'I could feel the excitement and enthusiasm for our products'

The face-to-face connections I made on the trip were the most valuable for me – it’s so much easier to do business when you’re talking to someone in person. And the people we met in Atlanta were warm, welcoming and enthusiastic.

Aside from Southern charm, I didn’t know what to expect from the city. Atlanta is quite small in American terms, but I was struck by how many headquarters of large companies were based there, as well as the number of local entrepreneurs, many of whom I met during the week’s networking sessions.

In fact, one of my top moments was at the welcome reception in Atlanta, which local business owners and potential customers were invited to. I set up a stand of my chocolates for the start of the evening and I could feel the excitement and enthusiasm for our products as everyone crowded around for a taste. The way we usually market our chocolates is to get people to try them, so the stand was a great way to introduce Montezuma’s at a grassroots level.

That evening I also met two buyers for Whole Foods Market – a store that was my top target customer before the trip – and made some good connections.

Branding was the theme of one of the week’s most useful sessions. I discussed Montezuma’s with the three expert panellists. We like to promote the fact that we’re a British company, but our name doesn’t really suggest where we’re from. However, the experts didn’t think that was a problem.

We have a small union jack on the back of our UK packaging, but for the products we sell in the US we’re thinking of making a slight change – we’d bring the symbol to the front of the cartons, where it would be easier to see, but still be quite discreet.

In terms of having someone to represent us in the US, we need to decide whether we should be bringing our own staff over or hiring in the States.

Americans appear to like doing business with British people, but our staff know little about the American market – we almost need a little of each. Overall, it was a really valuable week – I’m now much clearer on my strategy for taking Montezuma’s to the US market.

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