China For Business example essay topic

Phyllis Venkat aya Mkt. 448- Global Business Strategies Kimberley Movarick, Instructor October 14, 2002 Sterling Associates - A Move Into China Allow me to introduce our business, Sterling Associates. Sterling and Associates is a business that provides Legal Services in the areas of Litigation, Environmental Law, and Criminal Defense. Currently we run home offices from our homes in Sacramento, the East bay, and San Francisco, providing litigation and general legal assistance to the general public. Both my partner and I have been successful for various reasons, however, we believe it is because we are a smaller company and are reasonable in costs when it comes to the preparing, researching, and processing legal documents on behalf of our clients.

My partner and I, Merrick Alonso, have each worked in the legal arena for between us, about eleven years, and one day over coffee decided to go solo, start a business together from our homes, mine in Sacramento and the bay area and San Francisco. Our work has over the past six years has been constant and steady and is mostly from word of mouth. Our clients could go to a law firm and meet with an attorney and his representatives, a Legal Secretary, Paralegal, and a process server, and expect to pay upwards of $1500 for maybe only two hours of work. Sterling and Associates does all of our business ourselves, saving our clients thousands of dollars because everything is done in-house. We both prepare and reserve our own documents deliver and file with the Courts.

Over the last two years we have grossed almost $300,000 dollars in work! Last year we had the opportunity to do some work for a client who travels quite often to China for business, and were propositioned to think about opening up a smaller office in China offering the same services. We both had never thought about going into business internationally, but now that we are doing well as a business here in the States, we are considering what it would take to do business in China. In selecting to open a business in China, various things will have to be determined: .".. ". will we export our services in the Chinese market from our home base; should we invest in a third world country where the cost of producing our services will be locally to the general public of China; should we alternate and travel there for weeks at a time to make sure the business is operating as it should and would in the United States; should we hire a staff of employees from the pool of legal assistants already in China? The decisions are vast and should be determined so that we know which route we will take?

In doing further research, we have determined a few thing about the service we want to provide. Because China does not pay well, the services Chinese patrons receive differ from place to place. When conducting research on the legal environment currently in place we were surprised to know that of the Attorneys and paralegals on staff in their own legal clinics, you get what you pay for and not everyone gets the same service from say an office from site to site. The Chinese are not paid well as legal staff in any capacity very well so they in exchange are not going to provide consistent information; the work areas may not be the same and the tools used to work on your case will not be the same; in addition, there are not enough legal experts to get things done for you, and what you have done in one shop, the next week at another shop will not be the same; the original office may not know what is necessary to complete the work requested. Many legal appointees do not even care about the specific work that they do for a client.

We are well aware that a countries government is important to international business, and China as above mentioned was once under a communist and at times totalitarian government. In doing business you want to make sure that you understand the legal risks of doing business in another country. As in all businesses you want to place safeguards in case of contract violations or possible property rights. Lack of protection could case a competitor to gain advantage of your business. In selecting our company, we decided to also maximize the name calling it Sterling and Associates and its employers, we believe that it would be beneficial to everyone if we established cross-functional teams, training staff to do be able to do other jobs in addition to just being a paralegal, legal aide or attorney; to what we actually are known for, in the event of an emergency. We believe we both to initiate our sister office will have to travel to China to supervise the work.

We anticipate hiring a representative to work with us to capture the differences we are sure to experience from first working in China. We are not going to be familiar with the customs in doing business, their will most likely be a language barrier, even though many Chinese businessmen speak English will take projects to The Chinese government, in some instances is still hesitant about the types of services and / or products that are allowed into their country. China, used to be a communist country and around late 1978. However thanks to the inception of the World Trade Organization, which was created in late 1993 to police the international trade system and the General Agreement on Tariffs and trade (GATT), later in 1995 replacing the GATT, barriers to cross country trading has moved into the forefront of trade between many countries and the United States. We believe that our teams will develop milestones, and work on budgeting incentives created to gain and meet company goals and standards. Develop processes for communication and conflict resolutions.

Make a clear plan and strive to meet those goals, with commodarie and facilitating communication. Our work ethics, we now will need to bee ironed out and we are concerned about whether or not we will run the Sister Company There is no consistency to what one person could get on street A with someone obtaining services from street B.