Are Your Leadership Team and Key Personnel Ready?

Today we’re here to tackle another question about the successful expansion of your business to the U.S. Are your leadership team and key personnel ready for your U.S. expansion? This issue is another significant potential pothole in your U.S. expansion journey. Get it wrong and you’ll have greater turnover, internal dysfunction, and poor results.

What we see happen with our clients reveals that there are three basic questions you want to ask

1. Is someone from the management team ready to commit a significant amount of time in the U.S. market? In some cases that may start off as a few weeks. Maybe three to four weeks a quarter. In other cases, it’ll be someone moving right into the market. Either way, there should be significant blocks of time where there is a leader from the team ready to spend time in the market to build intelligence, to build relationships, and to build the team. It doesn’t happen without that institutional knowledge from someone from the home team who is committed.
2. Is the leadership team ready to commit to covering the duties and responsibilities of the person who is now in the U.S. market or primarily focusing on the U.S. market? Is the rest of the team ready to cover those responsibilities full-time or has the person been replaced in those duties so you can take those off their plate? The U.S. is going to take all of their attention. It’s just like nurturing a young baby. The U.S. is going to have lots of needs and opportunities and it will be up all hours of the day and night.
3. Is each department and team within the home office ready and committed to support the new market? The U.S. market has mission-critical startup demands just like they would have in the home market. Websites, marketing materials, social media, trade show banners and booths, and all of the marketing communications elements need to get created and iterated quickly. We see this phenomenon with every company entering the U.S. Where the U.S. team is not at the water cooler every day and they’re not in the social events, so it’s very natural that they don’t get the attention. The challenge in particular to the U.S. market is it’s very normal that within 3-years of entry that the U.S. business is larger than the rest of the business everywhere else in the world. This imbalance in need, authority, and resources between the new U.S. and home office can create a real fail point if not anticipated and addressed early.

It is critical to engage your team to assure that you and your organization are prepared and committed to the U.S. expansion. Your collective investment of time, passion, and capital requires success.

About
MEET (meetroi.com) helps international B2B companies gain traction and scale in the U.S. through trade shows, events, and strategic connections. MEET’s processes help its clients ramp up sales quickly and maintain a steady stream of high-quality prospects going forward. Contact Bill Kenney for a no-obligation conversation: bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.