Maintain Your Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship Focus
Whether you are an entrepreneur growing a young startup or an intrapreneur launching a new business from within a corporation, you will be faced with the gut wrenching decision of having to walk away from a customer to ensure your team remains focused.
Believe me, I know how reassuring and gratifying it can be to have a new potential customer express interest in your solution and to jump at the opportunity to secure your first early adopter. This has happened to my teams and me many times. The allure of that first customer, regardless of where he/she is in the world, seems to overshadow every logical reason to walk away from the opportunity. Trust me, every time I took on an international client too early in my startups’ growth, it resulted in disruptions and distractions to our product development efforts that took us off course and, consequently, resulted in delays in our core product validation strategy. It also brought countless inefficiencies associated with air travel for meetings and to validate the solution and with the disruptive impact of working around the clock to match your distant customer’s time zone.
I was recently working with entrepreneurs who were presenting their early stage business progress and who were pointing out that they had already secured a handful of clients, each in a different country, far from their home base and BEFORE having validated that their business models worked and were scalable. I have also witnessed this very same behavior with intrapreneurs. Trying to grow your geographic client base too far and too fast comes with many challenges. Topping the list is the challenge of remaining focused.
Moving outside of your immediate territory prior to having worked out your business model locally will result in having to modify your solution to address requests for cultural differences, technology compatibility, legal/contracting differences, buyer differences, user needs differences, import/export norms, and a multitude of other potential demands. All of these will stretch your lean startup team to look at new requirements and add them to a solution that has yet to be proven and validated. It will also inevitably lead to a higher cash burn cash and add new costs associated with supporting a distant customer.
Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs should take the time to work with early adopters in their immediate location before broadening their geographical reach. Then, when they are ready to grow more broadly, a second region can be targeted that is similar to the first one where early success was found. Each region will naturally lead to another where like-minded clients are likely to be found. In other words, validate locally, and then grow geographically.