While some founders are content with their business being based in one place, others have their sights set on international expansion. Oana Jinga is a co-founder at Dexory, a fast-scaling UK-based warehouse intelligence company with a presence in over sixteen countries.
Sharing three core learnings, she explains how they managed it, without any expensive marketing.
We had an interesting approach to expansion because we didn’t do the traditional thing which is putting people on the ground and a lot of money into marketing.
Perhaps controversially, we didn’t follow the idea that you start making a name for yourself and then hopefully customers will come. Instead, we went to all the new markets with existing customers that wanted to take what we were doing with them in the UK and Europe further afield.
Although our business sits in the robotics, AI and logistics sectors, these tips can largely apply to many types of businesses that want to expand abroad. Here are my three.
1. Find customers that will take you far
Having a big name behind you who has been using you somewhere else and is now taking you abroad is the most important thing you can do. I keep telling businesses this; rather than thinking about the big effort required and having to start from scratch, think about whether you’re working with anyone right now that could take you abroad and get you going. Customers that could take you with them rather than having to build on the ground yourself.
2. Impress those customers
We work with some of the biggest logistics providers in the world, and we normally start working with them in one particular market and then they like our solution and quickly want to put it across more of their warehouses. This way, we have ended up being taken to whichever market, or city, that needs our solution. So when we entered the US, for example, we went there with existing customers that allowed us to have case studies. This meant we had somebody locally so we could talk to more prospects. However, your offering needs to impress in the first place and have high customer satisfaction to do this.
3. Hire well on the ground
Once you start building on the ground abroad, be very intentional with those first hires, making sure they are people that align with your culture, your pace, and your way of working. This is important because they will be the ones that the rest of the team in that particular market will grow around. As founders, it’s crucial you resonate well with those initial hires. They will be your culture ambassadors in those markets.
While some founders are content with their business being based in one place, others have their sights set on international expansion. Oana Jinga is a co-founder at Dexory, a fast-scaling UK-based warehouse intelligence company with a presence in over sixteen countries.
Sharing three core learnings, she explains how they managed it, without any expensive marketing.
We had an interesting approach to expansion because we didn’t do the traditional thing which is putting people on the ground and a lot of money into marketing.
Perhaps controversially, we didn’t follow the idea that you start making a name for yourself and then hopefully customers will come. Instead, we went to all the new markets with existing customers that wanted to take what we were doing with them in the UK and Europe further afield.
Although our business sits in the robotics, AI and logistics sectors, these tips can largely apply to many types of businesses that want to expand abroad. Here are my three.
