On Course | We Develop Your Business

sales, marketing, communication, localisation, business development

You are a foreign company, you want to enter the Belgium market and need support?

You want to enter the Belgian market and sell your products or services as fast as possible without all the hassle of setting-up a new subsidiary, hiring new employees or de-localizing your existing staff?
On Course is a business development company that can help you. We can help you reduce the administrative hassle and achieve a fast time-to-market and reduce the cost-to-market.
We will help you setup your sales, marketing and communication. We will get the sales going and when you are ready, we will hand everything over to you. We will even train the sales and marketing people you decide to hire at that time.

As we work in tight collaboration with you in a real partnership, all the information flows back to you so that you can get control of it when our job is done.

Have a look at the various building blocks of services we are offering to get a better idea of what we can do for you.

There are also other ways of entering any new market. Let's examine the 4 options:

Work with a distributor or reseller
Work with a consultant
Send one of your managers as expatriate
Work with a specialised business development company such as On Course

Here is an overview of the advantages of each approach.	Distributor	Consultant	Expatriate Manager	On Course
Does market analysis		X	X	X
Has market knowledge from start	X	X		X
Does operational reporting			X	X
Does financial reporting			X	X
Reduces your time-to-market	X			X
Reduces your cost-to-market		X		X
Increases sales	X		X	X
Focuses only on YOUR product		X	X	X
Sets up sales channels			X	X
Sets up communication channels			X	X
Gains market knowledge for you		X	X	X
Flexibility when changes occur in your business		X	X	X
Adapts your product/service to Belgian market	X			X
Helps you setup an office			X	X
Involves you in all decisions & reports on it			X	X
Is transparent in all actions		X	X	X
Trains your people		X	X	X
Works as strategic partner				X
Lets you take over once project is finished		X		X

Work with a distributor or reseller

The success of your product or service lies entirely with the distributor or reseller. Depending on the attention your product or service receives from your distributor or reseller, it could be a success or a failure (often depending on the financial benefits he gets out of selling your product or service).
Distributors and resellers have many more products in their portfolio. How can you convince them that your product is the most important one and that they need to focus on it?
What is the distributor exactly doing for you, does he report on a timely basis and are you sure he does not hold back information?

Watch out for exclusive partnerships as they could easily backfire. If the distributor or reseller is not performing as you expected him to do, it will come down to lawyers to put an end to your exclusive contract.

Conclusion: Distributors or resellers can be a good solution for some products but you loose a lot of control over your product and do not gain country knowledge.

| back to top |

Work with a consultant

Consultants are a good solution to give advice on what to do.
However, most consultants do not like to actively do the work that is implied by their consultancy. Nevertheless, excellent consultants can be found in Belgium who can give you great advice on doing business in Belgium, if this is what you want.
If you want more than just advice then you need a team of local people that can help you set up your presence in Belgium.

Conclusion: Consultants can be a good solution to get advice on the best way to approach the market but do not allow you to progress fast enough.

| back to top |

Send one of your managers as expatriate

The Belgian market is really unique as we have three official languages with three communities that are completely different from one another. These differ not only from a language point of view but even more from a cultural point of view. People do not even greet each other in the same way !
For non-Europeans and even for some Europeans, this is a shock. Only having experience with Belgium allows you to know what you should do. Sending an expatriate executive, even senior, can be very costly and time-consuming. It will not yield the success you have planned in the beginning. The better solution is to send the expatriate executive once the base has been setup for your business.

Conclusion: Expatriate managers are a good solution once the business has been setup.

| back to top |

Work with On Course

Our job is to generate sales and make sure your product or service is known in Belgium. The faster, the better.
One of the aspects is adapting your product to the specifics of the Belgian market from a cutural, language, communication and legal point of view.
As we only have YOUR product to represent each time we are 'on the road' we focus solely on YOU and YOUR customers.

As our goal is to get you on the market, we strongly believe that our approah should be completely transparent (operational and financial) and that you should get all the market, culture and country-specific information we can find. Because once our project is finished, it is up to you to continue and therefore you should be well prepared.
We make sure that you receive all the market information so that you can continue the job that we started.
Whether you are offering products or services, we can provide you with a turnkey solution to approaching the Belgian market.

| back to top |