Barfield Management is now being read by entrepreneurs in 70 different countries around the world as of April 30th, 2009. We would like to express our gratitude to all of our readers who helped to make this possible. We appreciate your continued patronage. To all of you, “Thank You.”

As a bonus feature to our readers, if there is a topic or subject for which you have an interest in (as it pertains to entrepreneurship) please submit your suggestion on our contact page. We may take your suggestion and publish a post on it if it fits with our format. If we do, full credit (Name, Company, & Website) will be given at the end of the post to the entrepreneur who made the suggestion.

Lastly, if any entrepreneurs that read The Barfield Management Blog and have to translate the site, please contact us if the pages are not translating properly. Feel free to do so in your native language. We can do the translation without problems.

Once again, thank you for helping The Barfield Management Blog acquire the level of succes it has achieved. Remember, Life Is Good…Entrepreneurs Make It Better!

Tags: entrepreneur, foreign country, Memos, thank you

Today I am proud to announce the launch of a few new services both directly through Barfield Management, LLC and indirectly through Barfield Associates, LLC. We are very excited about them and we feel that we can truly help many more entrepreneurs through these offerings.

Barfield Management has been helping entrepreneurs worldwide with education and information through the medium of this website. We are now taking it to another level. We are offering personal coaching. If you have read this blog for very long, you are aware that we believe in the utilization of teams. We are officially offering the ability for you to add us to your professional team. Through Barfield Management coaching you receive direct access to an entrepreneur that has extensive experience in coaching and helping other entrepreneurs. In addition, you also receive the full benefits of the collective knowledge and experience of the extended professional team that Barfield Management utilizes. You subscribe to a coach but gain an entire network of resources. We can help whether you are a start-up and feel isolated and alone, a new company seeking growth assistance, or a mature company that could use innovation assistance to generate new products, ideas, and services. To find out more, contact us with your inquiry.

Barfield Associates, LLC is operated by a retired United States Department of Defense Contracting Officer. Together with other team members,  trained by the United States Department of Defense, they offer you the benefits of a governement or corporate level purchaing team without the expense. The international procurement team at Barfield Associates has extensive contingency contracting experience and they act in a capacity as your remote purchasing department. Their primary area of operation is within, but not limited to, Southeast Asia. Barfield Associates has major contacts in Korea, Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Thailand. On top of all of that, they offer you a Zero Up Front cost for normal procurement tasks. You receive all of the benefits without any of the expense.

Because of the international reach of Barfield Associates, they also offer international data collection and consulting. Searching to find information on the Internet is fast and convenient. But it does not compare to having someone physically collecting information for you in the location that you are inquiring about. Barfield Associates can facilitate your ability to have a physical presence in another country without having to leave the comfort of your own city. Entities big and small benefit from this service. Whether you are seeking a new manufacturing or distribution center abroad or you simply need to know the popular fabrics being utilized in a foreign marketplace, Barfield Associates can put a person “on the ground” for you.

For more information about any of the services that Barfield Associates offers, please utilize our contact page to submit your inquiries.

In this day and age, the world is shrinking and countries are becoming closer through the instant communication of the Internet. As the world shrinks, many entrepreneurs make new contacts but still feel alone in their endeavors. Do not let this happen to you. You do not have to be alone. Entrepreneurs are more successful when they utilize teams. Add Barfield Management to your professional team and you won’t be alone.

**Note of Mention: In case you did not read the memo posted on March 17th, 2009, Barfield Management created a website for all entrepreneurs to list their products and services for free. The site is called BIEN Online. Please visit the site (http://bienonline.info), list a few things and send me feedback on your experience.

Tags: barfield associates, coaching, consulting, procurement, sourcing

Guest post by Cristian Dorobantescu.

With the current financial turmoil and investors pulling up quick on the US stock markets some eyes are turning towards investments abroad. The simple reason is that economies that are not very connected to the US economy or are just in a plain growing period, feel the US crisis in a somehow filtered way.

Of course, if we are talking about Europe, well, Europe is clearly connected to the US market. And we have a saying here, if US sneezes, Europe will cough. Still, Europe and mainly Eastern Europe is not affected in such a radical way as US, partially because the European Union took drastic measures to limit the impact. If you add to this a partially similar Western culture, then investing in Europe might not be a very bad decision.

Now, before you take your backpack and start to hike in Europe looking for business or investments opportunities hold your horses until you learn something about doing business over here. That’s why I’ve decided to skip the part with why it would be a good idea to invest in Europe (or even better in Eastern Europe) and just talk about the differences, or at least a few of them.

To start, while European Union puts together most of the European Countries, just like US does on the American Continent, each country in the EU behaves differently.

• Each country speaks a different language. While English is the de facto business language for the consumer markets you should localize whatever you are selling, and let me tell you, we are talking about at least 6 major languages.
• European Union has put in place a common legislation, but each country has it’s own set of rules. Moreover, the European Legislation tends to be a little more restrictive and sometimes there are more regulations to follow.
• Consumer behavior is very different from country to country. Depending on what country are you putting your foot in, demand, pricing and overall acceptance of a product might be totally different. For example, Germany could be a good choice for expensive products. Greece works better with cheaper products.
• European Union provides several sorts of funding to sustain parts of the economy. There are several programs to sustain small businesses and even programs in which a certain EU country is supposed to receive funds from another country.
• As an opposite current, Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors are not so widely spread. Sometimes Europe can be less entrepreneurial.

On a more generic note there are other things to take into consideration as well.

• Not every US product or service is suitable for selling in Europe. For some, just the shipping cost to Europe ads to the product price more than the market could accept. For others, the products simply don’t fit with the demand (like for example it would be quite impossible to sell big SUV in Europe because the streets, roads and distances are much smaller)
• Lots of cultural differences. While Europe belongs to the Western culture, things over here can be completely different. For example, people pay a lot more deal of attention on heritage, history and nationality.

There are a lot more differences to talk about, and obviously more than I could cover on this blog post. So what should you do next? My experience in blogging about local economies taught me the following: you should get a glimpse on doing business in Europe from statistics. http://www.doingbusiness.org/ does an excellent job on showing valuable statistics on the business everywhere. Then you should get a glimpse of the real life business environment from business blogs. After that, take your backpack and see for yourself.

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Cristian Dorobantescu is a strategic expert with experience in small business development and entrepreneurship, delivering successful out-of-the-box initiatives. His special interest in business development processes helps him establish a strong and personal relation with companies willing to create a successful business model in Europe. The efficient entrepreneurial speech and the result oriented approach gives him the ability to surpass the European cultural differences.

He previously worked on distribution channel development, sales and marketing, company branding and client relations for International companies.

He enjoys writing the Small Business Entrepreneur blog (www.energybyte.com) and the Entrepreneur interviews blog. (www.entrepreneurship-interviews.com)

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Tags: business, cristian dorobantescu, europe, european union