Podcast 2.7: Exporting your products or services with Nate Ward

Summary:

How can you expand your market beyond the USA?

Nate Ward runs the Ohio Export Assistance Network serving the greater Cleveland-Akron area. He tackles these important questions:

• How does a small business owner know when to consider exporting?

• What are some preconceived ideas US businesses have about global business that are often wrong?

• What are some challenges a small business owner should consider when dealing with a variety of countries?

• What are some unusual things you’ve witnessed in another country that might be unexpected for an American audience

Ohio Export Assistance Network has helped hundreds of Ohio companies grow their export sales by nearly $100m over the past ten years, growing business on every continent except Antarctica. Nate and his team, housed at Cleveland State University, manages the longest running export accelerator in the country, one of four export internship host sites, and occasionally lead Ohio trade missions to various foreign markets.

#entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #SmallBusiness #podcast #NEO #Ohio #SBDC #exporting

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Transcript of Biz Chat Ohio’s podcast 2.7:  Nate Ward

Hello, everyone. Welcome to this BizChat Ohio, the podcast bringing you big ideas for small businesses and the best of small business news and industry trends from Ohio’s thought leaders. This podcast is made possible by Lakeland Community College and the Ohio Small Business Development Center. I’m your host Kathy Walsh Director of the Small Business Development Center. And I’m joined by my co-host Gretchen Skok Disanto Director of the Lakeland Community College Entrepreneurship Center and business advisor for the Ohio Small Business Development Center.

Today, we’re talking about exporting. When small businesses look at this, it can be a really intriguing idea for the small business, but at the same time can be confusing and frightening. And a lot of small businesses don’t know where to start. So how does a small business owner know when it’s time to take the idea of exporting and turn it into a reality. There are many misconceptions surrounding exporting. And that’s why we are thrilled to have an expert in the area of exporting with us today.

It is our pleasure to introduce today’s guest, Nate Ward. Nate runs the Ohio Export Assistance Network serving the greater Cleveland Akron area, the EAN as it is known has helped hundreds of Ohio companies grow their export sales by nearly $100 million over the past 10 years growing business on every continent except Antarctica. In addition, Nate and his team, housed at the Cleveland State University, manage the longest running export accelerator in the country, one of four export internship host sites, and occasionally leads Ohio trade missions to various foreign markets Nate welcome and thank you for being with us today.

Well, Thanks, Kathy. Thanks, Gretchen. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with both of you and your audience as well. And I will say that we are working on Antarctica. That is our next destination. We’re trying to make sure we get all the continents. So if anyone’s listening, and you have an opportunity with some science outpost, let us know. We want to help you. So we can check that box.

So exporting is an area that feels very foreign to most of our business clients, no pun intended. So we’d like to shed some light today to let businesses know that it really is a viable growth strategy in today’s business environment. Many small business owners, Nate, toy with the idea of exporting. They may be thinking there’s a market out there or a potential customer might come to them and say, “Hey, would you consider selling your product in Mexico or the United Kingdom?” So where would a small business owner even begin when they want to start thinking about exporting as an option?

Thanks for that question. It’s a really great question. I guess before we answer that, let’s back up a moment, and make sure everyone listening understands what an export is. It’s very straightforward thing. But it’s when you’re offering your product or service, for that matter, to someone that’s not in our case, an American citizen, someone that’s contacting you from a different country. And it’s not the kind of thing that a lot of– statistically, it’s not many companies are in a position where they can do exporting.

So if you’re running, let’s say, a barbershop, there’s a good chance that exporting is not something that you’re thinking about every day, and that’s fine. But if you’re running a company you offer, let’s say chocolate protein bars, or maybe you’re just a wholesaler of goods, or you could be running an account selling products on Etsy, let’s say. There’s a good chance that you’re in play for export.

And regardless if someone is contacting you from Bermuda or Uganda or Canada, which is our biggest trading partner, all those would represent an opportunity to export. And so all right, you’re in a position. You have something that could be sold to a foreign buyer. The next thing is all right, how do you know that the opportunity is there? And part of it I’d say is let the market tell you that it’s right.

Are you starting to get some inquiries? Are you’re getting inquiries first of all from across your state? And then are you getting inquiries from across our country? And then finally, are people contacting you, direct messaging you, emailing you from one of these other countries saying, “Hey, I’d like to buy your product I’m located in this country. Do you sell it? Can I get it here locally? Or can you send it to me?” Those would all be really good indications that the market’s telling you that you have an exportable product or even service. And that’s kind of where the journey starts.

