Icebreaking: Only Five Things from Zero to One

A founder about to open in Europe asked us: should the first year have a revenue target?

Let me put our view up front. The icebreaking phase produces no scale. It produces one answer: can we continue in this market. So the first year does five things. Not one more.

First, market insight and a go-to-market plan for sales and marketing. Work out who buys, why they buy, and who they compare you with. A plan is not a slogan. It is a list you can start dialling. If the list does not connect, the thinking is not done.

Second, finding and hiring good local people. The first local employee decides what the next ten are like. Can this post be economised on? No. Make do on this hire, and the money saved takes two years to pay back.

Third, building the local office platform. With an address, an account and a contracting entity, you turn from "visitor" into "present". This is a base, not a shopfront. Clients have completely different patience for the two.

Fourth, building relationships with government, associations and large corporate clients. In mature markets an association is often faster than advertising, and it decides who you get introduced to. One point here matters to us: in talks with government, asking for business is much harder than asking for money, and worth much more. A subsidy lands once. Use cases and orders grow on their own. So do not rush to subsidies when you meet.

Fifth, running trade shows and picking up key leads and opportunities. A trade show is not for handing out brochures. It compresses the first four things into three days and tests them face to face. So is the deadline for a show its opening day? No. It is the sailing day. Ocean freight often takes more than a month, over a tenth of the icebreaking window, and one storm on the way is trouble. Do not wait until the product is final to think about shipping it.

Why Five Things, Not Three

Why? Because on this trip what you sell is no longer something that works the moment it arrives. Chinese companies have already proved the light-delivery route. Heavy delivery is still close to blank — local installation, local repair, local service on site. Which means the denominator of capability has changed: from the supply chain to organisation and network. All five of these things build organisation and network. None can stand in for another.

So which of the five comes first? All at once. Without local people the office is a shell. Without association ties the trade show is a holiday you paid for. We are fairly sure of this one.

Can sales experience from home be moved across? Mostly not. Compliance, procurement and the structure of relationships are all a different set. A few contacts do not count. A complete landing path someone has run once on the front line does. Only what can be repeated deserves to be called a methodology.

One thing does move across: the cost curve. As things stand there is one complete hardware supply chain, and it sits in our own rear. Going global is not a new sector. It is the spillover of that chain. The chain travels. People and relationships do not. Four of the five things are there to make up the latter.

The Answer May Also Be No

With the five things done, the conclusion may still be "do not proceed". There is no shame in that. The greatest value of the icebreaking phase is to make the no arrive earlier and cheaper. Fold in the first year and you lose one small team's supplies for one year. Find out in the third year and you lose three. That arithmetic should be the ruler from the opening day.

Icebreaking does not break the other side's ice. It breaks your own imagining.

(Going global is one item in the Archive's method layer, "business and full mandate, focus, the operating system and going global"; only the first stretch is opened up here.)