Exporting with Uncle Sam: your tax dollars at work.

• Author: Beard, Alan J.
• Position: Government help for business; contains related article on business information and aid services

EXPORTING WITH UNCLE SAM

Utah business executives, not unlike those in the rest of the country, have traditionally viewed Washington, D.C., as more of a hindrance than anything else when implementing their business strategies. There are the horror stories about the $300 hammers and the purported regulations requiring farmers to provide farm workers with large numbers of toilets for every so many acres of land under cultivation. Washington, however, can be a valuable resource for business - especially businesses wanting to expand into international markets. The government spends more than $25 billion annually and employs more than 75,000 people to help U.S. firms compete internationally. It provides services as routine as background studies on foreign markets and as critical as subsidized financing to meet overseas competitors. Like it or not, taxpayers are footing this bill. So Utahns might as well get some return on all of those federal tax dollars by utilizing Uncle Sam's international business services.

American business executives generally have an aversion to using any government programs, and when a company goes to the government for assistance, the business community often sees the gesture as a sign of weakness. These attitudes can be summed up by the experience of a local attorney whose client was doing business with some Russians in Utah. The Russian partners insisted upon involving the state government to move the enterprise forward, much to the chagrin of the Utah executive. Frustrated, the Utah executive fumed, "Look, we only court government officials to keep them out of our hair!"

Given this bias, the concept of leveraging on government resources for international business is often more foreign to U.S. executives than to the global markets in which they are trying to compete. By comparison, few foreign business executives would think of expanding overseas without first approaching their governments for assistance.

Uncle Sam's Export Supermarket

Another obstacle to using government programs for international expansion is that the U.S. business community - both large companies and small - is not aware of the programs our government offers. Not surprisingly, a recent Gallup poll showed that less than half of the U.S. executives surveyed were aware of the international services offered by the Department of Commerce. And other government agencies offering international support had an awareness level of less than 15 percent...