Asia-Connect Executive Partners Name the country

Market entry leadership · Asia

You have signed the entity. Now somebody has to run it.

I build and run your first operation in an Asian market, on the ground, until your permanent team can. Not a study. The operating job, with the authority to do it.

Name the country What I have run

India · Japan · China · Vietnam · Asia-Connect Executive Partners

The paperwork is done.

The entity exists, the bank account opens next week, and the board has a date in the plan.

Then somebody has to hire the first twenty people.

In a country where you do not yet know which twenty, which salary is normal, or which of the three shortlisted landlords is a problem.

So the decisions go back to headquarters, eight time zones away, and the market entry becomes a monthly call.

Why this is not a consulting problem

A consultant will tell you what the market looks like.

You already know what it looks like. You signed.

What you are missing is somebody who has hired in that country, argued with that regulator and run that P&L, doing it as your executive rather than as your adviser.

Four situations I have been inside

The problems nobody warns you about.

Vietnam

A car company that did not exist yet, hiring the people who would build it

I led product development at VinFast in Vietnam, a manufacturer standing up a capability the country had never had.

Nobody local has done it before, because nobody local has done it before. The engineering process has to be imported and taught at the same time as it is being used on a real programme with a real launch date, and every week spent training is a week the schedule does not get back.

Which programme, and what existed at the end that did not exist when you arrived?

India

An Indian group selling engineering to European customers who did not trust it yet

I led global engineering and R&D at Tata Technologies, an Indian company whose buyers sit in European headquarters.

The work is good and the buyer assumes it is not. Every review becomes an audit, every delay confirms a prejudice nobody says out loud, and the engineering leadership spends its time defending the model instead of running it.

Which account or programme, and what changed in how the European side worked with you?

India, then France

The same failure, seen from both ends

I ran a French group operating in India, then an Indian group operating in France.

Headquarters believes the local team is slow. The local team believes headquarters does not understand the market. Both are describing the same missing thing: nobody with authority sits in the middle, so every decision travels twice and arrives late.

One decision that used to take weeks and stopped doing so. What changed?

China

Integration, where every supplier is local and every standard is not

I ran vehicle systems integration at ICONIQ Motors in China.

Integration is where a market entry actually fails. The parts arrive, each one correct, and the whole does not work, because the interfaces were agreed in two languages against two sets of assumptions. It surfaces late, which is the expensive time to find it.

What did you change about how interfaces were agreed?

A French group operating in India, then an Indian group operating in France. Two sides of the headquarters conversation, and not many people have sat on both.

How it works

Week 1

On the ground

I am in the country, not on a call about the country. The first week is the hiring plan, the payroll route and the three decisions nobody has taken yet.

Day 90

It decides locally

The first hires are in, the operating rhythm exists, and headquarters stops being the bottleneck for ordinary decisions.

Handover

Your team, not mine

I hand to the permanent leader when there is one. The job is to make myself unnecessary, and to say so early enough that you can plan it.

What I refuse

Four things, so you can rule me out quickly.

×

A market study

If a document is what you need, a consultancy will write you a better one than I will, and charge you less for it.

×

A partner search

Finding you a distributor is somebody else’s job. I run the operation you are standing up.

×

A market I have not run

I can prove India, Japan, China and Vietnam. Anywhere else and one of the other partners is the right call, not me.

×

A mandate with no authority

If I cannot hire, spend and decide, the entity will wait on headquarters exactly as it does today.

One question

Which country, and what have you signed?

Those two facts tell me within a day whether I am the right person, or which of my partners is. If neither, you will hear that on the same call.