The problem
A buyer in Rotterdam or Abidjan expresses interest. The exporter quotes, the buyer asks for a sample and a document list, and the deal stalls there, not because the product was wrong, but because nobody could produce a certificate of origin that matched the invoice, or explain why the HS code on the declaration differed from the one on the contract.
By the time this surfaces, money has usually been spent: on travel, on samples, sometimes on a container that is now sitting in a yard accruing demurrage. A readiness assessment moves that discovery to the front, where it is cheap.
The output is not a report that says “improve your processes”. It is a list of specific things that are missing, what each one costs to fix, how long it takes, and who has to do it
What we assess
Readiness is not a single question. A business can be commercially ready and documentarily hopeless, or immaculate on paper with no capacity to repeat the order.
The precise list varies by product and destination. The structure does not. Most first-time exporters have three or four of these and assume the rest can be produced on demand.
The document stack
The document stack
Questions
A standard readiness diagnostic runs two to three weeks from the point we receive your documents, including a site visit where the production process is material to the outcome. Larger multi-product businesses take longer, and we will say so before you commit.
It is the right time. The assessment is considerably cheaper before you have committed to a buyer, and the roadmap it produces is what most first-time exporters are missing when they start negotiating.
Export readiness is the general question: can you export at all, to anywhere. EUDR is a specific regulatory regime affecting seven commodity groups entering the EU. If your product is cocoa, coffee, timber, rubber, palm oil, soy or cattle and your market is the EU, you will need both, and the readiness assessment will tell you that in its first week.
That is a useful result, and a cheap one. The roadmap tells you what readiness would cost and how long it would take, which is exactly the information needed to decide whether to proceed, defer, or pursue a different market. We would rather tell you this than take a fee for a programme that was never going to clear customs.
Yes. Assessment, interviews, documentation and the final report are delivered in English or French, and document templates are supplied bilingually where the receiving authority requires French.
No, and you should be skeptical of any adviser who promises it as part of a readiness engagement. Buyer identification is separate work, and it is wasted effort until the file behind it can survive scrutiny.