Expanding into foreign markets can help your company increase sales and profits, gain global market share, and protect against market fluctuations. The Colorado International Trade Office has two grant programs to help you begin or expand your exporting efforts.

Colorado Export Grant
 
Grantees will receive between $500-2,000 to apply towards travel expenses, trade show exhibition or attendance, business match-making services with potential buyers, distributors and/or sales agents, and/or other direct expenses related to developing a new target market for exports.

 

The grant is open to companies of all industry sectors, except agricultural commodities and food products. Applicants should be Colorado companies with 200 or fewer employees. Grantees may apply the award to a new target market of their choosing, and should be export-ready.

 

Applications are due Thursday, September 30, 2010. Awards will be announced Monday, November 1, 2010.

 

2010 Mexico Green Expo
 
Through the CO-EXist program, ITO is offering a subsidized trip to attend the upcoming 2010 Mexico Green Expo event from September 27 to October 1. For $900, Colorado cleantech companies will receive round trip airfare, four nights lodging at the Hotel Intercontinental, airport transfer, pre-screened one on one business meetings, shared exhibition space and a group dinner. There are only ten spots, so apply soon!
 

Call 303-892-3850 for more info or visit the ITO Website. 

  

Are you striving to reduce overhead operational costs? Expense Reduction Analysts (ERA) can help.

While your staff excels at managing your core operations and core operating expenses, ERA cost control consultants excel at reducing non-core (overhead) costs. Armed with thousands of data points from more than 14,000 successful cost-reduction projects, ERA can reduce your expenses 20% or more, with no compromise in quality or quantity.

 

How are such savings achieved?  ERA analysts have considerable professional experience within specific industries such as freight, packaging, telecommunications, etc (over 80 such operational expenses) so they know what can be negotiated on contracts, what current industry benchmarks and standards are, and also typically have key relationships within supplier industries.

 

ERA's goal is to achieve maximum savings without sacrificing quality or service levels.  In fact, in 70% of projects completed, clients have stayed with their incumbent supplier while realizing significant savings!  Furthermore, ERA operates 100% on a contingency-fee basis, deriving its only revenue by taking a percentage of actual savings generated over a 24-month period.

 

By utilizing ERA, you can balance the buyer-supplier relationship, remove all emotion from the negotiation process, and free up your staff to manage your core business and focus on their true competencies.

 

Contact James Moss, Regional Director for Expense Reduction Analysts, at jmoss@expensereduction.com or 720-256-5218  for more information. 

 

Do your continuous improvement initiatives need vision to ensure long term gains?

Many companies have invested resources (and hope) in 5S, but never really surpassed neat and clean-- the first 3 Ss. The proven visual-thinking model of Visual Workplace will help you minimize interruptions in production, improve quality, increase overall efficiency, and maintain those gains into the future.

The Visual Workplace methodology allows employees to take the lead in converting their areas into robust, highly functioning visual work environments that are self-ordering, self-explaining where what is supposed to happen does happen, on time, every time, day or night- because of visual devices.

Visual Workplace: Work That Makes Sense is a visual transformation program that will teach participants a step-by-step approach to creating a visual workplace, building knowledge into the workplace, and empowering teams to innovate new processes and communication tools to better the work environment.

Learn how applying this proven visual-thinking model to your workplace will build and strengthen internal improvement structures at our next webinar on August 19th. 
 
Register Here for the Aug 19 Visual Workplace Webinar