a founder told me they were expanding internationally.
i congratulated him. it sounded exciting.
but i couldn't help myself.
why that market?
a pause. slight hesitation.
"we had an employee join us from there at the time."
that was it. that was the reason.
no market validation. no strategic fit analysis. no honest look at whether their company's identity, what they stood for, who they were built for, had any business being in that market at all.
they'd confused access with opportunity.
by the time we spoke, the expansion had already begun. so i didn't make my concern too obvious. but i noted it.
it didn't work out. they exited that market.
this happens more than anyone admits
not just with international expansion. with almost every category of strategic decision.
a new hire from a country becomes a market entry rationale. a conference conversation becomes a product pivot. a competitor moves into a segment, so you follow, not because you've validated the fit, but because the discomfort of watching is worse than the risk of acting.
these feel like signals. sometimes they are.
but a signal is not a strategy.
the pattern isn't that founders make emotional decisions. it's that they make rational-feeling decisions on the back of incomplete information, and the incompleteness is invisible to them at the time. you can't feel the data you don't have.
there's a structural reason this keeps happening
when a large company makes a significant strategic move, it's rarely made on instinct alone. it's preceded by weeks of intelligence work, competitive analysis, customer research, scenario modelling, financial projections attached to each path forward.
this infrastructure exists because, at scale, a bad strategic decision is catastrophic. the investment in better information pays for itself fast.
most sme founders don't have this. not because they're less rigorous, but because building it requires resources most growing companies can't justify. a dedicated strategy analyst. access to proprietary market data. time that isn't already allocated to sales, product, and operations.
so founders work with what they have. gut instinct, genuinely valuable. a handful of customer conversations, better than nothing. whatever data is publicly available, often incomplete. and then they make the call.
the gap isn't intelligence. it's infrastructure. and unlike intelligence, infrastructure can be built.
what that international decision actually needed
not a six-month research project. not a mckinsey engagement. just three honest questions asked before the commitment was made.
does this market have a meaningful concentration of customers we're actually built for, or just customers we could technically serve?
does our core identity translate? the problem we solve, the way we position, the trust signals that work at home, do they hold in a different context?
what would it cost to find out if we're wrong, and at what point does that cost become irreversible?
that's it. three questions. most expansions that fail couldn't answer all three before they started.
good strategy isn't about being right
it's about knowing what you need to know.
the founders who consistently make good calls aren't necessarily smarter or more experienced than the ones who don't.
they just have a clearer picture of the landscape before they commit. they know what they don't know. and they've built, or found, ways to close that gap before it costs them a market exit, a year of runway, or a team that trusted their judgment.
the founder in that story was sharp. genuinely. the decision to expand wasn't born from carelessness, it was born from optimism and an incomplete picture.
those two things are easy to confuse when you're moving fast.
a signal is not a strategy. but knowing the difference is the beginning of one.