There are some preconceived notions that US businesses have about exporting and global business in general. And which of those turn out to be erroneous? I mean, what do you see from your side, those thoughts that hey, you shouldn’t worry about this because that’s just not the case.

Yeah well, let’s look at it from two sides. On the one side, some companies might think that they have to be like a large company in order to be like some kind of international player. They have these images of a multinational corporation at Google and Amazon. They think oh well, that’s just for the large companies. But nothing could be further from the truth. So from what I do as a trade counsellor for the state, my job is specifically to work with small and medium sized companies.

And so I would if I had to guess, the average size of the company I work with is maybe like 40 employees. Maybe they have 10 $20 million in sales per year. But then again, there’s also single person entrepreneurs that I’ll work with who are husband wife combo teams that have an export opportunity. And so it statistically, it’s actually the small to medium sized companies that do the majority numbers wise of exporting in our country. So you don’t have to be a big company in order to be international.

But it’s understandable that on the other hand, that some people let’s say, look at, and they think oh, the world is their oyster. They’re really excited about their product. And they think Oh this is going to blow up really big. And they’re aware of some of these platforms like an Amazon, which has really changed the landscape I think particularly for those small companies to reach foreign markets. And they think they’re going to be an overnight success. And all of a sudden, they’re going to be selling in every market.

And they’ll send me a list of oh, these are my top 60 markets, so they think I’m going to be selling in. And oh, pump the brakes a little bit that’s I’m glad to know that you’re thinking about international markets. And we have to educate people sometimes that OK, we as Americans make up just 5% of world population. And there’s 95% of the other people on this planet are outside of our borders. And but let’s take it like kind of one step at a time.

I think that to think that your products are all of a sudden going to make it be a success in every market it wants is actually a recipe for failure. It’s a recipe to pull your hair out and to stretch yourself way too thin. So our advice to them is let’s kind of take this maybe one country at a time or even like one region at a time. Make it more manageable for you. And that’s just where they have their ambitions. The rest of it, the rest of the journey is kind of understanding how can you be successful in those markets and not putting the cart before the horse.

And in following up to that, Nate, so if somebody wants to jump into like you said doing the whole world right from the get go, you also have to consider that most small businesses or even medium sized businesses have limited resources. So one of the problems, I’m sure you see among businesses that want to go global is how to manage their resources effectively. So what can you suggest to business owners about managing their resources as they begin this process?

Yeah, that’s a great question. Thanks. It’s true. There isn’t this one size fits all that you’ve developed OK, this is how we handle the domestic market. This is how we handle the international market as though it’s all one homogeneous blob or whatever. It doesn’t work that way. Every country is set up that they can have their own regulations, their own way of doing business. There may be some similarities across some of those markets.

But when companies really get into it, they realize that they may need to treat other companies– other countries in a very individualized way. So it becomes this issue where they get taxed for resources if they’re not prepared for it. And that’s fortunately where I come in. And the network that I’m part of, we in the state of Ohio are very fortunate. We are a very prominent exporting state. We’re typically around seventh or eighth, I guess nationally in terms of our export sales.

We have a governor that’s very supportive and encouraging Ohio companies to get out there to be competitive internationally. Whether we’re talking about what I do as a trade counselor, I’m basically a taxpayer paid for consultant. I could walk into a company and give them kind of an objective third party opinion or guidance on how to do everything from their documentation to OK, how do you evaluate this market?

I could get, most likely, I could give them some kind of a brief background of what the country has been, what their stability has been. I could say whether or not other clients I’ve worked with have had success in those markets. I’ve had the good fortune of traveling to many of these places. So oftentimes, I could give them a firsthand account of what conditions are like if they’ve never been to that market before. Obviously, not Antarctica, that’s my one Achilles heel, but we’ll get that taken care of sometime.

The direct sort of advice part, that’s something that I’m responsible for. But in addition to that is the state. We have a grant program, the Image grant, which is part of the federal step funding. We can put $10,000 back in the pockets of companies for international expansion projects. That obviously is kind of a no-brainer for a whole host of companies. But it doesn’t end there.

