A self-assessment
Are you ready for the US?
I have taken different companies into a new market on several occasions. Sometimes as an outsider consultant, sometimes as an executive, sometimes as an owner. Every time, somewhere in the middle of the work, I hit a question I wish someone had asked me first. Usually about us, the company doing the expanding. Whether we were the kind of company this was going to go well for, before we spent a dollar finding out the hard way.
This is not a test. There is no score at the end, and nothing you click is saved or sent anywhere. You are answering these for yourself. What matters is how the questions make you feel. The ones that are uncomfortable to answer honestly are the ones worth expanding on.
Strength that travels
Most companies thinking about expansion are strong somewhere, and when you dominate a local market it is easy to believe you can dominate other markets. I have watched a market leader assume their dominance would cross the border with them, and then discover that what made them strong at home was being local, being known in their region.
The most probable scenario is that none of those advantages will exist in the US during the first stages of the expansion. The product that wins because it is genuinely better travels. The product that wins because everyone already knows your name back home does not.
Strip away your home advantage. No existing relationships, no brand recognition, no home-field anything. A US contractor sees your product next to three competitors he already trusts, and he has never heard of you. Which is closest to true?
Are you ready to scale?
The US is a big market. Even if you choose an entry strategy that is regionalized and paced, it is easy to suddenly find that demand for your product is higher than you anticipated. One big account or one huge project can trigger this, by showing you clearly that the US does not scale gently once you are having some degree of success.
And the problem is that you cannot turn demand on and off at will. Either you rise to the occasion, or they discard you and move on. At these initial stages you still have no reputation to rely on, no trust account built and groomed among your customer base.
A national account says yes next quarter. Not a pilot, the real thing, more volume than your best year compressed into months. Which is closest to true?
Who fights the change
The US uses a different system of measurement than most countries, imperial not metric, and it has its own lingo you have to learn to blend in. Roofers, for example, use squares as a main unit, one square being a hundred square feet, and they call many roofs shingles regardless of the specific type. Labor is expensive, forklifts are everywhere, and weight limits on the highways are strongly enforced. If you come from a country where those factors are different, you will have to adapt the way you load your cargo.
Bottom line, you will have to adapt many things along the way.
A distributor you want tells you the product name means nothing in English, the color range is wrong for the US, and he will not put it on his shelf until both change. Inside your company, what happens next?
Here is what you said
No score, as promised
No score, as promised. But you know which of those were easy to answer and which one you are still arguing with in your head. That is a signal of where the work is, for free, before it costs you anything.
And if you would rather just talk it through, that is what I am here for: