Think a company needs to be big to play on the world stage? Think again. Plenty of companies in the $10m to $1bn range are emerging as full-fledged international players by finding ways to move faster than their bigger competitors.
You don't have to be a giant to go global. In fact, smaller companies can use their size as an edge in overseas markets. Although it's generally known that small to mid-sized companies can be successful as exporters of their products, what has largely escaped attention is that a subset of these companies are defying the conventional wisdom that one must be a multi-billion-dollar-a-year multinational to play in such tricky markets as China and India. These "mini-multinationals" do more than just export their products to a single customer or a single distributor offshore. They operate factories, sales offices and laboratories in multiple countries on multiple continents. They do so by leveraging their ability to be more agile, more focused on a core competency and more entrepreneurial than their larger peers.
