Students and companies plot global expansions

By Linda Strowbridge

Hiking up a mountain in the Horn of Africa, Lanham entrepreneur Joseph Stoddard realized a dream.

He had come a long way from his business roots. Stoddard had started out as a teenage member of a fast food crew, then worked his way up the ranks of McDonald’s to manage multiple restaurants. He left the food service industry to start ventures in real estate. While evaluating countertops for a coffee shop development, he became fascinated with the marble and granite industry. He opened a stone sales, installation and fabrication business with a clear ambition in mind: to one day own his own quarry.

Late last year, that ambition drove him to a mountainous region of Ethiopia.

“I went to the mountain and I climbed it. There is a rare type of granite there and it’s there in big quantities,” said Stoddard, who sealed a $10-million deal in January to open a quarry and granite fabricating facility on site.

Stoddard, the founder and president of International Marble and Granite LLC, is one of numerous Prince George’s County business people who have teamed up with the University of Maryland University College to develop detailed plans to expand internationally.

Students in the Executive Masters of Business Administration program have helped companies lay plans to do business in Taiwan, Chile, France, Libya, Iraq, Burkina Faso, the Czech Republic, Singapore, India and about two dozen other countries by opening branch operations, forging business partnerships or competing for overseas contracts. Those expansion plans have focused on myriad products, including hand tools, plumbing supplies, solar panels, diet plans, computer services, fuel cell technologies and air traffic control systems.

“I have such a tremendous excitement dealing with all these new, emerging companies,” said Mary Ann Spilman, a professor of international business and executive director of business and executive programs at UMUC’s Graduate School of Management and Technology. “It’s really exciting to see the variety of businesses that are being started and expanded.”

A team of students, who are all experienced executives in corporations or government agencies, is assigned to each company that partners with the MBA program. UMUC selects each firm for the free program based on the firm’s readiness to expand internationally and the challenges that expansion could present to students. The team then spends 20 months determining which country would offer the most promising expansion opportunities for the company and developing a plan for building that foreign book of business.

“One of the things that surprises the companies is the level of detail they get out of this research,” Spilman said.

Each plan outlines market opportunities for the company’s products or services, major competitors in that market, best business partnering options and the procurement policies and customs followed in that country. It walks the company through relevant trade regulations, tax laws, intellectual property laws and labor/union regulations. It lays out multiple plans for entering the market (for example, partnering with an existing supplier or opening a branch office) then projects costs, revenues and profits for each option. It even identifies financial benchmarks, which would indicate that the expansion effort is failing, and details exit strategies.

Most small and mid-sized companies could never afford to hire a consultant to compile such in-depth research, said Patricia Thornton, a spokeswoman and former business analyst for the Prince George’s County Economic Development Corporation.

“But there are so many opportunities where those companies can expand globally,” she said.

Thornton began funneling Prince George’s companies to the UMUC international business plan program in 2004 when heavy competition and a soft economy was pummeling the bottom line of many information technology companies.

“Companies had to learn that they didn’t need to be dependent on limited market options here,” Thornton said. “They needed to diversify and many could be flexible enough to focus on a niche market elsewhere.”

Al Edwards, president and CEO of Exceed Corp. in Lanham, recently took that advice.

Although Exceed currently employs more than 100 people and posts annual revenues of about $9.5 million, the management services and information technology company has been grappling with an increasingly tougher market, Edwards said.

“Competition is so steep, especially in this area,” he said. “And we are seeing, especially in some recent [contract] awards, that there is more emphasis being placed on lowest price and less on the best value. So we finally said, well, there are so many sharks in this pond, maybe we should take our capabilities and become a stronger player in another pond.”

Exceed executives asked UMUC students to assess three foreign markets – China, India and Canada. They concluded that Canada offered Exceed the best contracting opportunities and laid out a plan “right down to how much it will cost us in per diems” to break into the market, Edwards said.

Exceed is scheduled to begin implementing the plan this year. If the Canadian endeavor goes as expected, it could add $4.2 million to Exceed’s annual revenues within five years, he said.

Meanwhile at a marble shop in Lanham, Joseph Stoddard is plotting a second international expansion. Equipped with an international business plan from UMUC, Stoddard is pursuing a deal to open a quarry and granite fabricating facility in Cameroon. The Executive MBA students, Stoddard said, deciphered many of the mysteries of creating a successful granite business in a developing country and became instrumental in his multi-million dollar expansions into both Cameroon and Ethiopia.

“They put together something that was so great,” he said, “that we are putting it into motion right now.