Aaron McDaniel and Klaus Wehage — Going Global
US-based entrepreneurs often underestimate the potential of expanding to other countries, but scaling globally requires an understanding of both company knowledge and local culture.
Klaus Wehage and Aaron McDaniel are the co-authors of Global Class: How the World’s Fastest Growing Companies Scale Globally. They have seen first-hand the challenges that entrepreneurs face in translating their local success into international markets.
Global companies are expected to localize their products and services to each country they are present in, as well as compete with both local and global competition. Language is the first level of how you operate and manage within a company, followed by pricing and marketing. But like an iceberg, there is so much under the surface that is required to operate legally and successfully in each different country.
Global-class companies consider how their values resonate with the culture of each country, the importance or offense of offering feedback, and how technologies can be either a help or hindrance to scaling. The examples of Walmart and DocuSign illustrate that what works in one country might be the reason a company doesn’t succeed in another.
The most difficult and most important effective part of expansion is the team. An overlap of local knowledge and company knowledge is ideal and requires hiring the right people to get the job done. There are spoken and unspoken rules in every country, and understanding these rules is key to successful global scaling.
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