Oxnard Center Assists Exporting Efforts : Trade: Agency opened by the SBA and state commerce department helps firms find resources and get the help they need to sell goods overseas.

Wanted to buy: beet pulp pellets, instant coffee and ball-bearing swivel casters. For sale: “Earth Day” T-shirts, Russian helicopters, shark fins and sea cucumbers.

Where can a business find such an esoteric, computerized list of international sales leads? At the Export Small Business Development Center in Oxnard.

The little-known agency, which is a new program mounted by the federal Small Business Administration and the California Department of Commerce, offers free assistance to small and medium-sized businesses in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties that are interested in international trade.

The center, which opened in Oxnard in the fall, and an SBA export office in Los Angeles are the first of their kind in the country. They are a cooperative effort between the public and private sectors designed to increase trade, said Alyse Rozenzon, the administrative assistant who runs the center in Oxnard.

The SBA chose California to start the program because of the state’s large export potential, said Gladys Moreau, director of the export center’s Los Angeles headquarters.

And the demand has kept up with expectations. So far, people from 88 companies have come in to talk with the Oxnard center, Rozenzon said. Of those, 25 have been put in touch with consultants and are laying the groundwork to begin exports.

Many business people think that exporting is just for large companies, Rozenzon said. But of the more than 100,000 companies exporting goods in the United Sates, only 15% have an average shipment value that exceeds $25,000. In the past, companies that wanted to try exporting or importing had to navigate seas of red tape on their own. The purpose of the export center is to get people started by helping them find the resources and get the help they need.

The Export SBDC maintains a list of consultants from the private sector who can help companies--at no charge--with specific problems related to international trade. The consultants, who are reimbursed through the center, can help with anything from designing packaging to drawing up international letters of credit.

Bill Jennings of Santa Barbara-based Olympian Motors, for example, has used the center to help find a way for his company to export inexpensive, four-wheel-drive vehicles to Bangladesh.

“It turns out there is a tremendous bureaucracy out there,” Jennings said. But with some help from the Export SBDC, Jennings got the cooperation he needed from the Bangladesh government. He hopes to have a manufacturing facility in Bangladesh within a year.

Right now, people in Third World countries are driving three-wheel “auto-rickshaws” with outmoded two-stroke engines, he said. There is demand for a safer, more stable four-wheel car that can compete on a cost basis, but the market has never been large enough to attract General Motors-type companies. It is a tremendous opportunity for a small exporter, he said.

Mark Munson, president of Diversified Fitness Equipment in Oxnard, also sees opportunities overseas. The company, which buys and repairs used fitness equipment, then resells it at 30% to 40% less than the cost of new equipment, is looking to expand its international sales. In the last six months, the company has received orders from Japan, the United Kingdom and Malaysia. It is pursuing distribution agreements in Australia, Chile, Kuwait and France.

“For this company, overseas is a completely untapped market,” Munson said. “If a small company does anything unique or better than most other companies, the potential is unlimited.”

So far, the Export SBDC has helped Munson’s company with its international distribution agreements.

It’s possible to export on your own, said Munson, who before joining Diversified Fitness Equipment ran his own export-import business, but it’s a lot harder. “Organizations like the Export SBDC can save you months of legwork.”

Although the U. S. trade deficit has been decreasing over the last five years, Department of Commerce figures show that American companies still imported $66 billion more last year than they exported.

“Increasing exports is a top priority in the U. S. government,” Rozenzon said.

The United States lost its export edge in part because there hasn’t been a concerted effort by the government and private industry to work together to foster trading opportunities, said Tom Rainey, executive director of the California Central Coast World Trade Center Assn., which is sharing its offices with the Export SBDC. “Meanwhile, the Japanese and the Germans have been beating us out.”

Many companies are not even aware that their products have export potential, Rozenzon said. For example, the World Trade Center recently surveyed businesses in Ventura County and concluded that 860 could be exporting their products, but are not.

“It’s very intimidating to go overseas with different languages, cultures, different ways of packaging goods,” Rainey said. “But with modern telecommunications, it’s just as easy to send products to Australia as to Des Moines.”

In fact, domestic companies are so blind to export opportunities, it sometimes takes a visiting foreigner to point it out, Rainey said.

Some international students at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, for example, recently began exporting snowmobiles to Finland and Levi’s blue jeans to Russia.

The students saw an opportunity that others had missed, Rainey said, and they used the Export SBDC to get some advice.

The Export SBDC gives clients free access on a computerized network, which is like high-tech classified ads, read by more than 3 million people in 60 countries.

(Although it is an electronic bulletin board and database that can be accessed through World Trade Center offices around the world, portions of the list are also published regularly in a variety of journals in many different countries. In the United States, parts of the list are run in publications as diverse as the Alaska Journal of Commerce and the Daily Shipping News.)

Listings on the network run the gamut from staples such as powdered milk to frogs to rose oil. Anyone interested in importing something on the list can find out how to get in contact with the company that has the product for sale, and vice versa. (Munson, of Diversified Fitness Equipment, plans to begin importing some manufacturing supplies by advertising on the World Trade Center’s computer network.) And a local company with something to sell can list the product for a week at a time in hopes of attracting an overseas buyer.

Hetherington Inc., a Ventura-based company that manufactures high-temperature heating systems and industrial furnaces used by manufacturing companies and research labs, contacted the center.

“We wanted to know more about our market niche abroad,” marketing manager Jean Dickenson said. The company had been receiving orders from overseas, but hadn’t developed a systematic marketing effort to capitalize on them.

“We know the market is there,” she said. “We want to exploit it further.”

Hetherington is focusing its efforts on Europe and Japan.

In addition to helping with market research, the Export SBDC has helped the company develop a form for its letters of credit.

Rainey likes to tell the story about Jim McEwan, president of McEwan Industries International in Ventura. McEwan developed an elastic shoestring for runners (because their feet expand when they run) and found a ready market in Japan, where it is customary for people to remove their shoes when they go indoors. With elastic shoestrings, the Japanese didn’t have to untie their shoes, Rainey said. The product was a big hit.

If you can identify a market, there is usually a way to go after it, Rainey said. “There is a lot of chaos and confusion internationally, but the flip side is there’s also a lot of opportunity.”