First Flight Asia – Are you ready for Asia?

What is “First Flight Asia”?

Enterprise Ireland’s “First Flight” process is designed to assist clients in a systematic way with their export development needs.  Developing new export markets is an essential aspect to growing your business but it is expensive and time consuming.

The aim of First Flight Asia is “to save you time, expense, and to help you manage the risk associated with entering a new marketplace”.

How does “First Flight” work?

Using a self-assessment tool, developed by Enterprise Ireland, there are six areas of your business that you will evaluate to determine your business readiness to export to Asia. We would recommend that you undertake this self-assessment with a mentor who has direct experience of doing business in Asia.

The assessment process considers:

• Your company now
• Your company’s performance
• Management resources / expectations
• Export market knowledge
• The business case
• Funding/budget

A scoring mechanism is then applied to assess your readiness to export, in each of these areas. This will help you to identify your resource requirements and other issues which you may need to address to ensure the success of your export development plan.

What will you gain?

On completing the First Flight self-assessment process you will have a detailed export development plan to address the needs of your company and you will have identified effective solutions to meet those needs. This action plan will also be the basis for referring your company on to Enterprise Ireland’s network of overseas offices  in Asia.

Steps to participating:

There are a number of approaches to undertaking the First Flight process:

• Clients can undertake to complete the process with the support of their Development Advisor , and jointly develop an action plan to address the needs of the company.
• A panel of business people, with direct experience of doing business in Asia, have been selected to act as mentors in the First Flight Asia process. These are drawn from Enterprise Ireland’s Mentor network. A Mentor can be assigned to a company to assist them with the self-assessment process and work with them in developing action plans for specific export markets. 

Applications 

If you wish to work with a mentor with experience of Asia, please download the First Flight Asia Mentor Application Form, and send the completed form to:

First Flight Asia

For further details, please contact:

Marie Rooney Tel: + 353 1 206 6319