If Tim Smith knew in 2004 what he knows now, he would have first sold his line of microcurrent neuromodulation devices in Europe. The handheld devices, about the size of a computer mouse, are a new twist on an old principle that relays electrical impulses to relive pain and encourage healing.* In Europe the devices are classified as a consumer device—as opposed to a medical device—and are available without a prescription.

“My revenue ramp-up would have been much faster compared to the U.S. market, where a doctor’s order is required,” says Smith, the founder and CEO of Avazzia, based in Dallas. Smith is 70 and speaks like a man who knows his values and is confident in them. He says marketing to doctors requires U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval and an intense one-on-one effort to demonstrate to physicians that a new therapy offers good patient outcomes. This is one of many lessons he has learned in the past 10 years selling his product globally. Even for an experienced former Texas Instrument (TI) senior executive who had profit-and-loss responsibility for overseas manufacturing plants, there is always something new to learn about successful exporting. In an upcoming trip to Asia, he will work for the second time to open the Chinese market.

“The first time I tried a few years ago I hooked up with a distributor group who I later realized expected under-the-table payments,” he recounts. “I don’t pay bribes. It’s against my ethics and it’s a violation of the U.S. Foreign Corruption Act,” he says. He has had recent success in India, where the U.S. Commerce Department’s Gold Key Matching Service program offered him several pre-vetted possible distributor contacts.

“One of the gentlemen and I hit it off right away. And because he had been screened in advance, I knew his values and mine were a good business match. I can’t say enough good things about the Gold Key program.” (See sidebar.) The company recently made its first product shipment to India.

Smith says that something he learned well at TI was that when you run into a problem, go to the locals for their suggestions. This is a lesson he has relied on in Malaysia.

“In Malaysia, 30 percent of the population are not native, such as Chinese or Indian, but they control 80 percent of the wealth. So you work a lot with this non-native population,” he says. “But not always. To get our products in Malaysian hospitals, I learned it is imperative to work with a Bumiputera, or a native-born contact. Bumiputera, a Sanskrit word, translates to ‘prince (or son) of the soil.’ So it’s very important to understand these kind of distinctions depending upon the market you target.”

For Smith, successful business is about good relationships, especially globally. This has enabled him to create vital partnerships throughout the world, including with research foundations and medical schools in Malaysia and Romania. He said it is absolutely vital not to act like an American know-it-all when cultivating new markets but to be sincerely respectful. Smith follows this strategy implicitly, to the point where he is often asked if he is a minister.

“I think that indicates there is something about my demeanor that implies honesty and character,” he speculates. But invariably, he says, there will be misunderstandings in overseas-market relationships.

“You have to really watch people,” Smith cautions. “You can tell when you’ve screwed up and done something culturally insensitive by the look on their face. The key is to apologize immediately, then figure out what mistake you made so you don’t do it again.”

As an example, he cited two instances in the Philippines when he was with TI. He learned very quickly that to point at someone with a raised finger, as is done in America to indicate you need them, is very offensive in the Philippines. Instead, the custom is to point toward the ground. Smith also told of an American engineer who worked for him who was on a trip to a TI plant in the Philippines. The exec kept referring to an English slang word for transistor adhesive but was also a local slang word for a body part.

“He figured it out when every time he said the word, the female employees either snickered or looked appalled,” Smith says.

“In Asian markets especially, the best answer you can give is ‘I don’t know,’ rather than make something up,” he advises. “Because then when you give an answer you do know, you will be believed and it helps establish trust.” He does not speak a second language, noting that English is the language of business worldwide.

Smith’s line of 15 electric stimulation products gives a modern update to an old idea. Its history can be traced back to ancient Egyptians who used electric eels for revival and on through to the late 1800s, when the newly invented electrical current was used to make all sorts of wild, unsubstantiated medical claims. But for the past two decades the standard has been Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS). Smith explains that his devices also place electric currents though the skin, but that is where the similarity with TENS ends.

“Most TENS units are designed to overwhelm the nerve with too much current, causing it to shut down to reduce pain. Avazzia devices deliver small amounts of current at a higher voltage and promote peptide production to help relieve pain chemically,” he explains. “The neuropeptide response we get equals a morphine dump into the affected area, without the side effects that come with narcotic pain medicines.”

Avazzia works on what are known as C-fibers in the muscles as opposed to A- and B-fibers impacted by TENS, according to the company’s website. And because it delivers a small amount of current, it can be powered with two AA batteries as opposed to plugging into house current or 9-volt and other larger batteries.

Although ongoing medical partnerships overseas support the notion that Avazzia devices promote healing, the company cannot make that claim in the United States. But Smith says he supports FDA standards for medical-device approval.

