Businesses bolster ties to clients in Israel

Rhode Island can expect a boost in exports due to a state-sponsored trade mission to Israel that saw 26 local business and government representatives spend nine days forging and fortifying commercial connections between the Middle Eastern country and the Ocean State, according to executives who participated.
Daniel Dwight, president and CEO of the Cooley Group in Pawtucket, said he expects the trade mission will generate “millions” of dollars of business for his company. “We’re real excited,” Dwight said. “It was an excellent trip for us.”
Robert “Brad” Mitchell, CEO of Virtual DBS Inc. in North Kingstown, expects roughly $200,000 in sales from the new connections he made in Israel. “We won’t know for sure until about 18 months from now,” Mitchell added, when agreements will be finalized.
Both businessmen gave high marks to the organizers and sponsors of the trade mission, the R.I. Economic Development Corporation and the Chafee Center for International Business/World Trade Center housed at Bryant University. Both said they would go on more trade missions in the future.
“It was very business-focused,” Mitchell said. “I’d recommend it to any other company.”
Raymond W. Fogarty, director of the Chafee center, said the Nov. 4 to Nov. 13 trade mission saw the visiting Rhode Islanders work “grueling” 12-to-15-hour days and nights, usually starting with 7:30 a.m. breakfast sessions followed by all-day meetings that, Dwight said, sometimes ended as late as midnight or 1 a.m.
No one treated it as a junket, Fogarty maintained, noting that participants “squeezed ourselves into coach,” foregoing first-class to save money. Business representatives paid their own way, while a federal grant covered the $20,000 aggregate cost for six government officials.
All the businesses profited from the trade mission, according to Fogarty. “Every one [of the 11 companies on the trip] came away with a sale in the end,” he told Providence Business News. Exact figures on the total financial impact of the mission should be ready in about a month, Fogarty said. A veteran of about 30 trade missions since 1988, Fogarty said the Israel trip was one of the most successful he can recall, based on the number of connections that businesses made.
He also pointed to a tangible spirit of cooperation and fellowship among participants. “The feeling was that everyone was going to help each other grow their businesses,” he said. “That doesn’t always happen on these trips.”
At the Cooley Group, Dwight said his firm already did business with Israel before the trade mission, but he went along to strengthen existing relationships with his Israeli customers and find more to trade with. A key part of his company’s mission is to expand globally, he noted, so the trade mission fit perfectly with Cooley’s future plans.
The Cooley Group has two sides to its business: it manufactures engineered weatherproof membranes for use in roofs, liners, reservoir covers and the booms used to contain oil spills, among other uses; and it has a commercial-graphics business that specializes in billboard signs. Dwight said the Cooley Group is responsible for about 70 percent of the advertising on American billboards.
In Israel, the Cooley Group already provides covers for its reservoirs – to prevent drinking water from evaporating in a nation where clean water is scarce – so Dwight said he used the trade mission to confer with his Israeli clients about the possibility of adding solar panels to the reservoir covers. It is an idea he said the Israelis heartily endorsed.
As for Cooley graphics, the Pawtucket company does a lot of business with an affiliate of Hewlett-Packard Corp. located in Israel, Dwight said, so the trade mission saw talks between the two firms about marketing and distributing more products in both nations. The Cooley Group has about 200 employees and, as a partial result of the trade mission, will hire more in the near future, Dwight said. “Despite all you read in the news about the economy, we’re having a great 2011,” he said, “and we expect 2012 to be even stronger.”
At Virtual DBS Inc., a high tech company that analyzes market-research data and specializes in cloud computing, Mitchell said he is now negotiating with “two or three” Israeli companies on business deals for what he expects will be roughly $200,000 in new business. Business connections he made on the trade mission are all new for his firm, he said.
Mitchell said his firm’s services are well-suited to a small nation such as Israel – “it’s the size of Connecticut,” he said – that must look to other countries to expand its markets. The kind of data-crunching that Virtual DBS does can help Israel identify the best markets for its products. “We can tell you the companies most likely to buy your product, even the households most likely to buy,” he said.
Virtual DBS Inc. has about 25 employees and, like the Cooley Group, is expanding its work force to add what Mitchell said would be 10 to 20 new workers in the next two months.
On the trade mission, Mitchell met representatives of an Israeli company he said was considering opening an office in the Silicon Valley in California. He urged them to put their office in Rhode Island instead. More businesses are located within three hours of Providence than three hours from San Francisco, he told them. “Just where Rhode Island sits, you’re better-suited to do business in Boston, New York,” he said, than anywhere in California. &#8226

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