Market Entry Is Not a Translation Exercise
Why literal transplants of a working business model fail in the other market.
May 6, 2026 · 3 min read · Gyula Lukacs
The most dangerous assumption in cross-border expansion is that a model that works at home will work abroad once the website is translated and the entity is registered. In thirty years of watching companies cross the Atlantic in both directions, the pattern of failure is remarkably consistent — and it is almost never about product quality.
American companies entering Central Europe tend to overestimate the speed of decision-making. A US sales process is built around momentum: demo, proposal, close. In Hungary or the Czech Republic, a first meeting is the beginning of an evaluation of you — the person — that may run for months. Pushing for a close on an American timeline reads as pressure, and pressure reads as risk. The companies that succeed slow down deliberately at the start to move faster later.
European companies entering the US make the mirror-image error: they underestimate the cost of being unknown. At home, their reputation precedes them — decades of relationships, a recognizable name, references a phone call away. In the US, none of that exists. The brand equity is zero, and the market does not grant credit for history it cannot verify. What replaces reputation is presence: a US entity, US references, someone senior who answers in a US time zone.
Both directions share one requirement that no amount of capital substitutes for: someone who understands how decisions are actually made in the target market — not how the org chart says they are made. Who must be convinced, in what order, and what convinces them. That knowledge does not survive translation. It has to be carried by a person who has operated in both rooms.
Market entry done well is not a translation of what you already do. It is a second founding, with the enormous advantage that this time you already know the product works.