Adrie's Blog

Beyond Boundaries - Growing Your Business Internationally

On June 24th we will organise an event on "Growing your Business Internationally" in Amsterdam for our E.Factor members. In preparation, I would like to treat you to a 3-part series of blogs about Cultural Differences starting today, with the others in the coming week. Hopefully this will be spiced up even further by you sharing your experiences in the comment section of the blogs. And ofcourse, the final part will be the experiences shared by our panel members during the session in Amsterdam.

By nature, a human being is adventurous, ready to explore. An Entrepreneur probably has that even more, always looking for a new path, expansion and moving borders in every way so it's not surprising that you may want to cross the physical borders and expand overseas. It's been happening for 1000s of year, although in the past people weren't so concerned with the variations and differences in cultures. They either brutally conquered the country in question or they reached an agreement with its rulers - nice and simple, in a way :-)
In our modern times however, it's not quite as popular to follow those tried and tested techniques. Large parts of the world are very well off, or emerging and becoming of interest - all of these are therefore likely to be considered interesting to trade with. If you go to any country with the purpose of doing business, you will have to figure out quite a few things in advance: it's political situation, economy, financial set-up and .... it's traditions. In general, I think people don't pay enough attention to the latter and think of it too lightly. I have definitely made lots of mistakes myself when I went to the US to set up a business there in 1983. It all seems very familiar and similar to your own country but you have to beware that there are huge differences, even within one country/continent such as the US. Only when I moved to the US, did I finally get a feeling that I was starting to get it - which only took me about 25 years. To give an example, Americans are masters in the use of abbreviations, which for an outsider makes it quite hard to follow the conversation. When you first go somewhere, you know nothing about a country's educational system or healthcare - I do now in the US but it has taken a long time. You need to understand which political parties there are and what they advocate - and if you don't get it as part of being raised somewhere, it will require dedicated effort. It's good to know for instance that advertising revenue can increase massively during election times, nice to know if you want to start an advertising bureau, or when the Democrates are in power - there will be more expenditure for healthcare and education. These facts have a huge impact on any business in those industries and therefore you need to understand them. In general it is worthwhile having someone locally that does know these things and ofcourse can help you through their network. I have often benefited from good contacts with people in the US, but also for instance with Hidaka san and Hideo San where guidance and advice for the Japanese markets was concerned.

A mistake made often is to think that you can conquer an entire country, like US or India or China in one go. It's virtually impossible to do so given the sheer size of the country, but also given the cultural differences between regions even and the logistical issues you might face. Early 80's the dutch brewer "Grolsch" tried to conquer the US. Many millions of US$ on, they retreated to a base location first - starting somewhere in the North East. Before you know it, you are almost running a travel agency and spending your entire budget on Travel.

For me the biggest problem has always been to understand what people are saying. Language, is of course one factor in this. But even more important is the habit or culture behind the language. After I sold my company to British Telecom, I was confronted with this fact in full. When one of my directors submitted a proposal to his english superior, he got the answer "interesting, we'll have a look at that". Later on it turned out they meant "No, thanks" but the dutch man in question thought they meant they thought it was a great idea and got stuck in making things happen - which really upset the english. I had to explain to them that you can, and probably should, just say "No" when you mean no when speaking to a dutchman, and explained to the dutchman that the english didn't want to be that direct and used polite platitudes rather then say "no". On another occasion I made the mistake after buying a German company, to tell them "have a look at this, when you have a moment" which in the Netherlands means you should have a look at it but in Germany you need to given an explicit order to look at something - so nothing happened at all.

If you ask something in Germany and they say "Yes", they mean yes. When you do so in New York and you get the answer, chances are actually pretty remote it'll happen. If you ask in Japan they will tell you whether it is interesting but add that they wish to confer with their colleagues (to get a consensus) so it could take a while before you get a distinct yes or no.

I would love you to share your stories and examples - either here or directed to me so that I can add them to my blog next week.

I'd like to close off with another example which happened to me when I went to the States for business. After dinner with about 6 people, a lot of food was left on the table and the waiter asked me: "Do you want a doggy bag?". I had never heard of this term then, and thought "How on earth does he know I have a dog?" but given that it was in Europe at the time I politely told him it wouldn't be necessary :-)