While opening in a new country presents an opportunity for growth and revenue, it is also an opportunity to lose ours shirts — through unexpected issues and complications. As such, it is important for small businesses that don’t have gobs of cash to manage each opening carefully. That said, we now live in a world where opening abroad is much easier than it used to be. With Internet phone service, long-distance calls are cheaper than ever and flying to Australia from New York can cost little more than flying to Fayetteville, Ark. Most important, while there are certainly cultural differences among foreign markets, they are far less problematic than many presume. TerraCycle, for example, is basically operated the same way in every country where we have operations, from Brazil to Turkey. We do adjust for each location, but we try as much as possible to avoid making adjustments in order to maintain coherence in a small organization of just more than 110 employees. For TerraCycle, the first step in choosing a new market is to evaluate the legal, financial and language issues to make sure we have a good fit. The next step is to look at the market opportunity. Will our business model — in our case, recycling waste that has been considered nonrecyclable — work in that market, and is the market big enough to make the effort worthwhile? These issues are connected. Big markets — Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany — tend to have relatively simple legal and financial requirements, and they tend to use English as a primary (or, worst case, secondary) business language. This is not as true in Asian markets like Japan or South Korea, which are immense but handle business very differently (and not in English).