Making People Feel Like They Are Home with Cynthia Dearin

Cynthia: It is important to get clear about who your ideal international client is. If you sell to everybody, you sell to nobody. The clearer you can be about who your customer is, really what makes them tick, the easier you are going to find it to launch a business that works overseas. You are never going to outspend the big guys in terms of advertising dollars. The global marketplace is incredibly crowded. If you want to get cut through, you have to have messages which are localised for the people in that market. When they hear you speak, they say, this company understands my problems and they can solve them. And I feel home with this company. Unless you can do that, you are really going to struggle to be successful.

Brian: Today we are talking with Cynthia Dearin, founder and CEO of Dearin and Associates. Cynthia is an international business strategist with 25 years of international experience. She is on a mission to empower business owners and CEOs to scale internationally and amplify their impact in the world. An Australian qualified legal practitioner and graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, Cynthia worked in the UK, US, Europe, and the Middle East as an Australian diplomat and as a management consultant. She spent three years as the CEO of the Australia Arab Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In 2013, she founded Dearin and Associates where she helps organisations create and implement international strategies that increase momentum and revenue. Cynthia is proficient in Arabic and French. In 2022, she released her second book, Business Beyond Borders: Take Your Company Global. Her first book is Camels, Sheikhs and Billionaires: Your Guide to Business Culture in the Middle East and North Africa. Cynthia, welcome to The Native Experience.

Cynthia: Thanks for having me on the show, Brian.

Brian: Tell us about yourself and what you nerd out on for fun.

Cynthia: I live in Sydney by the water. I have one husband, a seven-year-old, a four-and-a-half-year-old, and a Burmese cat. I don't get a lot of spare time for fun because I run my business and I am raising a family, but I do like throwing dinner parties and I love the outdoors. I love the beach when it is warm enough, but I also love the mountains. What I nerd out on is novels and Netflix. French novels in particular.

Cynthia: I own a company called Dearin and Associates, and what we do is help companies to scale internationally. We help them create a global footprint outside their home country by helping with strategy and by helping them get arms and legs on the ground: finding distributors, partners, agents, or building teams out in the world.

Brian: Do you have a localisation or translation story?

Cynthia: One thing I didn't say about me is I have language aptitude. English is my native language, but along the way I learned French. I am bilingual in English and French, and my kids are bilingual too. At one point in my career, I was part of the Australian diplomatic corps. I got told I was going to learn Arabic and get posted to the Middle East. I got posted to Egypt, then to the United Arab Emirates, and a few years later I found myself in Iraq working for USAID.

Cynthia: It was 2007, the surge was on, and things were pretty manic. As a consultant, you don't organise your own travel logistics. Someone hands you documents and you go where they tell you. I was supposed to have printed out a letter of authorisation that said I was allowed to be in Baghdad working. I didn't do it. It completely slipped my mind. I flew back into the airport and got stopped at immigration. They told me in Arabic that I didn't have the right papers and they were going to deport me and put me on the next plane back to Jordan.

Cynthia: I was absolutely horrified because that would have meant a huge amount of trouble from my boss. I might even get kicked off the project. I said to the guy in Arabic, the document you need is in my Gmail. Could I print it out? I think the duty-free shop over there has a printer. Please, could you let me get it? And it only happened because I was speaking Arabic. If I had done it in English, there is zero chance it would have happened.

Cynthia: He said okay. I went out through immigration illegally, went to the duty-free shop, begged them in Arabic, explained my terrible story. They let me use their computer. I found the document, printed it out, thanked them profusely, went back through immigration, handed the papers to the officer. He said, that is fine, you can go now, your bags are downstairs.

Cynthia: While it is not specifically translation, it is localisation. If I had tried to get out of that using English in that context, it would not have happened. Because I had the language skills to engage with the immigration officer and the duty-free staff, I was able to resolve a really big problem for myself.

Brian: The advice to prevent getting deported: know the language and fill out your forms in advance.

Cynthia: When you can talk to somebody and interact with them to a native standard in their language, you kind of have an advantage. If you are operating in English with someone whose English is their second language and you cannot speak their language, they have an advantage over you. When you can interact in their native language, it brings you up to their level. You understand how to engage with them to get the right result. You can communicate in a way that is empathetic for them in that particular culture.

Brian: What does providing a native experience mean to you?

