When I first got into this business over 20 years ago I was selling motels, B&B’s, other businesses, and land, and most of the time I was dealing with customers and clients that were of European/American backgrounds and were native English speakers like me.

My prior background involves work in other countries, international travel, and a couple of years living in East Africa, so I missed dealing with folks from other cultures.

It wasn’t long before we started dealing with significant numbers of people from other cultures buying convenience stores, motels, and dry cleaners. Our clients, the sellers, were still mostly Yankees of some variety. Often they would take the position that they wouldn’t sell to some of our ethnic groups of buyers. In every case we gave them the alternative to either accept all financially qualified customers or not do business with us.

Now in todays small business marketplace we have a rich mixture of customers from many different backgrounds and ethnic groups, and we are selling businesses for clients from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds.

It is not unusual to have the children of some of our customers translate for their parents in conducting a sale. Sometimes we have to study the culture a customer comes from in order to figure out why they react so differently than we expect to the process of negotiating and complying with contracts.

The challenges combine to make our work more interesting, giving us all more chances to learn about other cultures, and adds a rich variety to our work. One of the “byproducts” of our work is a broad range of friends we make while we are doing business with them, and it is great that they now represent such a diverse group.