An organisation often develops from few individuals to a team, to a set of teams, to departments, and eventually to a set of firms, or what’s called corporations. The size of resources and change of organisation is in direct correlation with the growth of the company. Under an organisation, using the BCG framework, it is not difficult to identify the golden flower. Without the existence of the golden flower, an organisation would be nearly impossible to become a corporation. Naturally and logically, when a corporation wishes to replicate the golden flower business to a different market, researches done, resources allocated, partners found, and paperworks filed prior to the entry. Even with 120% preparations efforts, often things just don’t go as smoothly as it would in the home market.
Many hypothesis or past cases suggest different market approaches, labours, or product/service perceptions are the contributing factors to the unsuccessful market entry cases. Marketing is only half of the story to an unsuccessful market development in a new environment, the other half of the story is the lack of flexibility and progressive development. Flexibility is the easier part to fix. When an foreign offering is having difficulty to be accepted in the new market, it is critical to change up the marketing story ever so slightly to let the local customers be interested. Local insights and speed of changes are required. In most cases, getting approval from HQ for changing the marketing story is not too difficult as long as numbers show success. The progressive development is, on the other hand, difficult to be grasped, or more correctly speaking, difficult to be reproduced.
Any successful business grew from a small scale of organisation to large corporations. SOPs, rules and policies often evolve in reflection of the organisation size, growth, and past experiences. Any company is likely to have only one set of policies at any given time. When entering a new market, the entry team is likely to be small and required to run the general affair side of business while running the core business at the same time. Therefore the abide rules should also be modified accordingly. Applying the policies of an corporation unto a small firm is doing more harm than good. For any large corporation to go back in time and remember how to be a small firm is impossibly difficult without proper knowledge management. Disposing existing system or having dual standards is also out of question, but the market entry team requires loose rules and less paperworks to grant them flexibility for them to run the core business more efficiently.
While the ultimate goal is to adapt the home market core business operations and rules in the newly entered market, initially, an HQ-support model is absolutely required. The progressive development requires the HQ to readily pick up bulk of the core-business operations from the entry team. As the entry team grows, HQ will be able to propagate some of the taken tasks back to the subsidiary. As aforementioned, the new entry team will spend a portion of the time dealing with non-core business functions, in order to achieve high efficiency using the less than optimal amount of time. Before making the market entry, HQ shall develop the following functions for the entry team: simplified process, localisation support, and common backend IT system.
Simplified processes
Paper works exist to record and clarify things throughout each step of the processes. Without altering the existing processes or intermediate KPI due to market entry, less critical steps should be handled by HQ, where the resources are assumed the most abundant, thus, entry team could spend more time and acquiring new customers. Exceptions may occur if cheaper labor costs exist in the new market, where the same processes may be duplicated with cheaper costs. With timezone and multiple market entries in mind, it is a tricky balance to consolidate the work in one market for cost saving and keep local staff for immediate support due to time zone differences.
Localisation support
The localisation support by no means is a must for any new market entry. This only means that the HQ should only prepare its processes and systems for multilingual standards. HQ should never pick up the translation work. I personally believe that only the local branch office staff can best understand and translate official materials.
Common backend IT support
Keeping inline with the ultimate goal of adapting the same processes and rules as HQ, common backend IT systems are required. Market specific exceptions may occur, the main processes and KPI should still be kept equal regardless.
Any company no matter new or old, when entering a new market, it is seemingly to start itself all over again. There is no need for the new entry firm to walk the same path as HQ did in the home market, but becoming the same scale as HQ will also take some time, as well as the rules applied. Companies should understand the different needs and required support for subsidiaries of different sizes. Growing a company requires knowledge of both past and local. More importantly, support from HQ will shorten the time needed for the progressive development, increasing the entry team's efficiencies and chances of success for the new market entries.
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