Historically, a Crusader fought in the holy wars to to reclaim the Holy Land.

I would define an “Economic Crusader” as someone fighting an economic war to improve the economy of their home land.

Who are the best Economic Crusaders right now? The Chinese.

If you where to start a successful barbershop in England, you may increase GDP but only slightly.

Your revenue likely subject to VAT and your profits taxed at the appropriate rates would increase governments revenue very slightly.

But if your customers where already buying haircuts, we now have 2 barbers in town instead of 1, and still no economic growth.

For the Economic Crusader to improve the economy of their homeland, they should focus on exporting to international markets. Instead of competing over the money already inside their nations economy, they go to international markets, take capital from abroad and bring it home.

How does one join the Economic Crusade?

1. Start selling to global markets.
   1. Some countries have low/no import duties from the UK (Beware: getting goods back out of the country for refunds/returns can be difficult)
   2. English speaking markets don’t have translation costs (Beware: may have cultural differences).
   3. Research purchasing power parity (Beware: FX volatility can create losses or unhappy customers if large fluctuations happen in between purchase and refund)
   4. Know your HS codes: https://www.gov.uk/trade-tariff
   5. Know your plug sockets: https://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plug-voltage-by-country/ (Note: look into a “multi country switching AC adapter”)
2. Start buying from UK suppliers instead of from global markets.
   1. This is equally important, if you where to generate $10m selling in the USA, but import all your goods from china for $9m, only $1m makes it back to the UK.

Some more brutal thoughts:

• Position in the value chain matters, vertically integrating to owning the entire value chain for products is important so that we don’t re-industrialise too hard and become a manufacturing country.
• Exports matter more if value creation and labour inputs are disconnected through leverage of technology. Creates possibility to scale, otherwise it’s just a high paying job.
• America is great at exporting infrastructure, Shopify earns off every global merchant, Apple have the App store.
• America is also great at ecosystem lock in. They have Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Apple.
• China are great at suppressing the Yen, Trump successfully dropped the dollar on purpose by 20%, sometimes you have to make your residents poorer in the short term.
• There’s a balancing act between buying UK and buying the best inputs, a UK only smartphone would not be competitive on any level.
• There’s a balancing act between a true economic crusader who uses their operations to make the nation richer vs a founder who takes dividends and has a profitable company.
• Buying UK-made goods doesn’t strengthen the economy if those suppliers depend on imported components.