We also run an internship program where right now, there’s four sites across the state, including my own at Cleveland State University, where one of the sites for finding, vetting, training, and then eventually, through a matchmaking process placing qualified young students, bright, ambitious students into companies that have an international flavor to them and international opportunities. We place those interns to work at those companies for summer internships. And the state reimburses the companies for half of the wages. So that’s been a tremendous way for companies to get additional resources, man hours devoted to developing, working with these foreign markets.

And the last one I’ll touch on here is that we also have the state maintains and overseas contractor network that we have contractors that cover something like 120 markets. And for Ohio companies, they could use this. They could tap into the service to engage our in-country contractors to find for them qualified leads. They could help them prepare, let’s say, a visit in the future if they’re planning going to a trade show or something to this effect. They could provide interpretation, translation services.

And these are all things that the state is more than happy to pay for Ohio companies as a way of making it a little bit easier for them to engage foreign markets. And these have all been very, very popular growing services over the last decade or so.

It sounds like when we’re talking about resources and helping businesses, we’re talking not just about there’s some financial padding there, I guess in the grants. But there’s also manpower resources available to whereas your group will help with some of the research and information gathering as well as providing internships. So it comes in two different ways, it sounds like.

Yeah, when we survey our companies, we ask them well, what’s holding you back? Why aren’t you doing more international business? And they’ll typically tell us three things. They’ll say opportunity, I want to know where the opportunity is in these foreign markets. The know how, I need to understand are the rules different? How do I need to prepare, all that kind of stuff. And then lastly, it’s the resources. Its financial resources. And it’s the labor involved the dedicating, maybe someone doesn’t have the time among the people on their staff to handle those opportunities once they come up. So we try to set this up to identify all three of those areas, the opportunity, the knowledge, and the resources.

And I think it’s been a really effective approach to some of our companies. When they find out about us, wow, they just, they won’t leave us alone, which is great. They end up signing up for everything we do. And that’s a great joy for us, and nothing more than we like that to really get to intimately know some companies.

So once a business has that foundation in place, they’ve assembled their resources, and they’re ready to begin exporting their goods. What are some of the other challenges a small business owner should consider and even when they’re dealing with a country that’s seemingly easy to do business with like the UK?

I get that question quite a lot. And I think that if you’ve traveled internationally at all, I think that there’s a lot that come to mind, the obvious ones, like maybe there’s a– you’re aware of those language differences, cultural differences. There may be time zone differences. Different currencies may be in play. But I think we kind of understand that other countries have their own laws.

One thing I like to educate my, if I’m meeting a new company, I’ll tell them that trade is a privilege. It’s not a right. It’s the kind of thing that other countries, they allow foreign companies. And we would be you’d be working for a foreign company to them. They’re granting you the permission to enter their market to sell to their citizens. And that’s kind of a, yeah, they could turn the spigot off anytime if they want. They could sort of change the rules. They can make life a little bit more difficult.

And so it’s not this automatic thing that you’re just going to be granted entry and the fact that you represent an American company. Maybe they’ll welcome you with open arms. Maybe they won’t. And so it ends up being a little bit different. I think back to in the last presidential administration, a lot of companies were affected by the tariffs that were enacted to slow down the imports from China. And then it also spilled over in other countries like Canada and so on.

And that was kind of us feeling the effects in the opposite that there may be other countries that employ those kind of tactics to slow down goods from a specific country, maybe ours. I have a story about that, a couple of my companies that got affected by that. Or your industry, they want to slow down because they’re trying to protect, let’s say, an industry in their country. So it all sort of depends on where are we dealing with. What are you trying to sell? And to some extent, who do you know?

That comes in the form of regulations, taxes, duties. And then there may need to be some special permissions that you have to get in order to sell your goods to those places. And that’s kind of where my bread is buttered if you will of helping companies understand where those obstacles may be whether they– maybe they have clear sailing. We could have a free trade agreement with another country, and yeah, no open door policy, great. Sell that stuff all day long, no problem. It won’t be quite like selling anywhere in the US, but it will be pretty easy.

And then there’s other cases where it’s wow, you wouldn’t believe it, but let’s say before NAFTA was renegotiated to the USMCA trying to sell US dairy to Canada, you’d figure this is a nearby to us. And oh, no forget about it. The Canadians were very protective of their domestic dairy industry. And that’s changed to some extent since NAFTA was renegotiated. But yeah, it’s kind of one of those things that you don’t know until you start looking into it of what is the playing field. Is it a level playing field? Or are there hurdles that you’re going to have to clear?

