Profit magazine recently published their Profit 200 which is a list of the fastest growing companies in Canada. I find lists like this and the Hot 50, very interesting for various reasons, including:
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- Canadian: The companies are from “Our Home and Native Land”
- Comparison: They provide you with the opportunity to compare your company to others in your industry. You can benchmark yourself against peers in your industry for example.
- Challenge: You can set of goal of making one of these lists
- Publicity: If you make it on the list you’ll get some PR which you can leverage
- Opportunity: They may need your goods and services so these companies are potential customers
- Education: You can learn what they are doing to be successful
Profit outlines the five winning strategies for these high growth companies here. Number one on the list is exporting. PROFIT 200 companies grew their exports more than twice as fast as their domestic revenue from 2005 to 2010. So, is exporting the key to growth? For these companies clearly it has been.
A couple of observations that make this very interesting to me:
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- According to BDC’s 2010 Canadian Entrepreneurship Study very few companies are exporting. Close to 70% of Canadian business owners are not exporting. If they want to grow than exporting could help them do so. (see graph below)
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- Silicon Halton members can leverage the Silcon Halton community to build their export business. You can start by checking out the Meetup #14 Report: Hi-Tech Entry in to the US Market.
If members of the Silicon Halton community see exporting as a key strategy for the growth of their companies let’s work together to come up with something to help them. So here’s what we’re doing about it:
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- We’ve started a private discussion about this post in our members only Linkedin group to explore this topic further.
- You can leave a comment below sharing your thoughts and ideas on this topic.
- We can explore whether Silicon Halton, through a volunteer member(s), can/should develop a sustainable export focused program for our members.
Related Posts/Resource Materials
Report: Meetup #14 – Hi Tech Entry Into The USA
About the Author
Chris Herbert is the cofounder of Silicon Halton and founder and CMO of Mi6 a marketing and business development agency. You can contact him via Linkedin, or Twitter.