Entrepreneurs: Exporting the Dream

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The man who has scraped up enough money and courage to start his own business is still very much part of the American dream. In a day when U.S. big business is successfully exporting its machines and methods abroad, smaller American entrepreneurs are also exporting that dream. In Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, even Africa, hundreds of Americans—who often get their first business ideas while traveling as tourists—are setting up every sort of business from popcorn stands to advertising agencies.

Most of the expatriate entrepreneurs draw on ideas that have already proved successful in the U.S., but have yet to catch on or are just catching on elsewhere: self-service laundries, bowling alleys, drive-in car washes, quick shoe-repair shops. But the task of setting up a small business in a strange country is far tougher than setting up one in the U.S., where the failure rate is high enough even without the resentment from foreign competitors that the American abroad often faces. Nonetheless, the appeal of setting up business overseas is undeniable. Says Peter Pach, who went to Italy to break into opera as a basso and stayed to set up an auto dealership catering to tourists in Rome: "In Italy, I have a somewhat unique position. In America, I would be just another car dealer."

Washday Rolls. The first problem is getting seed capital. American banks are usually not interested in helping, and foreign bankers tend to shun the little man in favor of big companies. Many beginners have to scrape deep to supply their own capital; others are forced to borrow on a short-term basis at interest rates that range from 18% to 25%. These charges, plus high import duties on American-made equipment, make many foreign ventures much more expensive to set up than similar ones in the U.S.

Oklahoman Charles D. Whitwill had to beg and borrow to raise nearly $50,000 three years ago to open the first round-the-clock coin-operated laundry in Paris, at ten times what it would have cost him in the U.S.; then he had to educate French housewives in how to use it. Now his machines are coining profits for him 24 hours a day, and one member of Paris haute société sends her maid with the family wash in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. When Chemical Engineer Frank Manley, 32, and his wife fell in love with life in Laos, he sold their return airline tickets to set up a travel agency. Now, three years later, he has a thriving agency, sells Kodak cameras and International Harvester tractors on the side.

Scoring Strikes. Frank Gordon, a G.I. who stayed on in Germany to work for Radio Free Europe, began looking for his own business in 1957. "My idea was that America was 15 years ahead of Germany, and all I had to do was to find an American idea and tailor it to fit the German mentality." Result: he and Partner Leo Horrigan settled upon their own Musik fur Millionen, which pipes soothing background music into offices, bars, hotels and stores in six German cities. Three young Americans—Cecil Altmann, Robert S. Mackay, and John F. Herming-haus—pooled their savings and borrowed from their families to score strikes with bowling alleys in Berlin, Munich and Milan, last winter opened a ski slope in Berlin that uses man-made snow.