The Biz Of Biz Ops (3) — Expansion, Int’l Expansion

Expansion projects are cool. 😎

There is nothing like the buzz of working on some new potential product expansion, or tapping into a new vertical, or assessing a new market, or a new company to acquire. If you are like me, you get that buzz under your skin and you end up thinking about it for more hours in the day you’d like to admit.

Some things will make disproportionate difference when you figure the puzzle out: the product “aha” moment for a specific segment, or that specific internal blocker in your sales velocity, or that unique quality of a M&A’s target data that makes that ownership that much more valuable to you. Getting to that insight and unlocking growth can be invigorating.

In my experience one specific type of expansion project is all that — but on steroids — and that’s international expansion. You need a lot of those insights, propping your GTM strategy, to move the needle. This is why international expansion is not a “project”, it is a whole movement. How big that movement is depends on the company, product and ambition.

As fun as it might be, international expansion is tricky. It means different things to different people:

• The People Team thinks of expansion is terms of hiring in major HUBs or aux geographies, setting fair salaries, enabling certain contracts (EORs?) etc.
• The Sales Team thinks of expansion as boots on the ground, language capability, sales rep responsibility, customer needs etc.
• The CX Team similar to Sales thinks of specialists’ language coverage, time zone, and other capabilities.
• The Engineering Team think of expansion in terms of tech architecture, data storage, service latency, service providers’ dependency, and other product-specific requirements.
• The Legal Team thinks of expansion in terms of commercial contracts, law jurisdiction, controls, data privacy issues, company entities etc.
• The Finance team thinks of currency exchange rates, accepted methods of payments and currencies, standardising accounting practices etc.

These are just some examples. The actual list is muuuuch longer. To add gasoline to the fire, oh boy, could all of these people get into a boxing ring over some of the issues that arise at the links amongst these teams.

Having led international expansion for Hopin, and learned a ton about the different challenges that arise in finding GTM fit, here are three assumptions to make before ensuing on the endeavour of expansion to new lands.

Assume that:

1. You don’t have Product Market Fit: PMF in one market might look different from PMF in another because targets might vary, their use cases might vary, they will most certainly won’t all speak English, and different countries have different laws and tolerance for user privacy.

• Use cases: Customers have slightly different preferences, and especially across continents use cases might vary. So the mix of product suite and features should take these nuances into account. Don’t think what worked in the US will work elsewhere.
• Localization: If your product was not set up for easy localization, then you’d have to take the extra step and prep it. Sometimes this “step” might be a whole flight of stairs and take a lot longer than you think.
• Backend tech: moving across regions means operating in different jurisdictions. The more regulated your environment, the more this will be a challenge for your legal and eng teams (Think about data residency, privacy, security, and commercial contracting).

2. You don’t have to do it alone: If figuring out all of the above, plus adding the obvious costs of expansion like sales / CX / payments / etc, puts you off expansion, you can engage with a GTM partner. But markets for software operate in unique ways in various continents and geos. So a few tips for the negotiation with a reseller or partner.

• Minimal Viable Scope: start small, leave room to add more later.
• Negotiate with empathy: remember different cultures have different values, practices, and rituals. Learn about them before you engage in a negotiation.
• Legal is your best friend: partnerships have a lot of IFs and THENs and making sure you think through and define the rules of engagement from the start will be in your benefit.
• Time is not your friend: it will take longer than you think.

3. You don’t have the operations yet: expansion touches every. single. department. in your company. As the Head of expansion I was that “Chief Octopus” and worked through all the dependencies across sales, finance, accounting, product, eng, marketing, comms, enablement… you name it. And every single time, if we were to turn on the switch, we would have been unprepared — leading to competing priorities, broken systems, and ultimately an inability to serve our customers.

• Remember the How: You have figured out your Why and What. That was the easy part, the 5% of your job. The next 95% is the How. And as I discussed previously, The biggest value a Strategy/Biz Ops team provides is prepping for, and often carrying out the execution of the How.
• Plan for scalability: don’t make the mistake to implement a process that will work only for the next 10 customers. Think of the next 100 and 1000.
• Revisit: you can’t launch and leave. You need to make expansion a movement, though the whole org, with its coherent feedback loops and processes.

This is it. If you are embarking on the crazy journey of international expansion, you are John Snow, you know nothing, and you have to keep your eyes open and your common business sense switched on.

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So far in this series I talked about the value of the Biz Ops / Strategy function for companies. The three main areas were: (1) data & market intelligence, (2) business analytics & performance, (3) business expansion & scale. As the pinacle of any data point, insight, or trend is the “ok, so what?” (i.e. what do you do with that information), I focused on the part of Strategy/ Biz Ops that ultimately has the power to move the business forward — the business expansion and scale. I wrote about the building block of any expansion-related project: the issue of how to construct an actionable strategic argument. This post has been about what I believe to be one of the most complex types of work a Biz Ops / Strategy department can take on. I hope you enjoyed it and if you have any questions or comments, you can ping me on LinkedIn.