APEC and Small Business? Absolutely
Imagine a place that is perhaps the complete opposite of Hawaii. A state that is now covered with snow, where desolate prairies meet high mountains, where numerous rivers flow to the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. This state is immense, taking 10 hours to cross it, over 147,046 square miles compared to Hawaii’s 10,931.
This place is Montana, and in Montana, APEC is vitally important.
Now imagine, a small town, called Harlowton, of 900 people with a small business of 25 people that now spans three continents: Australia, North America, and Europe. This is our company, TicketRiver.com. We focus on event ecommerce – event collateral such as event and raffle tickets, invitations, flyers, and posters, and online event management and ticketing.
We own and operate the following business units: Ticket River Australia, TicketRiver.com, TicketPrinting.com, and UK TicketPrinting.com — all from Harlowton, Montana. APEC and the opportunity it creates is critical for our company.
How can a small company span three continents and grow fast? Of course, the usual ingredients: innovation, initiative, luck and copious amounts of hard work. But all of this is for naught if we cannot grow, and in order to grow, we have to expand to new global markets. APEC is vital to TicketRiver.com’s market expansion. Why?
Free trade agreements (FTAs) create market expansion opportunities, create level-playing fields, and ensure businesses can follow relatively consistent and standard laws across global economies. As we all have seen, free trade agreements don’t happen quickly. They take years.
In the simplest business terms, FTAs are “deals,” complex deals, and in my experience, a deal – especially a complex one – does not get done unless there is meaningful dialogue which builds meaningful relationships which, in turn, help to negotiate the deal. Meaningful relationships and dialogue must span government, business, and the public. APEC is the primary vehicle for such dialogue and relationship building for the Asia Pacific economies.
Take this week’s APEC Summit here in Honolulu. Over the course of the next week, hundreds of business and government leaders will be meeting to ‘dialogue’ on a wide range of topics critically important to the Asia Pacific: proposed free trade agreements, women and leadership, innovation and intellectual property rights, sustainable green business practices, and an entire symposium on Thursday focused on small to medium size enterprises (SMEs’) in APEC.
It’s almost cliché by now but across the APEC economies, small businesses are the engines of job growth, accounting for well over 65 percent of new jobs created. Another example: over 90 percent of Walmart’s suppliers are small to medium size businesses. Therefore, APEC has rightly been focusing on small business and the various enablers (access to financing) and barriers (complex regulations) which affect SMEs’ across the Asia-Pacific.
Further, APEC helps identify and start meaningful research on next generation issues for small business. These are: facilitating global supply chains, enhancing SME participation in global production chains, and promoting effective, non-discriminatory and market-driven innovation policy.
Clearly, these are complex issues – requiring meaningful dialogue which helps support and build substantive relationships, which make the process of negotiating new agreements go much smoother, ultimately resulting in better outcomes for APEC economies and societies, including small businesses in Montana and Hawaii.
As we strive to address anemic growth, companies like TicketRiver.com need opportunity – the opportunity of market expansion, financing, and innovation. These are complex macroeconomic topics on a large stage this week with the leaders of the APEC economies in attendance. But they directly affect a small company in a small town in Montana with global ambitions.
About the author: Lance Trebesch is CEO and co-owner of TicketRiver.com which owns and operates TicketPrinting.com, Ticket River Australia, UK Ticket Printing, and TicketRiver.com. He lives and works in Montana.
