Are you working in the global marketplace?

It may not always seem like it, but the internet moves at the speed of light. The major connections between servers, and between countries, are mostly fibre-optic. Your emails, web clicks and downloads are carried around the world at incredibly high speed. So high that it’s faster than the signals moving around inside your brain.
The speed of light in a vacuum is almost 300,000,000 miles/second. That’s three hundred million meters per second. Nothing can move faster – it’s the universal speed limit. The speed of light in a fibre-optic internet cable is slower, by around 40 percent. Still, it can get around the world four and a half times in just a second.
This means that as far as the internet is concerned, nowhere is far away. You might be based on the opposite side of the planet to some of your potential customers, but in internet terms they’re right next door. In fact, they’re standing next to you. Go on, shake hands.

The world is getting smaller

And there are more of them every day. Ever more people are being connected, with better internet access coming to remote areas as well as cities. Whether by cable, mobile phone, high-altitude drone or balloon, the internet is reaching places it could never reach before.
Now look at your business. Where is your energy focused? Where do you direct all your attention? Are you looking at this vast global marketplace, or are you concentrating on your local customers?
Many of today’s entrepreneurs grew up in an era when the internet was slow and unreliable. Some of us grew up in a time when there was no internet at all! As a friend of mine is still fond of saying, “I remember the internet when it was just fields.”
But things have changed, and they continue to change – very quickly. Unfortunately our minds don’t always change fast enough to keep up. Some of us are stuck in a slower, more parochial past. We need to wake up, and fast.

Global marketplace means global competition

As I sit at my desk here in New Zealand, I’m about 12,000 miles away from some of my clients. But in real terms I’m one-third of a second away. That’s how long it would take email, instant messaging or video-conferencing to go from here to there. It’s a meaninglessly small duration. I truly work in a global marketplace.
That’s all very well, but there’s a sting in the tail. If I have global customers, I also have global competitors. And probably so do you. As Intel’s Andy Grove once put it, “If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry.”
It’s happening now. Long established business models are being overturned overnight. Don’t believe me? Ask a taxi driver about Uber, or a book publisher about Amazon. The age of your business is no defence. If you can’t adapt, you will be swept away by the tide.
What does this mean for you? It means that you don’t really have a choice. The global marketplace isn’t just a nice option – it’s a fact of life. There are people all over the world chasing business. Your business.
The only exceptions are those companies that can’t export their products or services. For example, you can’t easily cut someone’s hair from another country, or sell them freshly baked bread. Having said that, I wouldn’t bet against either of those things happening in the future.
For now, hairdressers, bakers and similar businesses don’t have to worry too much. The rest of us, though, had better stay on our toes. The fields were concreted over years ago.
If you still think your business can succeed by focusing solely on your local market, you could be in for a nasty shock. And wherever in the world that shock originates, it could arrive on your doorstep in less than one-third of a second.