Green Worldwide Shipping is the presenting sponsor of Global Atlanta's Trade Channel. Sign up here for monthly global trade updates.
What a difference $5,000 makes: That was the takeaway from the Atlanta Metro Export Challenge Pitch Day competition Wednesday, where three companies took home a combined $30,000 to further grow their international sales.
Vying for a piece of that bigger pie, six firms — three in tech, two in life sciences and one in agribusiness — sought to show how they’d used the reimbursable seed grant as first-round winners. [Apply now for the 2025 cohort]
It turns out, intentional export expansion efforts can have exponential impact. Companies spun $5,000 into global gold by landing deals at trade shows, generating e-commerce sales through translated website materials, and covering travel costs to overseas client meetings.
Trans Globe LLC, a Woodstock-based food and commodities exporter, used its first grant to staff up with interpreters and change its mindset at the International Production and Processing Expo, a huge international poultry and feed trade show in Atlanta.
“We went in there to see what we could take from it, not what we could give to it,” said Karen Koppenhaver, who handles the company’s finances. “From this $5,000 we met an individual who was able to go to Latin America — Guatemala — and we earned, in five months, $1.5 million worth of contracts.”
That 300x multiple may seem like an anomaly, but other competitors saw similarly solid traction by concentrating on global markets, a process they said the small seed grants helped facilitate.
CodeMettle, which creates custom commercial software to ensure interoperability of military and government networks, started selling abroad 10 years ago with its first sale to Canada — one license. That same year, it made the first military sale, with 450 licenses.
With help from the grant, the Sandy Springs company of about 90 people is blending these two sectors, chasing foreign military sales now that it has the imprimatur of the notoriously difficult-to-access Department of Defense on a prototyping project.
“This opens a lot more internationally for foreign military sales,” said Vice President David Lassiter, who added that Portugal is now putting to use training exercises for the software developed in partnership with the U.S. military. CodeMettle’s software reduces the cognitive load of the soldier, reducing the number of tools needed and providing data and network visibility in one node to decision-makers.
“Our export thesis essentially that this problem that we solve is not unique to the U.S. or the U.S. military. In fact, it’s being repeated all over the world,” said Mr. Lassiter.
Closing the first (non-Canada) global sale this year was a major milestone, bringing international sales to 10 percent of revenue. The grant funding would help the company pursue sales in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Canada and Spain by attending defense trade shows like Eurosatory with the Georgia Department of Economic Development and other key industry events.
At times, going to trade shows can help define which strategies companies don’t want to pursue. That was the case with Dr. Noze Best, which provides its NozeBot nasal aspirator for infants, helping keep them out of hospitals for breathing issues.
Christy Brown, CEO of Dr. Noze Best, said traveling to Arab Health in Dubai helped the company look closer to home; the conference is where the company found its Canada distributor.
“We actually went to Arab Health thinking we would have more of a opportunity to meet those in Asia and the African countries that help us expand into those communities. But we came back really working with America and the Americas overall,” said Ms. Brown, the newest inductee into the Atlanta Endeavor community.
Using research from Georgia and the U.S. Commercial Service, the company also identified Australia as a key market and found distributors there.
Any new funding, she said, would aid in getting the CE mark that will be required for entering the European market by August 2025, an expensive compliance process that will culminate with the need to find sales channels across a bloc of 27 countries.
“The EU, as many of you know, is a vast landscape, so it’s not going to be just one distributor. We’re looking for multiple relationships to help throughout each of those countries. But again, we’re starting with our initial 10 that we’ve identified for our own internal work of what’s important based on GDP and so on,” Ms. Brown said.
The other medical technology in the conference, ProgenaCare, had a different experience. At the Dubai show, the company met the man who would become its well-connected “master distributor” in Jordan, a small market that John Daniel, a co-founder, said would become a gateway to the Middle East.
“Our distributor got us Jordanian FDA approval in six months, which is unprecedented. It usually takes 18 to 24 months,” Mr. Daniel said.
Made from donated human hair gathered from three salons in Cobb County, ProgenaCare’s keratin-protein-based wound care product makes sense for markets where human- or animal-derived biologics may raise cultural concerns, said Mr. Daniel.
Europe is also on the agenda for ProgenaCare, which has donated its products to Ukrainian hospitals to help treat soldiers wounded
“The next metro grant, we are going to continue the momentum that we started with the first grant,” Mr. Daniel said, noting that in two weeks, the company will be at the Medica conference in Duesseldorf, once again as one the select few companies at the Georgia booth.
The presentation was enough to earn ProgenaCare the top prize in the Pitch Day competition — $15,000 more toward its global growth efforts.
CodeMettle won $10,000, while Dr. Noze Best took home $5,000 and third place.
Perhaps the most creative use of the initial grant came from Eskuad, a software platform that companies can deploy to collect data in the field, replacing pen and paper = in places where cellular networks are sparse or non-existent.
Chilean founder Max Echeverria, who relocated to Atlanta a few years ago, used the $5,000 (and his local connections) to put on his event in Santiago, Chile, inviting his target customers to learn about a topic of interest.
That event helped him generate media interest but also two leads that look like they will close as pilot projects worth $50,000 each.
“Also out of the other 18 companies, we already sent seven proposals, and the rest of the money we used to bring some buzz in the press, leveraging Endeavor’s connections in the country, and we got more companies in our pipeline,” Mr. Echeverria said.
This year was the first that the Metro Atlanta Chamber and its regional economic development partners started to track the sales return on investment from its grants, said Stefan Harrigan, senior manager of global business development at the chamber.
“Companies that we supported, we found that from the $50,000 that we provided to this reimbursement grant, more than 3 million in export sales were supported. That’s remarkable from just 10 companies each receiving $5,000 each,” Mr. Harrigan said.
Since 2016, he added that the challenge has doled out $800,000 in grant funding and helped 130 companies support more than 4,000 jobs.
Perhaps important than cash, however, was the network and expertise that companies gained by participating in the program, Sander Biehn, CEO of Ready for Social, said in his pitch.
“We doubled our money inside the last year, from a run rate perspective, looking at the contracts that we have right now,” said Mr. Biehn, whose company automates social media activity for sales teams and has large clients in Germany. “But it wasn’t just the money, it was the relationships.”
First-round winners gain access to tailored consulting through the Georgia District Export Council, the Georgia Department of Economic Development, the Small Business Development Center of the University of Georgia and the U.S. Commercial Service.
Partners in the effort, billed as the largest collaborative economic development initiative in the state, are:
- Invest Atlanta
- Mayor’s Office of International and Immigrant Affairs
- Select Fulton
- NRW.Global Business
- Partnership Gwinnett
- SelectCobb
Delta Air Lines Inc. gave away three credits toward airline tickets at the Pitch Day event.
First-round winners in this year’s cohort are listed here.