The world is a big place, much bigger than most people care to consider in their daily lives. For most business people, life doesn’t go far beyond their community, much less their city or their state. International markets rarely come into most people’s minds, and this lack of foresight and interest can lead to unwise actions on their part. Worldwide markets affect local small businesses.The global markets have a far larger and more important effect on all local economies than anyone usually realizes, and it is the ones who neglect to realize and take this into account that suffer the most when bad situations arise.
If you want to most successfully run a business in these modern times, you have to make sure you place proper focus where it is needed. You have to be aware not only of what is happening in your area, or your city, or your state, or even your country as a whole, and think also about what is happening in the other countries surrounding yours. Sooner or later those events will come around to affect you in some way, and you need to be prepared.
Worldwide Markets Affect Local Small Businesses
[adsense]Most Common Effects
Usually large international changes within your industry are the things that will affect your business the most, and for obvious reasons. When there is a large shift, a developing trend, or a new revelation that occurs anywhere in the world, you and your peers are bound to hear about it and be affected by its ripples. This is the most obvious way an event somewhere else in the world might have a large effect on a particular community, despite being miles away.
Indirectly
But even more common is the effect a global market situation will have through its indirect consequences and results. While a crisis in an area where there is lots of crude oil will obviously affect the price of gas in one area, it will also affect many other things as well. Cost of transportation increases, therefore cost of the goods being transported must increase, and services everywhere get more costly and less affordable. Conversely when something happens in an industry that causes prices to drop—say, a sudden discovery in the biological engineering world that makes growing corn cheaper—it can affect every other area as well by lowering prices. In the example of cheaper corn, there would also be a price drop in foods made with corn, corn-based products, and so on.
[adsense]Through the Internet
And let’s not forget to consider the area that has the largest effect on local small businesses: the internet. The online world is the one thing that connects everyone everywhere most effectively and completely. Internet trends are something that old-fashioned businesses often forget to take into account, and it’s why many of them suffer losses and aren’t as effective in their advertising and marketing.
So next time you’re tempted to take a shortsighted view of current events and the world outside your country, think again. Remember all the factors that affect you and your area, and try to take them into account and plan for them when you can.