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Getting started with your new company in the United States

Leaving your homeland behind and diving into a new culture is offering some tremendous experiences. Combining this personal experience with starting a business in the United States is even more exciting. Some of your experiences may be pretty exciting; some others may be from a rather challenging nature. However, from an immigrant's perspective you will be able to learn unique viewpoints on the American culture and gain astonishing abilities to reflect on your own belief systems.

USA Market Entry - Information Overload

When planning the USA Market Entry for your American business, you may just loaded your plate with a serious research project. Over the next couple of months you need to obtain, filter and handle information very efficient in order to be successful with your USA market entry. In addition you also need to continuously revise data, structure and re-structure the data you collect, as well as assign different priorities where to put more or less focus on. The huge amount of information which is available for USA markets combined with the lack of knowledge what may be relevant or not, can turn into some frustrating moments. Sometimes this may seems to feel like trying to drink water out of a water hose. However, "too much" information is not the worst problem to have.

Setting Goals for your USA Market Entry

Before investing a large portion of your valuable time in performing random research, you should start your Market Entry project by defining specific objectives and definite goals. While uncoordinated research may help you to step over the one or the other interesting point, the main part of the research project should be more focused.

An important part of the overall planning process to get your USA company started is to write down goals. Persons who are the most successful in realizing the most challenging projects are typically those who have written goals. Entering a market of the size of the U.S. market is for sure a challenging project and thus requires a laser-sharp focus on what needs to be done when. Most people in charge for the U.S. Market Entry bring enough personal energy, motivation and knowledge for the Market Entry with them. This should be combined with a sharp focus to be effective in reaching the right objectives in the right timeline. A written plan is a great help with that.

Developing a Written Business Plan for the USA Market Entry

The word "business plan" got a lot of attention by mainstream media outlets in the late 90s during the height of the Internet "gold rush period". Many believed that a simple 25 page document could bring in an unlimited amount of venture capital and get any Internet business jump-started. This actually worked pretty well for a short period of time. However, all the positive attention to business plans partly turned into negative attention when the gold rush period ended and thus diluted the original meaning of business plans. Today, business plans came back to their original plain purpose: describing in detail the concept of a business, its prospected environment, objectives, required resources and projected revenues. Not more and not less.

One of the greatest potential benefits of a written business plan is that it enables its respective author to systematically structure an overall venture - in our case the project of successfully starting your business in the USA. The overall American Market Entry project could take up rather big dimensions and gets pretty complex and challenging. In addition, it typically comes with only limited resources. In this situation, you will need to be double effective, extra-focused and execute certain strategies with precision. A written plan offers great support to launch your USA business.

Determining USA Market Entry Challenges and Opportunities

After locating and researching a variety of information sources and collecting useful USA market data, you should get clear about your competitive advantages and potential challenges in order to implement a successful Market Entry Strategy for your future USA company. Some of the obstacles you could face when starting your business in the United States are listed in the following list of typical Market Entry challenges:

• Language Challenge: American English is not everyone's mother tongue. Even with good language skills and fluent English, there are potential communication hurdles in the first couple of months when operating your USA business. It is important to adapt to the American English language with appropriate vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and style while matching the American business etiquette in day-to-day business conversation. The only way of overcoming the language challenge is to train it as much as possible. In a country where everybody speaks American English, there shouldn't be any difficulties to find enough training partners.
• Cultural Challenge: Cultural differences are probably the hardest challenges and need the longest time to be overcome. A cultural "outsider" coming to the USA and doing business is having typically a complete different cultural background and the social etiquette and USA business manners are not familiar. The effect of lack of cultural understanding is often that a lot of ideas and decisions could be based on wrong assumptions.
• Market Challenge: You probably know very well how your specific market works in your home country. However, there is often only limited knowledge about how the same market eco-system will work in the USA for your future business. Maybe it works exactly the same? Maybe the market works completely different in the United States? Knowing and understanding local USA market mechanisms will be a necessity to be successful.
• Organizational Challenge: You could face the situation that you are not only competing in an environment which is not known very well, but also with an organization which has some potential challenges in comparison to local U.S.-competitors. There are maybe only limited personnel resources in the start-up phase available and competitors may have tenfolds or hundredfolds the number of local people and a far advanced organization.
• Geographical Challenge: Overcoming the large geographic dimensions of the USA market can be another challenge which needs to be dealt with. Remember that the United States is not only a country, but an entire continent.

The exciting part about any challenge is the fact, that challenges usually have many positive aspects, too. Being in the situation as the "USA market challenger", you should think about, how you could turn your challenges into competitive advantages. Even if it is hard to believe - but your biggest challenge can be the greatest competitive advantage! Not only that the best strategy to overcome any weaknesses is to turn them into an advantage and selling point: The fact that you are from a different culture with a completely different thinking pattern and mindset can give you the greatest possible competitive edge over established market players.

Your USA Market Entry Project - Are we any further now?

Maybe you think that you are still at the same spot after reading this article where you were before. There is a huge amount of information out there and you probably don't know where to start. However, the bottom-line message of this article is that you need to set objectives for your market entry and structure your planning process in order to get your project on a solid foundation. Structuring data and theoretical planning is probably not as exciting as meeting new customers in the USA, launching USA Marketing Campaigns or present your exciting products. However, you will greatly benefit from a solid planning later in the process.

About the Author

Ben Baier owns and runs www.myusabusiness.com. You can learn more on the 'about' section on the left within this website.

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