Trade Missions and Export Development Editing and Proofreading Services

A company that has never exported is persuaded to spend twelve thousand pounds and a fortnight in a market it has read about in a brief. Sometimes that brief is the most valuable document the business will read all year. More often it is a compilation of national statistics, a paragraph on cultural etiquette and a list of trade fairs, and the company comes home with a folder of business cards and an unrecoverable cost.

We edit what trade promotion bodies, export consultants and mission organisers produce — market briefs and country reports, sector opportunity assessments, trade mission itineraries and delegate packs, buyer meeting briefing notes, exporter readiness assessments and diagnostics, route-to-market and distributor guidance, regulatory and market access summaries, pricing, incoterms and logistics guidance for new exporters, grant and funding application material, in-market partner and agent introduction documentation, post-mission follow-up guidance, and evaluation and outcome reporting for funders. Our editors work on the brief a company makes a spending decision from.

The market brief is where export support is either useful or ornamental, and its realism is the whole test. A brief opening with population, GDP growth and a statement that the market presents significant opportunities for UK exporters could have been written about anywhere, and it flatters the reader into a decision. We write these so the market is described in terms of what a company of this size can actually reach, since a market of eighty million people that buys exclusively through three distributors is a market of three; so the route to market is stated with what it costs and how long it takes, including the realistic period before first revenue, because companies budget for the trip and not for the eighteen months; so the specific barriers are named — certification required before a first sale, local partner requirements, payment terms customary in that market, the tariff that makes the product uncompetitive — rather than gathered under regulatory considerations; so competitors already serving that market are named, given that the commonest error in an export brief is describing demand without describing who is already meeting it; and so the brief states plainly who this market is not suitable for. Companies that read this and decide not to go have received good value, and the mission that sails with eight serious delegates beats the one with twenty.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including company information, market intelligence and programme material. We are editors rather than trade, export or regulatory advisers, and we offer no view on market opportunities, requirements or business decisions. What we can do is make a brief realistic enough to be acted on either way.