Mark Lyn­der­say

"I went home on ma­ter­ni­ty leave and when I came back in 1998, the In­ter­net had ex­plod­ed," said Sarah Car­roll, her face still show­ing some of the sur­prise of that life change.

Car­roll had been work­ing on brand and mar­ket­ing eval­u­a­tions and while learn­ing to be a first-time moth­er at home, had spent some of that time build­ing her first web­site.

A trilin­gual spe­cial­ist in mar­ket­ing, she had been do­ing work on in­ter­na­tion­al ac­counts and quick­ly re­alised that rais­ing her son and trav­el­ling the world would be in­com­pat­i­ble.

By 2005 she was do­ing web­site eval­u­a­tions for com­pa­nies and five years ago found­ed Grow­Glob­al, a com­pa­ny ded­i­cat­ed to re­fo­cus­ing com­pa­nies of all sizes on the mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions pos­si­bil­i­ties of the In­ter­net through ef­fec­tive web sites.

Car­roll ar­rived in T&T last Fri­day as a guest of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies through its Cen­tre for Lan­guage Learn­ing. The cen­tre launched its Lan­guage and Com­pet­i­tive­ness web­site yes­ter­day and the In­ter­net en­gage­ment coach was al­so com­mit­ted to a se­ries of lec­tures with Uni­ver­si­ty staff, sec­ondary school stu­dents, Ex­porTT this week and on Thurs­day, will present a full day of coach­ing for any­one in­ter­est­ed in us­ing their web­site to com­pete ef­fec­tive­ly on the Web.

"We have a roadmap for how it's done," Car­roll said, "it's not a quick fix, but in six months to a year, the process can com­plete­ly tran­form a busi­ness."

Grow­Glob­al has done 600 eval­u­a­tions of web­sites over the last ten years and coached 3,000 peo­ple in work­shops con­duct­ed around the world.

The com­pa­ny has worked close­ly with the UK gov­ern­ment to de­vel­op not on­ly state Web com­mu­ni­ca­tions, but al­so to en­able a se­ries of in­ter­ven­tions for small- and medi­um-sized busi­ness­es, teach­ing them to par­tic­i­pate more ful­ly in Britain's thriv­ing e-com­merce mar­ket­place.

"It's a big win for a gov­ern­ment," Car­roll said. "Small com­pa­nies do this pro­gramme and they in­crease their sales a hun­dred per cent, they grow, they em­ploy more peo­ple. Gov­ern­ments see more rev­enue, they re­ceive more in tax­es."

An im­por­tant com­po­nent in web eval­u­a­tions for the Brighton-based com­pa­ny is the in­ter­na­tion­al­i­sa­tion of web­sites, be­ing able to de­liv­er in­for­ma­tion in mul­ti­ple lan­guages and cur­ren­cies and e-com­merce.

"You can't do busi­ness in the UK with­out an e-com­merce com­po­nent, there's just no point."

The UK does have a sta­ble bank­ing in­fra­struc­ture and a com­mit­ment to par­tic­i­pat­ing in in­ter­na­tion­al trade, not just as an im­porter but as a sig­nif­i­cant ex­porter of both goods and ser­vices.

Grow­Glob­al op­er­ates with just five full-time em­ploy­ees but en­gages a much larg­er ros­ter of spe­cial­ist free­lancers and con­trac­tors to ful­fil its projects.Coach­ing com­pa­nies to present them­selves in­ter­na­tion­al­ly through their web­site pres­ences with a fo­cus on ex­port and in­creas­ing sales is at the core of the com­pa­ny's busi­ness.

For the UK Gov­ern­ment, Car­roll works on projects to coach se­lect­ed com­pa­nies and iden­ti­fy their mar­kets through sub­sidised train­ing and a full web site au­dit.

"There's no point hav­ing the web site say­ing one thing and the com­pa­ny do­ing some­thing else," Car­roll said.

"It's of­ten nec­es­sary to walk things back to first prin­ci­ples to get the right kind of align­ment be­tween the com­pa­ny's mis­sion and its ex­e­cu­tion on­line."

"We did a project with a British ca­ble man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny, re­al­ly the last busi­ness man­u­fac­tur­ing what is now a com­mod­i­ty prod­uct in all of Eu­rope, who had gone niche and spe­cial­ist with their prod­uct but had a web site that made them look like they made gener­ic ca­ble."

"First we re­fo­cused their web­site on what they were ac­tu­al­ly do­ing and they are now plan­ning to move in­to di­rect sales via the new web­site."

Trav­el­wrap (http://ow.ly/WQNfd), an­oth­er client, is drop­ping vis­its to ex­hi­bi­tions and in-per­son sales pitch­es in or­der to put more mon­ey and en­er­gy in­to new web-based ap­proach­es.