In control.... face to face with the man who sold across the world

IT was a trip across the globe at the age of seven that sparked a lifelong passion for travel in Jim Hart.

His father’s aunts, who were from New Zealand, had died and the family went over there to sort out their affairs.

Hart recalled: “So we went to Denmark, Hong Kong, Thailand, en route to Australia, and then from Australia we went back through Hawaii. I think we went to the US as well.

“And then after that we had slideshows about the holiday every few months and I just remember being entranced by them.”

Ever since, global travel has been a constant theme in Yorkshire-born entrepreneur Hart’s life – through his university days, when he studied languages, to his working life, where export has been at the heart of his business strategy.

Europlus Direct, his Saltaire-based business specialising in the sale of IBM maintenance services contracts, has twice won a Queen’s Award for International Trade since its inception in 2004.

Hart said that international expansion has been “critical” to growing the business – more than 95 per cent of its sales are export.

His other business venture, One Global, a translation and multi-lingual recruitment firm, also based in Saltaire, sees its sales split 50:50 between the UK and Europe.

But Hart’s first job out of university was in the publishing industry in London, selling into the German market. He spent two years there before taking off around the world, travelling via the Trans-Mongolian Express, and working in a department store in Sydney and as an English teacher in Santiago, Chile.

On his return to the UK, Hart took a job at a contact centre in Skipton selling machine translation software using his French and German. The firm, Connections Plus, won a contract with Hewlett Packard selling maintenance services in the UK and Hart became involved in its roll-out across other European countries.

After eight or nine years, Hart took a sales job at a marketing firm for a short time, before he decided to go it alone and set up his own business, Europlus Direct.

Europlus Direct as a whole, including both the UK and international businesses, turned over £7.1m last year, with a rise to £8.2m forecast for 2013. The business employs 40 people, including 11 in Africa, and has this year set up Europlus Direct International in Las Vegas.

“That allows us to buy IBM services very competitively in the US. A lot of our customers are European companies going into the US and we buy the services for them.

“So we think that there’s massive potential there and we are hoping in 12-18 months we can sell maybe $600,000- $700,000 in the US market.”

Hart is always on the hunt for the next global market to target and has worked by this philosophy since the business was born, initially as an IBM support services reseller solely targeting the French market. “I employed two French people and we got a contract with IBM France”, recalled Hart. “It basically provided us with a database of French IBM customers whose maintenance support was about to expire.

“We just sell, we don’t deliver the service. So if a server goes down in Paris, it’s an IBM engineer that goes along, it’s not us.”

He added: “After about six or seven months I started talking to other IBM countries so to speak. We didn’t just hang around and say, ‘oh we’ve got this great business with IBM France and let’s just concentrate on that’, we were very quickly looking at other markets.”

Europlus Direct, whose target clients are firms which already trade internationally or those which are looking to do, expanded to cover the UK, most of western Europe and Australia. In 2010, the opportunity arose to set up a different model as a distributor, selling IBM maintenance contracts in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the firm also specialises in providing spare parts.

“We’re in Senegal, South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia, and the head office in Africa is Mauritius. IBM is concentrating heavily on certain markets, so they are concentrating on the really big markets like Kenya and Nigeria, but they are not necessarily having a focus on other markets where we are getting involved so like Namibia, even Zimbabwe, we’ve sold some big contracts there, and Mozambique.

“A lot of banks, telco companies and mining companies are moving into African markets. A great deal of investment going into Sub Saharan Africa in preparation for markets beginning to boom in two to three years’ time.”

Hart said: “We also need to look at new areas with IBM. We are very interested in the big data aspects and might become a reseller of big data in the future. I think it’s very dangerous to have just one model and say, ‘well that’s going to go up and up’, so we are diversifying with IBM.”

Meanwhile, Hart also has big plans for his other venture, One Global, which recorded a turnover of £320,000 last year and forecasts £500,000 in 2013. “We are busy trying to build up a database of international clients or companies who sell overseas and sell them the multi-lingual recruitment side and the translation side. I want to get to a critical mass with both of them... and then add on another service, for example a digital marketing service, so we build multi-lingual websites and then you have a whole load of customers that you are already working with, so then it would be a bit of a one-stop shop (for companies going overseas).”

One Global employs eight people and has a network of freelance linguists, who are native speakers.

Hart is a keen advocate of exporting and encourages businesses from all sectors to explore global markets. But targeting sales abroad is not without its challenges.

He said: “Setting up in a country on the cheap is not a good idea. It’s a mistake that we’ve made in a couple of markets. I’d say it’s absolutely vital to have a good firm of global accountants behind you and recommendations for lawyers that are not just local recommendations but are more substantiated than that.

“I think things like shareholder agreements are absolutely critical as well.”

Hart continued: “I don’t think we would have expanded as we have if we hadn’t wholly embraced the local cultures and languages.

“Also I think you need quite a bit of patience. It’s not going to happen overnight. For most companies, I think it should be an integral part of their business, their international expansion plans. We have world maps all around our office, especially in the boardroom.

“We are always looking at our maps and saying, ‘What are we doing there?’, ‘Where should we be going next?’”