On that same note, what are some of the most unusual things that you’ve witnessed in another country that might be unexpected for us here in America?

Yeah. [LAUGH]

I want to hear it.

Man, this can really go into all kinds of different directions. What rating is this podcast? No.

It’s rated all ages.

All ages, all right, yeah, OK. [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGH] Well, some things are like it goes to mundane of how do different countries and cultures view things like their relationship with, let’s say, nature or animals. Gosh, you know, of course, it’s known that the cow is sacred in India. I did a Fulbright Program, was there a month and a half in India. And yeah, sure enough like you can’t eat beef anywhere. In fact, there’s people who protest anyone who would eat meat, there’s retaliations that happen against the minority population that does consume cow.

But you went to McDonald’s there, and of course, nothing on the menu is beef. They offer things in substitute like lamb or I think it was the spiciest hamburger. I went just once a week to Western restaurants. And I went to Burger King once. And I had the spiciest whopper. I couldn’t finish it. I couldn’t physically put the sandwich in my mouth. It was just burning. They say that everything in India is spicy. They’re not kidding. That was the spiciest thing I tried eating while I was there. But of course, it was a whopper that wasn’t made out of beef. It was made of some combination of chickpeas and other things.

And it was I guess you could say it was delicious. But [LAUGH] the relationship with animals and nature, I’ve got other stories. I won’t go into that. Sometimes the presence of military and security, I remember we led a trade mission to South America, and we went to Colombia. And Colombia has come a long way from where they were with drug trafficking and largely have gotten that under control.

But nonetheless, in the streets of Bogota, I remember going to, I saw an IHOP. I didn’t go to IHOP but there was an IHOP across the street from wherever we were, the embassy or something. And there is military guards. And they’ve got these enormous guns. And they’re there making sure that nothing goes down at the IHOP. And just OK, like what? Is this a normal IHOP or the International House? Maybe it stood for something else, The International House of Peacekeeping or I don’t know what it was. But yeah, that kind of blew my mind.

But the most pressing one, I guess, not pressing, but one of the most obvious is when you go to a country that is developing. And you see that there– you have this expectation maybe a preconceived notion of you hear about oh, this is a developing country. And maybe you’re only familiarity with it as some Sally Struthers feed the children commercial of everyone here is desperately poor. And I’m not trying to make light of that.

In fact, there are levels of poverty that you see there would be really, I think, depressing and sobering for people in America that by the same token you might go to a country that has leapfrogged us in terms of what their technological sophistication is. And I’ll go back to the example of India that in the same street, maybe you could see someone who is destitute and poor, doesn’t have any money. And they’re sleeping on the sidewalk. And there’s a whole bunch of people like that.

But just down the road, there’s a technology city that it’s where all the major technology companies have this kind of like compound and the latest in forms of technology, things that would surpass what we have in the United States. And it’s mind blowing when you see especially that, the contrast in these developing countries, the speed, the pace of innovation, and infrastructure. And those are just are not things that we’re so used to seeing in our own country.

In your answers this morning, you have mentioned a little bit about what your Export Assistance Network does. Is there anything that you didn’t talk about that you want to make sure our listeners know about? And could you also maybe give us an example of how you’ve helped small businesses?

Sure, absolutely. The last couple of years for us have been very up and down. In a normal circumstance, we love meeting companies that are just kicking around the idea of international trade, or it’s been kind of an afterthought. I remember meeting a company once that I asked them, it was a plastics company. And I asked them do you guys do international? And this guy was the I think the son of the owner, and he kind of timidly said, “Yeah, we get some international inquiries.” And I said, “OK, great, well what do you do with those inquiries?”

And I kid you not. He opens up this drawer. And the drawer is filled with a bunch of like folders and papers. And I said, Oh, hey what’s that, Kenny?” Or whatever his name was, and he said, “Oh well, these are all the inquiries that we’ve gotten over the years. And we just, we print them off. And we put them in this folder. And then we close the drawer.” [LAUGH] What? You’re not doing Anything They had– they really just didn’t have an answer. They didn’t have a response.

And I love working with those kind of companies to help get them up to speed. They’re leaving money on the table just because they’re afraid of what it’s going to mean if they start engaging those opportunities. And so it could range from that. But there have also been, I mentioned the tariff wars that happened when we got into all those duty changes in sales. It started off with imports from China. But then it quickly bled into there were retaliations. Other countries raised the import tariffs on US goods.