Cynthia: It is making people feel, when they speak to you or receive something from you in writing, like they are home. If you think about it in the context of websites: imagine you want to buy walking shoes from a Korean company. If they have localised and translated their website so that when you go in, you feel like you are looking at a website from your home country, you feel comfortable, safe, and you want to buy.

Cynthia: But if that Korean company has not localised anything and everything is still in Korean, all the words are Korean, all the images are Korean, you cannot read it. The payment system is through a Korean bank. The likelihood you are going to purchase something is far less. It boils down to the fact that you don't feel home, you don't feel safe. A native experience is about making people feel home, making them feel they understand the environment, and making them feel they can trust the person or thing they are engaging with.

Brian: I really like what you said about making it feel like home.

Cynthia: That is why language is so powerful. I don't think we appreciate how powerful language is. Some of my clients appreciate that they are not equipped and their staff don't know about the culture. Others just think it doesn't matter, they will just go there and interact the same way they do at home. It just doesn't work.

Cynthia: When I was working in the Arab world, I adjusted how I opened and closed my emails. I adjusted how I asked for things. I had to adjust how I gave feedback when team members didn't meet the standard I was expecting. If I wanted to get a good result, it all had to be adapted to what the people in Egypt or the UAE or Iraq were going to expect from me.

Brian: Tell me about The Office as an example of localisation.

Cynthia: The best example I can come up with is my kids. They are bilingual and I put all their Netflix and YouTube Kids into French. My son is obsessed by Ninjago. Because it is a cartoon, it is easier to localise. You can put whatever soundtrack language you want and it more or less works. He has watched so much Ninjago in French that if you put it in English, he says he doesn't prefer it in English and asks to have it back in French.

Brian: The show Lupin is another interesting example.

Cynthia: I watched season one. If you haven't been to France or don't know French culture, you won't understand certain things even with translation. They translated the words but not everything the characters were doing. I always take subtitles off because if I am watching a film in French with English subtitles, I spend the entire time reading the subtitles and comparing them with what I hear. I either turn them off or cover the bottom of the screen.

Brian: Tell us about how you help businesses expand globally.

Cynthia: People often come to us already exporting but without a plan. I spoke to a large company this week that turns over hundreds of millions of dollars and has accidentally built export to 7% or 8% of the business, but they have never put any plan around it.

Cynthia: The very first step is to sit down and think through what we are trying to do and why. There are a range of reasons: more sales, more margin, becoming a global brand, innovation, economies of scale when your home market is saturated. You have to map out a very clear vision of what you want to achieve over the next five years.

Cynthia: Then I like to go to market selection. People often say they are going to do five markets. I am thinking, no, you have 20 people and no one dedicated to export. I guide people to think about the fact that they can really only tackle one market at a time in the early stages.

Cynthia: We prepare a market ranking report. We take the top five to ten markets they have in mind, collect data about their company and products, and run it through large data sets. That generates a report showing where the opportunities are, where the risks are, which markets they should look at, and in what order. Then they can make an evidence-based decision.

Cynthia: Once you know where you are going, you can build things out. We identify the ideal international client, find a distributor or strategic alliance partner. For companies that want a more hands-on approach, I run the International Business Accelerator where companies spend a minimum of 12 months working with my team to build out their plan.

Brian: Is there a ranking based on language or cultural similarity?

Cynthia: It is not the only consideration, but it is definitely a factor. I had a personal care company recently where we looked at the UK, Japan, Singapore, the UAE, and Malaysia. Japan was clearly the best market for their product. But they had almost no export experience. We didn't want to send them to Japan and have it blow up. The United Kingdom was a solid market with a lot of potential, and obviously the language is the same and the culture is similar because of historic ties. Our recommendation was to start with the UK, then when they have experience, turn around and do Japan.

Brian: Tell us about your experience on Kochie's Business Builders.

Cynthia: My favourite one was the Australian family company Survival. They sell amazing first aid kits. Everything inside is labelled. If you have an emergency and your brain goes into panic mode, this kit has labels for everything and a book that tells you what to do. They have been targeting the US market and doing well.

Cynthia: It is an inspiring story. A family had one of their kids get into an accident, come running to the house covered in blood, and they didn't know what to do. That prompted them to say, we need to get first aid sorted out so families have the resources and know what to do.

