BUSINESS 2000:The Irish market is tiny, a drop in the ocean on a global scale, so many companies look further afield to achieve scale, writes Caroline Madden.

IF YOU want to make it in the entertainment industry, you've got to think big. For the aspiring actor this could mean upping sticks and relocating to Hollywood.

As the 10 young Irish wannabes featured in the new RTÉ documentary Hollywood Trialshave quickly discovered, though, there is no fast-track route to cracking Tinselstown and becoming an international acting sensation.

The same holds true for Irish enterprises trying to expand their business internationally. The Irish market is tiny, a drop in the ocean on a global scale, so many companies look further afield to achieve scale. In fact some businesses have no choice but to go global.

Take Havok, for example. Havok started out in life 10 years ago as an incubation project in Dublin's Trinity College.

It is now the world's leading provider of interactive software to digital creators in the international video games and movie industries.

Its software is used to produce special effects in films including The Matrix, Troy and Poseidon, and in games such as Halo 3and Assassin's Creed.

To cap it all, the company won a prestigious Emmy award earlier this year in recognition of its pioneering work which has made video games more realistic than ever before. How did this stunning success story come about?

"We weren't an overnight success," says managing director David O'Meara, "it was a lot of hard work."

Because of the market in which it operates, Havok has no Irish customers and probably never will, because Ireland is not a player in the global entertainment industry.

"So we had to be 100 per cent export [based] from the beginning," O'Meara says.

As a small company located at a great distance from California, the centre of the entertainment industry, it was going to be difficult to crack the market, so the big decision was made to relocate half of Havok's Dublin staff to a new base in San Francisco.

It was a risk that paid off. About five years ago, it began making significant progress, winning important clients and getting its product into big games and movies. "As a result of that, more and more people wanted to buy from Havok," O'Meara recalls.

However, just like the young actor who moves to Los Angeles in search of fame and fortune only to discover that every waitress in LA also has dreams of making it big on the silver screen, any business trying to crack the global entertainment industry faces stiff competition.

So, how did Havok stand out from the crowd and catch the eye of the industry moguls?

O'Meara explains that the first thing a potential customer will want to establish is whether the supplier is financially viable.

No big operator such as Disney is going to buy a digital software product on a one-off basis, he says, so it wants to be sure that the developer will still be around in 10 or 20 years.

"So you have to convince them you're financially viable," he says.

"You have to, second of all, convince them that your product is viable, and third, you have to convince them that you can support your product."

These are hard things for a small Irish company to achieve, he adds.

By setting up the California office, Havok overcame the difficulties presented by the eight-hour time difference between Ireland and the US west coast, which would have made servicing and supporting their clients a logistical nightmare.

Since establishing the base in the United States, Havok has gone truly global. The company now has six locations around the world, including a recently opened office in Japan.

What advice would O'Meara give to entrepreneurs hoping to some day follow in Havok's very large footsteps and expand their business internationally?

Firstly, if you want to go global and compete with the big boys, you've got to have great people working for you, he advises. "If people aren't great they have to be upgraded."

Secondly, you can't let anything come between you and your client. "In other words, staff interests or employee interests have to be secondary to customers' interests," he says. "Everyone in Havok knows that the customers come before our people."

Thirdly, the company must have real financial discipline to survive an international expansion.

"I think a lot of Irish companies fail, not just because of the idea that they have, but

because they're really not top-notch at running the business from a financial perspective," he says.

Having stuck rigidly to these rules, the world is now Havok's oyster.