Before you move
Twenty questions to ask before entering a new market
Market entry is one of the highest stakes strategic decisions a business will make. And one that can be prone to drift in the months after the move is made. The strategy that looked like a great idea on paper goes out into the new market and, well, meets surprises. The cultural translation that wasn't quite done at the front end becomes a quiet drag on performance. The route to market that worked at home doesn't quite hold in the new context. And the operational pressure of running the existing business means no one has quite enough bandwidth to course correct.
What's striking, when you look at market entries that work and ones that don't, is how often the difference sits in decisions made before the move, long before the launch date, before the partner contracts are signed, before the team is in place. The businesses that handle market entry well tend to have asked themselves a particular set of questions early enough to act on the answers. The ones that struggle have usually answered the same questions implicitly, in passing, without the structured attention the questions deserved.
The questions cluster around five domains.
Strategic readiness: is the rationale for this market, now, clear enough to defend?
Market and cultural fit: has the market been read properly, not just researched at a desk?
Brand and proposition translation: has the proposition been translated for the new context, or just carried across?
Commercial structure and route to market: is the operational backbone right?
Team, capability and aftercare: who is responsible for delivering this entry, and what happens in the eighteen months after launch?
None of these is rocket science. All of them are easy to under engage with until the early data starts coming in, by which point the cost of correction is much higher than the cost of structured preparation would have been.
We've built a quick diagnostic tool, Before You Move, that walks through twenty questions across these five domains. It takes about 5-10 minutes. At the end you'll get a personalised report that identifies where your planned entry looks solid and where it's most at risk, broken down by domain, with qualitative interpretation for each.
It's free, requires no commitment and is useful whether you're early in your thinking about a potential market entry or actively planning a launch in the next six to twelve months. The most common reaction we get from leaders who've worked through it: I knew most of these answers, but I'd never written them down in one place. Which is the point. The diagnostic exists not to tell you something you don't know, but to turn what you already know in a structured enough form to act on.
If you're considering a market move, or are already underway with one, it's a useful starting point.