Expanding into a new market.One owner for the selling and for the money.
Two things decide whether a second country works: how well it sells, and what it costs to run. They almost always sit with different people. The team selling in the market reports on the selling. Your accountant reports on the spend. Neither owns the question of whether to keep going, so it gets answered late, by whoever argues hardest. Spurwing owns both halves. The same person accountable for the selling is accountable for telling you what it is costing and when to stop.
Why one owner changes the answer.
Market entry gets split almost every time. An agency or a country manager owns the selling and reports on how the selling is going. An accountant owns the numbers and reports on what has been spent. Both reports are accurate. Neither answers the only question that matters, which is whether this is still worth continuing.
So the decision drifts. It gets taken late, in a meeting, by whoever argues hardest, and usually after the money that would have made stopping cheap has already gone.
Spurwing takes both halves. The same person accountable for the selling writes the report on whether the selling is working. That is deliberately uncomfortable, and it is the only arrangement where nobody has a corner to protect.
A market that is not going to work is far cheaper to leave in month four than in month eighteen.
What Spurwing owns.
Both halves, to one standard, reported in one place.
- The sellingRemote and field sales teams in country, lead generation, export sales, and the distributor and partner relationships that come with selling somewhere the business has never sold before. Contracted by Spurwing, priced by Spurwing, and held to Spurwing's standard.
- The finance function behind itGroup and local books that agree with each other. Statutory obligations tracked in each country, so nothing is discovered late. Payroll wherever the people sit. One cash position across the group, in the currency the business actually thinks in. A board pack that shows the new market on its own line, so its performance is visible rather than buried in the consolidated numbers.
The number that says stop.
Every expansion has one. Very few businesses write it down, because writing it down means agreeing in advance to a decision nobody wants to make.
Set before the first hire lands, it is arithmetic: what the market has to be producing, by when, for this to still be the right use of the money. Set afterwards, it is an argument, and the person who wanted the market in the first place tends to win it.
Spurwing agrees that number at the start and reports against it every month, in the board pack, next to everything else.
The cost side of this is set out at length in entering a market versus running in one.
Who this is for.
Owner-led and investor-backed businesses opening a second or third country, where the finance side has to work from the first month rather than be tidied up afterwards.
It runs alongside a CFO mandate rather than as a fixed-scope project, because market entry is not a piece of work that finishes. The decision keeps needing an owner.
Opening a second or third country?
The place to start is who owns the answer to whether it is working. That takes a conversation, not a proposal.
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