And so we had to answer lots of questions from companies of how they’re going to alter their international strategy because of that. And now more recently with the Russian sanctions and sanctions against Belarus, we’ve also been receiving calls from companies everything from we create a different military products or protection equipment. We’re getting orders from people in the European Union or just outside of Ukraine. How do we do this? Is there a pathway for us?

Or conversely, we had relationships with Russia. Maybe we had a sales office in Russia. What are we supposed to do about this now? And so when those questions come in, and there’s a lot of uncertainty, companies can, and they do call us asking for direction on how they can and how they should really respond to the changing environments when they have business concerns in other countries. And that’s also what we’re here for, too.

Well, and that’s a great service because we don’t want our businesses getting into trouble just because they weren’t aware of something or didn’t know about something. So that’s a great resource that you have that you can answer those kinds of questions for your clients and not necessarily–

I’m sorry. And I want to say I’m not trying to lay the claim that I am personally the expert we are tapped into. There is a really strong, tight knit network of people not only here in Ohio, but we also know people on the federal level. And in those cases, it turns out that there is an entire program set up through the State Department to help handle all the communications for and helping companies deal with how to address and assist with what’s happening in Ukraine right now.

So that was definitely something that was not at my pay grade level, so to speak. But we were able to get them connected with who’s running that team on the federal level so that they could get the answer directly from the top source.

So any other interesting stories that you could share with us, maybe a lesson that somebody learned? Maybe they jumped into something they shouldn’t have or didn’t follow your advice, or any interesting stories of what not to do in exporting?

Yeah.

Really, you have some stories?

Believe it or not, I’ve got stories. So I will take a call if someone’s here they’re in Ohio. And they are just dreaming about exporting, or they just want to have free conversation of what. I try to really give pragmatic advice. And I try not to have any kind of preconceived notions. Every day I get educated. I’m sure you know, Cathy you do, too a new industries, new product ideas, things that maybe familiar with, maybe not. But there are nonetheless still some basic questions you can ask to figure out whether or not this business potential is going to go anywhere. And you kind of need to ask yourself a few things is what I’m selling something that other people would want? And why would they buy from me? Why is it– why am I the right person to be selling it?

So there was a guy who approached me. And he had a guess a fairly successful consulting business and helping companies adjust to different, the differing landscape of regulations in terms of green energy and sustainable solutions and energy saving policies and things like this. And he wanted to meet with me because he wanted to take his business to Brazil. And I thought, OK, he didn’t strike me as someone that maybe came from Brazil. But I didn’t know. Just start asking questions of OK, why this country?

And all of a sudden, the answers started coming out well, you know, I looked at the map, and Brazil is a pretty big country. And they’re not too far away from the United States. And as this conversation is going on, I’m thinking like, I don’t think you’re prepared for this. Do you speak any Portuguese? And he was like, no. And do you know anything about what the green laws are and the policies are of Brazil? And no. OK, this guy is just taking a stab at in the dark.

And Meanwhile, he was hopeful to maybe get on board with a trade mission or to go to Brazil himself. And maybe that would have been fine. It would have been an education, but probably saved him some money by exposing him to a couple of basic facts about what life is like or what the reality on the ground of a place like Brazil is.

And maybe got him to reconsider at least if nothing else, the pace of which he was hoping to develop this business idea and also gave him some homework of OK, you need to talk to this and this person before he pursued this idea any further, before you buy your plane ticket, or who knows? Enter into some kind of terrible business deal with someone. I don’t know that you’re ready for this opportunity.

And so we live in an age where there is a ton of information out there. There’s also unfortunately a ton of misinformation out there. But there is a pathway to doing some basic due diligence. And that’s really something we recommend companies do. Choose it wisely. Choose it proactively if you can. And if I can, just one other really brief story, on the flip side of this, a company that was very successful.

In fact, I remember the first meeting I walked in, the president was in his office. And he had this whiteboard behind him. And he basically had drawn this map of the world. And he had written out there are five or six different countries from around the world. And he had business opportunities going on in Hong Kong, in Japan, in South Africa, in Mexico, and the UK. And it was just kind of all over the place. And I said, “Wow, like I’m so glad your business is going well all over.”

