconditioning/ climate control. I decided also that I would do the deliveries myself in between (helpdesk) working hours. I then went on the internet and investigated the tedious task of how one sets up a small business in Spain.

   Now it was time for one of my most important tasks - market research: would i actually have any customers?
   I put together a 10 question survey that I had planned to accost passers by with outside the few foreign wine boutiques as well as restaurant owners. I had also started working on a business plan for which I had downloaded a template off the internet.

   At this stage, I invited my Spanish father in law over for dinner one night and to discuss or give my some pointers on my very exciting new venture.
   Well, I’m not sure if he was speaking from good experience or just the bad personal experience he had had. He is now retired but worked as a customs officer and also owned a restaurant that he was forced to sell after it ran at a loss for 2 years. He warned me that Spanish restaurant owners would never pay up front and that I would be forever chasing them for money.
   (My idea was to ask for a 50% deposit on innitial orders until there was some form of a customer relationship set up.)
   He also told me that the wine wouldn’t survive the journey from SA as it would have gone off from the heat by the time it arrived! I knew he just added that to try and talk me out of the idea but thought I’d double check. The shipping company that had worked out a very economical deal for me advised that while they felt it wasn’t necessary, if I really wanted I could pay extra for climate control for the duration of the journey.

   The bottom line is that I went from a real high point to a real low point in my enthusiasm as my father in law talked me clean off of the idea. This together with the thought of having to find the funds for an entire container worth of stock made me decide to put the idea on hold for a few months. That was about 6 months ago.

   I have recently decided that I want to re-ignite this passion and get busy on completing my business plan. I need to get out there and do my market research. I’m still not sure about the funding though. I don’t think my bank manager will be too interested in my business plan at this stage as my wife and I have just taken on a mortgage recently.

   I know you aren’t going to have all of the answers for me but I suppose I’m looking for some advice and I guess some assurance from somebody who’ll let me know that my idea is worth taking a chance on. I wish there was a specific website I could go to that would show me step by step how to set up a small business for importing and distributing South African wine in Spain. But that would be way too easy wouldn’t it. Maybe one day if I’m successful, I could start a website that teaches you how to set up an import/distribution business.

   So if you have any advice or even just encouragement for me, I’d be more than happy with a reply of a few lines.

   Looking forward to hearing from you.

   Pete

2. Stefan Töpfer
   http://www.winweb.com
   
   Said on November 26th, 2007 at 8:49 am

   <p>Hi Pete,</p>
   <p>I think you have done very well to plan your strategy as you have. Having read your comment - I hope you wanted it as a comment - I would like to mention some ideas to you:</p>
   <p>1.) Try and work as an agent, you get the wine in commission, and you do not have to find the funding for that!<br />
   2.) What about import duty, your father in law should help you with that?<br />
   3.) Transporting should be something your SA winery should be able to advise you on - cooling or not!<br />
   4.) Make your payment terms C.O.D.-Cash on Delivery, try and avoid the credit control nightmare, if you can.<br />
   5.) Complement your business idea with a blog, you write well, so it is ideal to get some advertising going - The South African Wine Blog! Get your suppliers to advertise in it!</p>
   <p>I love you passion, I sure you can find a way to make it work for you. If you have any other ideas you want to bounce of me, I’m happy to respond.</p>
   <p>Stefan</p>

3. Justine Curtis
   http://www.ukava.co.uk
   
   Said on May 1st, 2008 at 3:11 pm

   What a great idea for a multi-lingual virtual assistant. I currently have an associate who has such skills but only uses them for translation services. This is a great idea and I’ll certainly suggest it.

Leave a Reply