MARKET-ENTRY MISTAKES
The start-phase mistake
A company decides to enter a new market. Within a fortnight there is a target, a budget, a name for the project, and a partner on the ground who is genuinely enthusiastic. Nine months later the project is quietly not discussed in the management meeting any more.
Nothing dramatic went wrong. Nobody was defrauded, the partner was real, the product was good. The order of the first four decisions was wrong, and by the time that becomes visible, all four have been paid for.
Where the obstacle actually sits
The mistake is not enthusiasm and it is not diligence. Companies that make this error usually did their diligence. They did it on the wrong question, in the wrong order.
A market entry has two kinds of question.
Revisable
Pricing, positioning, which trade fair, which city first.
Structural
Which entity holds the contract, which route the business is won through, who is permitted to deliver, where the liability sits.
Almost every market entry answers them in that order — interesting first, structural later — because the interesting questions are the ones a management team enjoys discussing, and the structural ones look like paperwork that can be handed to a lawyer once things are moving.
By then the structural answers are no longer open. They were fixed, silently, by the first partner conversation, the first quotation, and the first signature on a letter of intent. Nobody decided them. They were inherited.
Why experienced people still make it
Three reasons, and none of them is carelessness.
Momentum is a management virtue everywhere else. A team that moves fast on a domestic project is rewarded. The same speed applied across a border converts an open question into a closed one before anyone has read it.
The enthusiastic partner is answering a different question. They know what they can do. They do not necessarily know what your company must be able to prove to your own compliance department, your bank, or your insurer.
The structural questions have no natural owner. Sales owns the market. Legal owns the contract. Finance owns the number. The question belongs to all three and therefore to no one.
A fourth reason, less comfortable: the structural questions are the ones where the honest answer is sometimes no. Teams that have already announced a market entry are not well placed to ask a question that might end it.
If a decision cannot be reversed, it goes first — even when it is duller than the decision everyone wants to make.
Once the NDA is back, we answer those questions in one page, in five working days, before anything else has been signed. If the answer is that the corridor will not hold, that is what the page says.
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