Now You're Talking Turkey

A Lens of Business Development Experiences in Turkey.

Step 1. Get yourself to Turkey.

Step 2. Get a haircut and a real job.

Step 3. Enjoy!

The Turkish people are generally friendly and helpful and Turks love to shop. Turkey's location - bridging Europe and Asia, with a rich history and beautiful environment is great for tourism. Turkey's Black Sea, Aegean and Mediterranean beaches are ideal locations for retirement or summer home investors. Turkey is rapidly growing and changing and so there are many opportunities for investment in infrastructure or helping to increase productivity in agriculture and horticulture, energy and manufacturing industries. Turks are getting into sport and recreation. They highly value education. With the move to join Europe, Turkey needs business reforms and marketing. Lots and lots of opportunities for doing business in Turkey.

From New Zealand (the ends of the earth)

In September 2003 we packed all of our belongings into suitcases and flew from Auckland, New Zealand to Izmir, Turkey. We were traveling with an infant and to release other passengers from that stress we had a couple of whole day stopovers in USA and Germany. The trip took us about four days - about 24 hours in the air. The alternative route through Asia is not much different - 22 hours in the air. Jet lag lasted about three or four days.

A potential/future business partner met us at the airport. We stayed in a friend's apartment and had one week while they were away to find an apartment, furniture and survival Turkish.

Our apartment was in an area where the locals were used to foreigners. It was cheap (about 1/4 the price we were paying in NZ) and close to public transport and a language school.

Residence permits are required for car ownership and connecting services (electricity, water, telephone, internet) in your own name. Often Turkish friends or foreigners who have permits will sign up for you.

Obtaining a residence permit requires forms, passports with photocopies of your last entry to Turkey, photographs, marriage certificates translated into Turkish and proof of financial support (money in a Turkish account). So applying for a long term residence permit before you spend your start up cash is a good idea.

You can apply for a work visa from your home country, but if you are exploring business opportunities it is advisable to spend some time in language and culture learning on a tourist or student visa first. Visa fees and terms vary from country to country - New Zealanders can get a three month tourist visa for free. Applications for work permits from withing Turkey require a current residence permit.

Once you've got somewhere to live and some of the initial paperwork sorted, it is time to get a haircut and a real job.

Turkish is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 10–15 million native speakers in Southeastern Europe and 55–60 million native speakers in Western Asia.

The Turkish alphabet has 29 characters, with eight vowels. When you have learnt how to pronounce these you can read and say Turkish words with confidence because the language is phonetic.

Learning grammar is more difficult. Sentences end with the verb so the phrase "Learn Turkish!" in Turkish is "Türkçe ögren!", literally "Turkish learn!".

Words are agglutinated with tense and pronoun word stems added as suffixes to form long words. I have struggled with this, often talking about myself in the third person because I forget to add the "-im/ım/um/üm" suffix for "I/me/my".

Turks are very hospitable and friendly people. As a business person, you will want to make friends and connections with people.

Many Turks learn English and especially in the major cities you will find Turks who are willing to practice their English with you and help with all sorts of things as you adjust to Turkey. You will find that Turkish culture may be quite different to your own.

A good way to start to fitting into the culture is to get a Turkish haircut.

Turks have a low level of trust and often are more trusting of foreigners than of their own people. It takes lots of time and tea drinking to build relationships.

For example, I met a lawyer in a neighborhood park when our sons were playing together. He spoke excellent English and we started talking about what we did. When he discovered I do web design, he said he wanted a website. However, it took a full year of getting to know each other before we even started to work on the website project.

I own shares in Vista Interactive, a media production & IT company specializing in producing highly effective websites. Vista Interactive is the leading TYPO3 agency in Turkey and the websites they build for our Turkish and International clients often feature localization or multiple languages.

When I joined the company, my partners were in the process of establishing a sister company in the training and consulting industry and I learned a lot about starting business in Turkey through their experiences.