“Our global customers appreciate the fact that we have FDA approval for pain relief. FDA approval is highly regarded in the rest of the world,” Smith says. He hopes to conduct U.S. clinical studies on healing, although stateside studies are very expensive.

But Avazzia does obtain other standard endorsements that are recognized around the globe. “In India we give the devices to the medical schools and they produce very credible medical studies accepted in most of the world,” Smith says. He adds that in India, hospital pain wards have up to 4,000 patients and the department heads are not happy with the available pain-management options.

“They don’t have the money to use narcotic pain meds, and over-the-counter meds like acetaminophen can have long term effects on the liver,” he notes.

Smith was motivated to invent his devices when he saw a neighbor suffering from neuropathy foot pain due to diabetes. He had recently left TI after 21 years and was looking for his next project. When his friend began reporting much better pain relief, his development tinkering led him to found Avazzia in 2004. He quickly added former TI senior executives with experience in developing and selling “small gadgets you carry around in your hand” and who are trained in the TI tradition to think strategically with every process. He also hires veterans and likes to have some interns around for their energy.

“I look for people with honesty and integrity who are really knowledgeable in their field. I also want self-starters and people who understand it is important to have fun at work,” Smith says.

Rickey Puckett, Avazzia’s comptroller and accountant, is a good example. A 22-year Air Force veteran, he also handles shipping for the company. Puckett says he considers shipping to be a function of his duties to control expenses. The company recently switched nearly exclusively to FedEx for an estimated savings of $10,000 annually. He stresses that there are still some countries where they will continue to use UPS, depending upon the in-country delivery network that performs best. Avazzia’s handheld products are relatively easy to ship and are packed to withstand a drop from shoulder-height to the floor. Puckett reports that Customs is the company’s biggest challenge. Some of its clients use freight forwarders such as ClearFreight to both batch orders for a better shipping price and to expedite and reduce Custom issues.

“They email me the Customs forms, I fill them out and then a third-party picks them up for the freight forwarder,” Puckett explains. “In South America, for example, we’ve learned it’s really critical to have someone there to walk the shipment through Customs. There is something about products with wires that are labeled medical devices that creates difficulties in some countries.” By contrast, he says, India and Canada are relatively simple destinations for shipment.

With about a third of the world’s population suffering from chronic pain at any given time, Smith’s vision is to place one of his Avazzia units in every household in the world.

“The U.S. has 5 percent of the population of the world, but we use 80 percent of narcotic pain meds in the world,” says Smith. He cites the side effects of narcotic pain relievers—including addiction or overdose—then notes that for the rest of the world his device is a lower-cost, more-effective solution for pain management.

Avazzia manufactures its product line, which includes applications for cosmetic and veterinary use, in Dallas. On the company website, the devices sell for between $400 and $3,590, depending upon the application. A few accessories are made in Taiwan. Smith feels there are unique sales benefits to manufacturing stateside, where consumer safety standards are perceived to be among the best in the world. He also says that the global clinical community is used to seeing many medical research and study papers out of Dallas, which is home to some of the most respected medical institutions in the world. This includes MD Anderson, where the first artificial heart was developed, and Baylor Medical Institute, which has a network of more than 3,000 board-certified physicians. At any given time, BMI has 500 ongoing active research investigations for drug, device and vaccine studies.

“People around the world know that Texas is different from the rest of the United States and that is mostly good,” Smith says wryly. He adds that the people of Canada, where he also easily exports his product under NAFTA, are a lot like Texans.

“They are former cowboys who are now drilling oil.”

Currently, Avazzia exports account for 10 percent of sales. His goal is to grow that to 25 percent in Asia and 25 percent in Europe. He says the company is working on a web-based plan in Europe. “Right now the Internet outsells what Walmart sells every day and is growing faster. There is a huge opportunity in that trend,” he explains. He also says that he does not think European companies can develop a competing product that could be marketed at the same selling price. “European countries have expensive social programs that are paid for by taxes at various business and retail levels. This drives up prices on European goods. European consumers have demonstrated they will choose a lower-cost import product.” He says this is a good opportunity for Avazzia in the European market.

Smith is a big believer in his people, talking with pride about how engineering interns he mentored at TI went on to work on the Lunar Lander project and move up to vice presidents for TI. While he recounts this experience, he does not mention that he also worked on successful components projects for the Lunar Lander and Apple computers earlier in his career.

To ensure the company’s viability when he may not want to or cannot serve as CEO, he makes sure his senior team is all trained to wear multiple hats.

“When I’m out of town, the company still runs,” he says proudly.