But the problem was as I was kind of alluding to earlier, he was trying to devote the same amount of attention and energy. Meanwhile, it was just him and one of the person that was trying to juggle all this. And I told him like, you’re going to burn yourself out. You can’t possibly be buying plane tickets, flying all around the world, talking with all these people, and managing it. That’s not going to be sustainable. You can’t give the same amount of attention to all these at the present staff members that you have.

So you either need to start slowing some of these down or maybe changing your approach so that it’s not so time intensive, while at the same time also may be looking to onboard a few more people to take these on. And it ended up being a terrific success story. He did that. He ended up saying well, a little bit with our help, and we gave him some advice on how to make that decision. And he said, “OK, we’re going to put these two. They’re going to be our main focus. And for the rest of these, we’ll kind of put them a little bit to the back burner, not turning the sales off entirely but maybe modifying our approach where it wasn’t so time intensive.”

And eventually, they were able to continue growing their business. And then fortunately for them, they ended up selling their business to a very large well-known company. I can’t say who it is. But they became a success story for us because they reached all their goals internationally speaking and then some.

Well, and I’m glad you brought up the consulting example. Because that’s a service that’s being exported, correct? It doesn’t have to be a product you can see or touch when it comes to exporting. You can–

Oh yeah.

Export services as well. That’s something we haven’t really talked about.

Yeah, absolutely. It just so happens that when you’re exporting a thing, a tangible physical thing, there’s a little bit more complexity to it. But Oh yeah, I’ve helped out companies, believe it or not that sell security services, at times, legal services. There was a cleaning company in fact, believe it or not that it made sense it was a very specialized type of cleaning service, let’s see here, industrial kind of services, programming, technology related type of things.

Yeah, it’s not just a matter of tangible physical things, oh, education services that’s been big, people selling education services abroad. Again, export is just when your customer is based in another country, you’re selling your products or your service to people that are not US citizens. That’s really what an export is. And so if that’s the case, that’s something that you’re contending with or considering, give us a call, happy to talk about what we could do for you.

There are additional resources out there to help businesses in addition to the Cleveland State SPDC Export Assistance Network Office. I’m going to list a couple of those. The. Export-Import Bank of the United States, also known as EXIM, the US Department of Commerce, trade.gov, and Thomas Net, which is a web search service for manufacturers. I also want to touch on really quick, Nate, if you could just quickly talk to us about the trade passport that you have available through your CSU spdc.com website or how our listeners can access that.

We obviously, we’re based here at Cleveland State University, which is our host. And that’s terrific. If you’re listening to us, and you’re anywhere in the greater Cleveland area, we’d love nothing more to speak with you directly about any of the points that were mentioned on this conversation today. So some of our services are offered directly out of CSU. We have an export mentorship program, a couple of direct training programs. But all of our services are aligned.

And we are a state aligned service. So the Ohio Department of Development has an Office of Export Assistance. You can find out all of those things, both locally and the links to our counterparts statewide through csuspdc.com. It so happens that we are also affiliated, or I have an affiliation with an organization called NASBITE International, which is a national, international trade education group. And they sponsor a web library called Trade Passport.

And there’s about 60 plus many lessons that have been recorded. I’ve recorded three of them. But this is something where people like me across the country have contributed this. A few I think out of the country even have contributed to these sort of mini-education video lessons on if you want to get the latest on what is the USMCA or free trade. What is it free trade agreement? Or how do I fill out a import documentation filing something like this?

So if you reach us that csuspdc.com, we can give you some coupons that you can download. Access the entire library of 60 plus of these videos. Yeah, that’d be my pleasure to connect your listeners to that great service.

So, Nate, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for your interesting stories. And I know you’re always open to talking to any of our small businesses that we deal with at the SPDC about the potential for exporting. So we appreciate the help and support that you give the businesses out here in Lake and Geauga counties. And you’re going to be continuing to do that.

So I would encourage anybody listening who would like more information about the potential for exporting, you can start with us at the SBDC if you want, or contact Nate directly. We are going to have his email address in our show notes. And we will also have the link to your website on there as well. So again, thank you, Nate. And it’s been a pleasure working with you. And we look forward to many more years of working with you with our clients.

Same here.

Thanks, Nate.

All right. Thanks, Kathy. Thanks Gretchen, a lot of fun.

Thanks for listening. Look for BizChat Ohio on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify. And subscribe to receive our latest episode And business blogs at bizchatohio.com. If you would like to learn more about the Ohio Small Business Development Center at Lakeland, please visit our website at www.lakelandcc.edu/spdc.