It's not about how to relate to the other companies. I can get all the advice I might need by flying to Houston to the International Quilt Market, which happens to be a $34 billion industry—yes, quilting—so the president of Olympus Japan can come with his entire team for a meeting, because it's closer than getting to Japan, although I also will go next week, if you have space. I can get all the information I need on how to make it successfully through that meeting as a younger Canadian woman entrepreneur with a fourth generation male business owner. What I can't get is what you specifically just said. In Canada, I can't get access to regulatory information that is pertinent for Japan, and so I need government assistance to prove to my suppliers that I'm not just asking for the sake of asking.
It is exactly what you said. There are all kinds of resources for business relationships with Japan, from my MBA all the way through to preparing to go on TV and to these contacts that I have in the government. What I need is some kind of government support so that I can go back to a Canadian manufacturer, a Canadian distributor, a Canadian raw materials supplier, and tell them that while I appreciate that their information is proprietary and they are not required to tell me anything about the ingredients beyond what I'm doing, there is potential for this export market in Japan, that there is a new trade agreement with Japan, that this is currently my largest distributor, and it is testing my product.
I need the clout behind me to push my Canadian manufacturers and suppliers to extract information from within their organizations that they otherwise have no obligation to give me. That's where the finite difference is. We can find everything we need about international business relationships. That's not where the challenge is.