“There is a certain irony, that with the UK population engrossed in the full flow of certain high-profile divorce proceedings, all of a sudden the papers are full of the official announcement of an event that will see the younger generation of the Royal Family recreating our historic trans-Atlantic union. No doubt it will be seen as yet another British snub to the House of Europe that Harry failed to find a European princess to marry ” exclaimed the BattleAxe as she swiped through the glossy acres of pictures of the Fifth in Line to the Throne plus bride to be.
“You know, businesses could learn a lot from the Royals” she mused. “Their presence was well and truly visible across Europe well before anyone thought of the EEC let alone the EU. After all Queen Victoria managed to either populate the major royal palaces of the world single handedly (with a nod to Prince Albert of course) or govern the rest directly. Not of course that I’m saying we should be taking back control of the New World - just think how big the civil service would be!” The Chief Elf shuddered a major sigh of relief and nodded enthusiastically.
“I see where you’re going” he said. “You mean we should be setting our business net ‘wider still and wider’. But don’t we already do a lot of business with the Rest of the World?”
“Of course we do, but there is much more that we can do – even as relatively small businesses.” The BattleAxe waxed Churchillian, “We Brits have always led the way in so many spheres. Who was it that invented steam locomotives, light bulbs, computers? More recently we pioneered text messages – starting as BT’s way of testing ISDN lines – and the World Wide Web. And it’s because of these that the world has become such a small place and the opportunities for UK businesses have become so much broader than in the days when we were masters of shipping bits of heavy engineering around Europe.
“So many SMEs think it’s too much hassle to expand beyond these shores but it doesn’t have to be. Never let it be said that the BattleAxe doesn’t give credit where it’s due: there are even parts of HM Government that do really good work running programmes helping businesses of all sizes develop their exports. The Department of Trade and Industry has people located in most embassies around the world actively opening doors for British companies. They do everything from complying with local product safety requirements, to minimising the credit risk of doing business with customers not covered by the UK courts. They can even intervene if they find countries putting up trade barriers such as imposing higher quality standards on foreign goods than locally made.”
“The world is our oyster as they say......... ooh, now there’s an idea for an export business. I wonder if one of our clients has a way of keeping them cold enough to get to Australia!”
This article was originally published December 14th 2017 in Huddersfield Examiner