It was somewhere over Greenland, somewhere between the screams and cries and quick hits of stashed booze that Annelise Loevlie found her China distributor. At the time, she had no idea that she and her airline seatmate, Weir Er Qiu—friends call him Wei—would one day be in business together; she had no expectation of living that long.

Loevlie, CEO of Colorado-based Icelantic Skis, was completing the last leg of a trade show triangle that had seen her go from Salt Lake City to Munich before heading back to Denver on a nonstop flight to attend the Snowsports Industry America (SIA) show. Founded by childhood friends in 2006, Icelantic has always seen overseas sales—and European acceptance—as critical to their success. While the innovative nature and handmade craftsmanship of their product usually took care of acceptance, maintaining sales proved challenging—especially when it came to finding reliable distributors.

In the early days, the process was hit and miss, the biggest miss being when Loevlie signed up Austrian distributors without ever meeting them in person. The distributors had said, and written, all the right things, so right that Icelantic sent them a huge shipment of skis. Six months later, the distributors were nowhere to be found.

“Luckily, we had gotten prepayment, but they just went MIA,” Loevlie says. “Long story short, we didn’t do our ground check. It turned out they had made a lot of promises and burned a lot of bridges. What I learned from that is that it’s easy for someone to sell you passion but you can’t overlook professionalism.”

During the flight, Loevlie could not overlook how cool Wei remained when the plane was hit by violent turbulence causing it to drop hundreds of feet in a matter of seconds. That unleashed a torrent of wails and terror that, along with the turbulence, would last for hours. Loevlie attempted to maintain her cool with intermittent visits to a small bottle of wine she’d kept hidden in a seat pocket and focusing on, of all things, the screen image on Wei’s phone.

“It was this weird Chinese cat all glammed out in bling,” she says. “I decided it was a spiritual deity or something, I connected with it and decided we’d be okay. So I just sat on my hands and continued sweating.”

But Wei, Loevlie says, remained “peaceful,” sitting in the middle seat, watching an action movie, pretending not to notice Loevlie’s perspiration on one side or the prayers of the elderly woman on the other. At the time, Loevlie thought Wei might be one of the last people she’d ever see in her life. Gratefully, he wasn’t.

As fate would have it, Wei would be one of the first people she’d see at SIA.

“When he approached my booth, we both knew,” Loevlie says. “We smiled and laughed and hugged.”

Soon, they were talking business. Wei said he’d been following Icelantic for years and that pursuing an agreement to distribute the skis in China was the main reason he’d come to SIA. Loevlie was impressed with his knowledge of the company as well as the possibilities in China, where an emerging middle class has increased the demand for such Western leisure activities as skiing. But she had also seen how he reacted under pressure, had taken note of his confidence and assuredness. It turned out some of her most critical groundwork had been done in the air.

“We battled a storm together at 33,000 feet before signing the contract. We both liked that fact.”

The partnership has proved successful and the fact that Wei pursued Icelantic represented a sea change for the small company that, in its infancy, had to cold call distributors to try to convince them to carry their product and its revolutionary design.

Company founder Ben Anderson knew he wanted to design and sell skis from the time he was 14. Loevlie grew up with Anderson and had become close with him when she was selling him candy out of her school locker in the seventh grade.

“I had become a major sugar pusher and he was one of my best customers,” says Loevlie, who was born into an entrepreneurial family, her parents having founded concrete manufacturer Shotcrete Technologies.

All Anderson had ever talked about was starting his own ski company, so it came as little surprise to Loevlie when her friend called her and said he’d dropped out of college and was starting Icelantic. Loevlie, who was studying at the University of Vermont, agreed to come and work with him and other childhood friends once she graduated.

Anderson’s innovative design went contrary to the then-popular wisdom that said speed and stability derived from a ski’s length. He had found that he could make his skis faster and more stable by creating a shorter, wider design, one that valued surface area above all.

While Anderson played the part of mad scientist, it fell to Loevlie to sell Icelantic internationally. The first place the company had to go was Europe, not only home to the biggest manufacturers, but where she knew acceptance would go a long way to selling their skis in all other parts of the world. Though she’d studied business at Vermont, formal education was far less valuable a teacher for her new venture than the years she had spent traveling with her mom and dad as they grew Shotcrete.

Loevlie grew up as a “gypsy child, always traveling for business,” and had watched as her mother Mary Jane attempted to sell skeptics on Shotcrete’s innovative spray concrete. Loevlie was selling more than a new ski—she was selling a lifestyle; one that valued quality and creativity, since each of its skis were not only handmade but displayed original artwork.

As groundbreaking and well-made as the skis were, Loevlie knew from her time traveling with her parents that people go into business with other people, not products. She knew she would be tested by a male-dominated, European-based industry that was skeptical of American products to begin with—and this different-looking one specifically. There was always a test, she says. Her Russian contacts may test to see if she could hold her vodka, while Swiss counterparts may test her mettle by whipping out a magnifying glass to go over every inch of the ski.

