Twelve Months: the Order Is the Method

Let me put our view up front. In the first twelve months on the ground, the hard part is not how well each step is done. It is which step goes first and which goes later. Get the order wrong and every later step costs twice as much.

Why? Because you are buying one thing only: local facts. Facts have an order. Money does not.

Lay the twelve months out: five milestones, about two and a half months each. That sounds comfortable. It is not — the first two eat almost half a year.

First, lock in partners. Cut the candidates down to the few you can sit down with. A list exists to be cut.

Second, sign the agreement. Write governance and control down first. Writing it while relations are good is far cheaper than writing it after something goes wrong. This is not the place to save.

Third, the local pilot run. Running it through means materials, people, paperwork and inspection all go the full way. The full way, not half of it.

Fourth, apply for local funding. Use the industrial and subsidy policies fully. The reviewers look at local facts, so this has to come after the pilot run.

Fifth, the first outside round. Bring local capital to the table and let local people speak for you.

Why the Order Is Worth Something

Put fundraising before governance and control becomes someone else's agenda item. Put the funding application before the pilot run and the file holds plans, not facts. Put the pilot run before partners are locked in and you pay tuition twice for the same lesson. This is not process fussiness. It is arithmetic.

The first four steps are all producing evidence for the fifth. Whether a local institution will name a price first turns not on the story but on whether you have run a line there, paid tax there, passed inspection there. In our view, the first task in fundraising is safety, not odds. Someone has to fire first before the rest dare follow. We are fairly sure of this one.

And what is the first local order worth? A round of valuation. Ten pages of material describe a plan. One document describes something that has already happened. That is what we mean by a ruler.

The First Wall Is Not the Market, It Is Language

Many people blame a rough start abroad on not adapting to the local climate. We see it differently. The earlier wall is the local language — not how good your English is, but whether the local tongue works. As things stand, English is not widely spoken in several important markets, and the local language cannot be learned in a short time. So it has to be treated as infrastructure and placed in the first step. Many teams treat it as a bonus and leave it to the third. Without the right people, partners cannot be locked in.

And the timetable? The timetable can give. Better to push everything back a day or two waiting for the right people than to swap two steps to hold a schedule. A delay usually costs days. The wrong order costs you the whole run again.

Can the order give? No. The pace can. Some steps go three rounds back and forth. Some clear in two weeks. When the window has not opened, you wait. That is tempo, not a promise.

Going global is not moving the product over. It is moving a set of orderings over. But someone has to execute the method — language, partners, paperwork, not one of them can be missing. These keys have to be cut yourself.

(For the full going-global method, see the Archive's "Glacier Pyramid III, method layer — business and full mandate, focus, the operating system and going global".)