A recent SMPS (Society for Marketing Professional Services) Marketer magazine included several articles about what architects, engineers and contractors need to consider when they are planning an international expansion. The writers suggest, not surprisingly, that patience, cash and cultural sensitivities are truly important. In other words, you can’t rush the process, you had better be prepared to spend quite a large amount of money building your base and you must absolutely appreciate there are different cultural rules in different parts of the world.
Of course, these variables in part explain why things can go truly wrong, especially the suggestion that large investments and significant resources may be required. Long-term investments requiring significant ash outlays over prolonged periods are scary in the best of times and downright “dangerous” in unstable economies. If you have the cash and patience — and get it right — of course you can win battles few others can play. But the risk of blowing the cash and having nothing to show for your efforts is also quite high.
I am reminded, in this context, that in some cases bootstrapping approaches can be the wisest solutions to international expansion (but these will only work under the correct conditions.)
Certainly, when I was 23-26-years-old, traveling to Africa on two separate visits, I both envied and shrugged at the ‘waste’ in older expatriates living in seeming luxury and experiencing life in a way which seemed totally out of touch with the reality around me. I had greater respect for some non-governmental organizations who managed to get far more useful work done on much smaller budgets. Of course, backpacking though countries with strange names and faking my way through Rhodesian immigration to get a job as a journalist are entirely valid approaches when you are traveling alone, in your 20s, but wouldn’t work if you were a senior executive with a family, representing a company on a corporate international expansion initiative.
Obviously, the expense-account, high budget business lifestyle (and “long range” approach to marketing investment) can require much less individual responsibility than the modest-resourced, cash-starved and quick-thinking approach required for success within most smaller (and many medium-sized) businesses. If you have the cash and patience, and use it wisely, you can certainly blow away the competition — and enter markets with challenges and opportunities far greater than your bootstrapping competitors. Just do it wisely, as I fear, it can sometimes be as easy to waste large sums of money as tiny amounts on (international) business expansion and development.