Atlanta’s small- to medium-sized companies should leverage a special advantage they have for doing business in the Netherlands, Atlanta native K. Terry Dornbush, the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, told GlobalFax during an interview here last week.
Although Mr. Dornbush stopped short of saying everyone should call him personally just because he is a native of Atlanta, he did say that the embassy’s staff in The Hague should be put to greater use.
“The one thing that surprises me,” he said, “is how few small- and medium-sized companies are aware what the U.S. embassy can do for them anywhere in the world at very little or no expense, …our employees (at The Hague) have an average tenure of 15 to 16 years so they know who’s who in the country and they know where the markets are.”
Mr. Dornbush was in Atlanta with Joris Vos, the Ambassador of the Netherlands to the U.S., to attend Dutch American Heritage Day Celebrations held here Nov. 21. The events were sponsored by the Atlanta chapters of The Netherlands America Foundation and The Netherlands Chamber of Commerce in the U.S.
Mr. Dornbush, who has held his post since March, 1994, underscored the business opportunities in the Netherlands and Europe for local companies. Prior to being ambassador, he had a career in corporate finance, business, banking and real estate.
“Anything that’s selling well here has a great potential certainly in somewhere like the Netherlands,” he said. “My advice is to contact the embassy and a good place to start is the Netherlands because everyone in the commercial area speaks fluent English and all of the other (European) languages…So you can communicate with the Dutch in English and have them as your interlocutors and have them cover the whole European market.”
by Mark Pierson