Are You Ready to Export? Meet the Washington State Dept of Agriculture

Are You Ready to Export?

Join us this week for a conversation with Julie Johnson, International Trade Specialist for the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA). The WSDA’s International Marketing Program supports the health and viability of Washington’s food and agricultural businesses. The program facilitates buyer-seller connections, delivers resources and continually advocates for global market access. The team is uniquely positioned to promote communication and collaboration, so WSDA consistently serves industry needs.

As the WSDA Export Development and Outreach Trade Specialist in Olympia, Julie works to assist companies with the resources needed to become export ready. Trade specialists in Seattle, Othello and Kennewick directly assist individual companies and conduct trade activities. The WSDA International Marketing Program also has in-market representatives covering Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Mexico and Central America who are experts in exporting and marketing food and agricultural products to these markets.

About Julie Johnson

Julie is the Export Development and Outreach Trade Specialist for the Washington State Department of Agriculture’s International Marketing Program. In this capacity Julie covers the state in working with new-to-export and new-to-market companies to become export-ready and then refers them to the International Trade Specialists who specialize in the foreign markets. She helps to identify and provide resources to Washington companies and does the program’s company recruitment and outreach, resource referral, and market identification. Julie also works to facilitate contacts between Washington State companies and international buyers.

Julie joined the program in July 2012. She has worked over 25 years at the Washington State Department of Agriculture in various programs which includes eight years working in the Director’s Office as the legislative coordinator. She served on the Washington State Beer Commission as the Director’s representative for two terms. Julie studied at Western Washington University.

Wednesday Webinars

Wednesday Webinars with SBA Seattle is an ongoing series of free, virtual, webinars covering a variety of topics to benefit small business owners. On the fourth Wednesday of each month, we will be focusing on export assistance, featuring conversations with different members of the Washington Export Outreach Team (WEOT). Established in 2013 following a national mandate to do more to support international trade, WEOT is a collaborative team of local, state, regional, and federal export assistance agencies who provide you the tools and resources you need to sell internationally.

Each Are You Ready to Export? monthly webinar will feature one Washington Export Outreach Team (WEOT) organization where they have 45 minutes to present and have 10 minutes for questions and answers to provide a 500 feet overview and will cover areas such as:-The products and services and resources they provide-How the organization is structured and organized-A typical customer profile and how they are onboarded -A client success story

About the Host

John Brislin is SBA’s International Trade & Finance Specialist (Export Finance Manager) for Washington State, Northern Idaho and Alaska. He has over 23 years of private-sector international banking and trade finance experience working at Bank of Boston (Bank of America) and Bank of California (U.S. Bank). John has over 12 years of public-sector export trade finance and risk mitigation experience working at Export Finance Assistance Center of Washington (EFACW), Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM Bank) and SBA Office of International Trade (SBA OIT). He looks forward to working with Small Businesses so they can turn their export opportunities into actual sales and to achieve the ultimate goal of getting paid—especially on time—for those sales.