Brian: How did they provide a native experience for the US market?

Cynthia: They have products like a snake bite kit. It is green, a smaller subset of products, made local for Australia because of our snakes. But in the North American desert, people also encounter snakes. It is the kind of product that does well because people think, I need one in the back of my truck.

Cynthia: Often the product is going to be pretty much the same, but it is the positioning, the pitch and the marketing around the product that speaks to people. They could make a beach first aid kit for California or the Eastern seaboard of Australia. Each item inside is labelled, so you can put those labels into Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, French, whatever you need, and it is immediately available.

Brian: You could even adjust the form factor for different markets. Cars versus backpacks depending on whether people drive.

Cynthia: They have different sizes. I have one in the back of my car and a big one in a cupboard at home.

Brian: Tell us about your books.

Cynthia: The first book came out in 2015, Camels, Sheikhs and Billionaires: Your Guide to Business Culture in the Middle East and North Africa. I wrote it to equip people who wanted to do business in the Middle East with some idea of how to go about it. It goes back to the culture and language discussion, getting people to understand how they needed to adjust their expectations and conduct themselves to get business deals done. That book is probably due for a second edition, but people still want copies eight years later.

Cynthia: The second book came out last year, Business Beyond Borders: Take Your Company Global. It is really the blueprint of what we do at Dearin and Associates. It gives you the recipe for successfully taking your company global. I couldn't fit all the detail of the how between the covers because it would have been 20 volumes, but it tells you at a high level the steps you need to take. If people are thinking about going global and wondering what it entails, that book is a good starting point.

Brian: If you had to pick the most important things from the book, what would they be?

Cynthia: One thing that keeps coming out over and over: get clear about who your ideal international client is. If you sell to everybody, you sell to nobody. The global marketplace is incredibly crowded. If you want cut through, your messages have to be localised for the people in that market. When they hear you speak, they say, this company understands my problems and can solve them. And I feel home with this company.

Cynthia: Having a clear plan is very important. If you don't have clear goals and objectives, how do you know when you have been successful? You have nothing to benchmark against. Selecting the right market is incredibly important because you will make a big investment of time, energy, and money. People make strange decisions about where to expand. I have a story about a guy who went to Bali, couldn't find a particular brand of crisps, and decided he wanted to become the distributor for that brand in Bali. It didn't go very well. When you choose your market, do it based on data.

Cynthia: And when you come to channels, whether e-commerce, direct sales, agents, or distributors, make sure you get it right. If a distributor is going to be your arms and legs on the ground, you want the relationship to be right. You want to share values with them and know they are going to do the best for your product.

Brian: Do you have any other notable fails we can learn from?

Cynthia: Starbucks is a huge one. They had notable failures in Israel and Australia. In Australia, they came in and basically went, it has worked everywhere else, so we will just roll out what we know. They somehow missed the fact that Australia already has a very strong coffee culture, which grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s from a massive wave of immigration from Italy and Greece.

Cynthia: Chain store coffee is not a big thing here. What is big is independent coffee shops. It is all about the local community vibe, knowing the barista, the barista knowing you, knowing your favourite coffee, making it when you walk in. Starbucks brought this monolithic thing where it was all about venti and grande. People did not like the taste. We drink Italian espresso coffee, not American filter coffee. They had to close 89 of 107 stores and wasted millions of dollars. It was not a language issue, but people did not feel home when they went into a Starbucks.

Cynthia: In contrast, McDonald's has done well to think global and act local. You can get wine in France. In India, there is no beef because of the majority Hindu population. They have managed to tailor a lot to national preferences, which is one of the reasons they are still so successful.

Brian: Any final pieces of advice on how to provide a truly native experience?

Cynthia: My top tip: put yourself in the other person's shoes. Think about what they are experiencing as they engage with you or your product or your website. If you have a Korean person coming to your Australian website and they can't read English, will you sell them something? No. At its most basic, it is about thinking what the other person is going to expect and where they are coming from. How can you make them feel at home?

Brian: Cynthia, thank you so much. This was wonderful.

Cynthia: Thanks so much for having me on the show. It has been great chatting.

Brian: Cynthia Dearin, founder and CEO of Dearin and Associates. Thank you for joining us. Remember, always strive for authenticity and embrace the power of native experiences.

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