“No smiling, no laughing,” says Loevlie, who is usually doing one or the other, often both. “Being an American company selling skis in Europe, quality and service were always the first hurdle. But, in the end, it didn’t matter as much where it was from as it did how well it was made. To do that, I had to show them. I skied a lot, which is another thing they wanted to know. I had to show them I could ski, that I understood the product and the culture.”

She showed them and Icelantic overseas sales soared. Ironically, the company that now sells in nearly 20 countries has a smaller percentage of overseas sales than when it was in its infancy. That’s only because sales in the U.S. have grown, helped by Icelantic’s acceptance overseas. Sales are strongest in Russia and Japan where, Loevlie says, “Made in America” has proven a key selling point.

“They’re really into American products,” she says. “We’ve found that all over the place. The fact that it’s made here really says something about quality.”

Icelantic skis are manufactured in a factory run by Never Summer Industries, a like-minded, Denver-based snowboard manufacturer that believes in overseeing every step of the creation process, from its local supply chain to construction.

Once made, skis are put on a pallet and moved to the company’s third-party warehouse run by the Colorado Distribution Group. In the beginning, production was always an issue. Sharing production time with Never Summer meant Icelantic was sometimes unable to fill full orders all at once and would have to ship orders in intervals. But Never Summer’s move into a new, larger factory this summer has enabled Icelantic to be much more responsive to its customers’ needs.

“The production schedule was always a big hurdle for us,” says Jon Mueller, Icelantic operations manager, who notes there is always at least one Icelantic employee in the factory to monitor quality control. “The Never Summer move has made things much more efficient for us. We’re producing a lot more product on-time and are able to ship full orders where, in the past, we may have had to wait and ship a couple times. Now we can send an entire order out with one shipment.”

To protect their handmade product, skis are not only bubble- and shrink-wrapped, but loaded into custom-made crates designed to mitigate damage. Icelantic moves all product domestically and into Canada via UPS. Orders to Europe are shipped from the East Coast, usually New York, on an ocean barge. Mueller said that the company will use different freight shippers depending on costs and, most importantly, “who can guarantee the skis get over on time.”

Asian orders are either shipped out of Los Angeles or Seattle or, depending on the size of the shipment and the time that is needed, moved by air freight with the added costs billed to the distributor. Mueller says that acting locally with suppliers, manufacturers and warehouses has proved critical to Icelantic thinking globally.

“It streamlines a lot of this process and has made it very convenient for us,” he says. “It not only supports our ethic of supporting local brands but it makes real sense for us as a business.”

That business is still very young, like the kids who dreamed it up, and still has many markets ahead of it. It has done so well identifying and selling in its present ports that Icelantic was recently honored with the Presidential “E” award for export excellence, the nation’s highest award for companies contributing to the growth of U.S. exports. The award was especially meaningful to Loevlie since she accepted it while standing next to fellow honoree and CEO of Shotcrete, Mary Jane Loevlie.

“Some of the best advice I ever got from my mom is that you will never know until you try,” Loevlie says.

Though, as she says, Icelantic is still in its “toddler years,” the company has grown not only in sales but reputation. Loevlie now sits on SIA’s board of directors. When she was selected to run the company last year by Anderson, who decided to focus on the company’s image and products as its chief branding officer, he said he “couldn’t think of a better person to take Icelantic to the next level.”

Today, a growing client list and her duties as CEO means Loevlie does not travel as much as she once did. That’s good and bad, she says. While she doesn’t miss the turbulence, she grew to really love the challenge and adventure of forging new relationships with business partners. Still, she’s gotten much better, sharper about those relationships, what she wants and who she is looking for in them.

“I’ve kind of evolved over the years,” she says. “Not super-consciously, but I find that while I’ll always want to see that someone I’m in business with has all their ducks in a row, I still have to like that person. I don’t want to be in business with a square-jawed numbers person.”

The lesson she learned over Greenland taught her it was okay to trust her gut—“I’m a bit of a hippie and Wei is Chinese so we both believe in fate, that relationship was meant to be”—albeit a fate that is thoroughly vetted. She’s developed her own way of looking at business and people and finds it’s still a rather high-flying experience for her, even if most of it is done from her office.

“Since I’m captain of the ship, I’ve found that deep breathing and a lot of medication helps keep us on a good course,” she says, cracking herself up. “Actually, what’s most important is that you define what you want and where you want to go and then be really conscientious about being sustainable, whether it’s everything that goes into the product you’re making or, just as important, the people you do business with.”