My first serious international expansion was in the late 1990s, leading Southern European market entry for a fibre-optic bandwidth business. I was negotiating $30M+ agreements with telecoms incumbents who had been running their markets as monopolies for decades and had absolutely no interest in opening them up. I learned very quickly that market entry is not primarily a commercial exercise. It is a political one.

Since then I have directed country managers across 18 European markets simultaneously, scaled a prepaid telecoms division from €70M to €220M across Europe and the US, and built supply chains from scratch under COVID-19 conditions. Each experience reinforced the same core insight: the things that kill international expansion are almost never the things you planned for.

Lesson one: your first local hire is your most important decision

In every market I have entered, the single decision with the greatest impact on outcome was not the pricing strategy, not the channel model, not the regulatory approach. It was who we put on the ground first.

A brilliant local leader who genuinely understands both the market and what you are trying to build can compensate for almost any strategic mistake. A poor one — however credentialed — will ensure that even the best strategy fails. I have seen this pattern repeat without exception across Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, the US and beyond.

The trap most international teams fall into is hiring for the CV rather than for the fit. They find someone with the right sector experience, the right relationships, the right language. What they miss is whether that person actually believes in what they are building — and whether they have the independence of mind to tell headquarters when headquarters is wrong.

"A brilliant local leader can compensate for almost any strategic mistake. A poor one will ensure that even the best strategy fails."

Lesson two: speed of learning beats speed of execution

There is enormous pressure in international expansion to move fast. Boards want to see market share. Investors want revenue. The competitive anxiety is real. But in my experience, the companies that win in new markets are not the ones that execute fastest. They are the ones that learn fastest — and adjust.

At Tele2, we entered markets with a clear playbook built from our successes elsewhere. The playbook was useful as a starting point and almost always wrong in its specifics. The markets that went well were the ones where we trusted our local leadership to deviate from the playbook when they saw something we could not see from London. The ones that struggled were the ones where we insisted on conformity.

The discipline is to distinguish between principles — which should be non-negotiable — and tactics, which should be permanently in question.

Lesson three: relationships precede revenue

In Southern European and emerging markets particularly, the sequence matters enormously. You do not enter a market, build a product, and then build relationships. You build relationships first — with regulators, with potential partners, with the informal networks that actually govern how business gets done — and revenue follows.

I have watched North American and Northern European businesses struggle repeatedly in Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe because they approached market entry as a transactional exercise. They had a product, they had a price, they had a sales team. What they did not have was trust — and in these markets, trust is not a nice-to-have. It is the precondition for everything else.

The one question I ask before any expansion

After three and a half decades, I have reduced my pre-entry assessment to one question: Do we have someone in that market who will tell us the truth?

Not someone who will tell us what we want to hear. Not someone who will validate the business case we have already built. Someone who knows the market deeply, has no interest in flattering us, and will pick up the phone when something is going wrong before it becomes a crisis.

If the answer is yes, the expansion is worth attempting. If the answer is no, the first job is to find that person — before you spend a single euro on anything else.