While many small business owners might rest on their laurels after carving out a 90% market share, Martine Michaud had a different idea. As founder and president of Montreal software maker Micro-Acces, she was delighted that her software for child-care-centre operators had been so widely adopted in Quebec. But rather than stopping there, she wanted to expand into English Canada -- and that would mean jumping hurdles galore.

Growing any small business with a local or regional focus is tough. But Micro- Acces faced additional challenges -- its daycare software was written for French-speaking users only, it was customized to suit Quebec's daycare regulations, and it represented only a portion of Micro-Acces's overall business. What to do?

Michaud tackled the company's focus first. Although Micro-Acces was founded in 1988 to create specialized child-care-centre management software, it had expanded in the 1990s by adding a third-party software division whose products included a ticketing system for Les Grand Ballets Canadiens de Montreal and emergency-management software for the Canadian Red Cross. That division would have to be sold. "When you have too many centres of interest, you become diversified," says Michaud, "but you need to be extremely big to do that."

Retooling the company's software would be an even bigger task. Michaud spent years creating a product that was based on huge amounts of feedback from child-care operators. Before she'd come along, most managers had been relying on an assortment of off-the-shelf software. She created a suite of applications that met all of their needs -- from payroll and government reporting to attendance sheets and medical forms -- which saved them considerable time and money.

No doubt, such a solution would also appeal to daycare operators in English Canada. However, since child-care services are regulated differently in each province, simply translating the French software and trying to sell it as-is to the rest of the country wasn't going to cut it. The solution: Micro-Acces developers redesigned the software from the bottom up, working with child-care operators across Canada to incorporate a host of changes that would make it universally useable. For example, they modified the accounting application so that government subsidies could be easily tracked and applied to clients' accounts, whether the daycare was in British Columbia, where subsidies are delivered directly to the child-care provider, or in Ontario, where subsidies are first transferred to regional authorities, which then dole them out to providers. Upon discovering the popularity of child-care chains outside Quebec, developers created a Web component for the software that allows centre managers to input attendance and payroll data easily and transmit it to head office for processing. "Our clients educated us," says Michaud. "We designed by their needs."

Of course, there was also the language barrier. Not only did the company have to redesign its marketing materials for English-speaking users, but it also had to become bilingual. Michaud says they had to change everything, from the automated telephone system at their support centre to their salespeople's customer relationship management software. "We had to start thinking in two layers," she says.

They also had to rethink their training materials. Michaud puts high value on having a small staff -- Micro-Acces has about 40 in all -- because it helps maintain a direct connection with customers. "People in this business appreciate the human approach," she says. At the same time, having so few staff meant it would be impossible to fly people across the country to get new clients set up or troubleshoot problems. So the developers focussed on making the new software as user-friendly as possible and created online tutorials and help services in French and English, encouraging clients to try to solve their own problems before calling the support centre.

So far, the challenging expansion project has paid off. Since launching its English software in 2004, Micro-Acces has gained 350 clients in Ontario and is active in western Canada. It's gone so well that Michaud now has her sights on the U.S. Although it's a massive market with more than 100,000 child-care centres, Michaud says it looks a lot the way Quebec did back in 1988, with only 25% of centres using specialized software. So, having made the leap once, Michaud feels confident Micro-Acces can do it again. "We know how to adapt," she says.

Sidebar: It's a big, lucrative world out there

Expanding beyond one's home region can be tricky for any small or medium-sized business. Here are some tips to make the transition smoother

Leverage your assets. For small software firms and other tech companies, the key is to start with a reliable, robust base product. If you have that, you don't need to hire many more people to customize it and sell it to a range of clients. "It's one of the real benefits of companies based around knowledge-based assets," says Eric Morse, executive director of the Pierre L. Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship at the Richard Ivey School of Business, in London, Ont. "You get really nice leverage out of it."

Stay close to your customer. Small business owners have more direct communication with their customers than their bigger counterparts. It's a major advantage that you should never forget -- and never squander. "The entrepreneur has a level of information about the market that the big companies just don't have," says Morse.

Don't get lost in translations. Designing effective marketing materials for a different region can be tricky, particularly if you're going from French to English or vice versa, says Harold Simpkins, marketing professor at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University in Montreal. While a direct translation might seem like the easiest option, it rarely works. Spend the money on original marketing materials -- it'll be worth it in the end.

Get cultured, Canada. Has a wide range of regional cultures, so don't assume what works in one area will automatically work in another. Before diving in, make a point to understand the cultural framework and values of a new region you're looking at.