3 points for successful expansion abroad Goal. Resource, team, be clear who will do what, how, need a plan. And the third thing ... tailoring the product to help foreign expansion
Petr Běhávka is UK Business Development Director of the start-up 4me.
4me is a provider of a new generation of software for managing support processes in companies.
Petr has had an extensive career in information technology, where he has worked his way up from journalist to salesman to EMEA sales director. After his corporate career he started working for start-ups, one of which he co-founded. He has been involved in business development and international expansion all his life.
In this podcast, we seek answers to these questions together:
What led him away from corporates to start-ups?
What do corporations have in common with start-ups?
What question needs to be answered before international expansion?
What are the 3 most important things for international expansion?
Is it possible to fail?
Important links:
TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW
Martin Hurych
Hello, I'm Martin Hurych and this, this is Ignition. The ignition is the beginning of acceleration, and acceleration is something you need to move from a place. If you've tuned into this podcast, which I thank you for by the way, you've taken the most important step for that self-acceleration, which is the first step. In Ignition, we share experiences from B2B business, from business, from innovation, from working with people, and more. Today we will be accelerating with Petr Běhávka, business development director at 4Me. Hi, Peter.
Petr Běhávka
Hi Martin, thank you for inviting me.
Martin Hurych
You're welcome, Peter, before we get into the introduction of you and 4Me, one thing that caught my eye, you started out as an accountant, then you worked as an IT journalist. You started out as a business consultant, then you worked at a large corporation as head of a huge region and sales people, then a big detour towards a couple of startups, one of which you co-founded, how does all this happen?
Petr Běhávka
I guess I enjoy doing things that are hard, I enjoy software, I enjoy corporations, I enjoy doing things that customers can't imagine, offering them something they've never done before that they can't imagine, explaining it, coming up with a road map, getting to solve the problems that come with it, and I also like it to be expensive. I guess that's the business part, I like the communication.
Martin Hurych
That's what intrigued me about it, we'll get to that later. We have a lot in common. I'm intrigued, you say I like corporations, I like big things. What causes the switch between corporate and startup?
Petr Běhávka
Stress. I'm slower on some things, it took me about twelve or thirteen years to understand that just because a person works for a corporation, has a great salary, American Express, great influence, and is well paid, it doesn't mean the corporation isn't trying to kill them. And in sales, this is typically true of American companies, where I worked. This was the main reason I started looking for something that was equivalently interesting, challenging, potentially from an income perspective for me. But it's something that can entertain me but not kill me, and I really mean that to the letter. When we moved to England, I changed bosses. One of my bosses was Portuguese, a tall guy like you, a beautiful guy, wine, fish, and when he was about 55 he had a stroke on Monday in a meeting in London, and he died on Thursday, just like that. And then it happened again, not tragically, thankfully, when one of my last corporate bosses, after we finished, we quit as a team, a month later he had heart problems. So it started with health, and that's an evolution. Yes, we can struggle with that stress, I lasted a good fourteen, fifteen, twenty years depending on how you count it, depending on the corporation, one solves it with sports. I started running a lot, I was able to run a half marathon without any training. And then you find out it's not worth it. I don't want to be tragic, but that was the main motive, and I was interested in startups from the point of view that they do something different, they do it in a completely different way, they usually have a completely different architecture, and it doesn't have to be IT architecture, it can be cars, for example, where a Tesla looks like a car, it has four wheels, it has a steering wheel, but the people who work at Tesla say, don't make the mistake of thinking that a Tesla is a car. And the reality is true, it's gradually moving away from the first one, it's just something else, the conversations that come with it are completely different and the impact is completely different. And I like that.
The difference between a corporation and a start-up
Martin Hurych
You have a long experience on both sides, we have discussed it, even in the preparation you mentioned it without any clichés. When you compare the two worlds, startup and corporate, what can motivate each other, what should they not adopt from the other side?
Petr Běhávka
I would say a lot depends on the situation, and it's true that the answer to that question two or three years ago would have been very different than it is now. Everything has suddenly accelerated, what used to take four years now takes four months. And I confess it's hard to say. It's a good question. I would say nothing. There are things that make sense in a corporation that corporations do, they're successful because of that, then I see a whole different list of things that startups do and are successful because of that. And those two lists are completely different. It's true that corporations are trying to be startups, but they're using completely different tools to do it and it leads to a completely different version of that startup. And startups, on the other hand, try to be more like a corporation from a certain size of, say, 100 people, but those principles are again completely different. So I for one don't see the overlap there.
Martin Hurych
Today you work for 4Me, as business development director, primarily in the UK, if I understand correctly, you also cover Eastern Europe and other countries, where you must have a lot of contacts in your long corporate career. Give us an idea of the company, so we can get an idea of where you work, and what you do, and how you do it.
Petr Běhávka
4Me is an innovative startup, we do employee workflow, typically between employee and IT. It's called IT Service Management, nowadays Enterprise Service Management, because the employee needs much more than just IT. They need help from HR in terms of salary, onboarding, offboarding, but it also applies to security, security safety, facility in terms of desks, etc. and we can address those workflows in a very unique and specific way. When I joined 4Me, I did the complete onboarding including training on a walk in the woods from my mobile phone, which I couldn't imagine before.
What's interesting about the platform is that we have a completely unique new architecture, this area of service management started back in the 1970s when they said: If you need something, you need a ticket. Ticket in the sense of a piece of paper, and that was circulated, finally the civil service here in many ways works the same way, and in the nineties they said: Let's come up with software for this, and there were a number of vendors, and the market then was equivalent to about two billion dollars. That is, every year $2 billion moves from customers towards vendors for software. Now at the beginning of this millennium a new company came in with cloud, said we're going to provide this from the cloud and took over the whole market. It's managed to grow that market from two billion to about 20 billion, which is incredible.
And we're a small startup, back in December we had 30 people, now we have 50 people and we have a generation newer software, a generation better architecture, so compared to our competitors we're able to deploy the software for a small company or for one person just like Gmail, I can set up one email account and Google is fine with it, and I can use it nationwide.
What is an Enterprise Management System? How can it help an SMB company?
Martin Hurych
If I've got it right, and that's what caught my eye, the software category is Enterprise Management System. The word Enterprise evokes multinational companies, countries. This podcast is mainly for small and medium-sized companies, give me a specific example. As a medium business owner, what could I trust this software to do, what could it solve?
Petr Běhávka
All the requirements that circulate within the company, which make sense to accelerate, to have control over them, often cost something. A good example is, a manufacturing plant somewhere on the edge needs to deal with things not just IT, because usually it's manufacturing and it has a small IT, but it needs to deal with, for example, taxis, that is, if I have a visitor, I would like a taxi to pick someone up at the station, at the airport, etc., I don't have to go anywhere, I take my mobile phone, my laptop, I make a request and it's very easily dealt with, i.e. I have a clear communication of what I have to enter, a form pops up with the required data, I don't have to think about it, it's a repetitive process and it's also very cheap because I don't have to figure out who the taxi driver is every time.
And that's how it works with physical security, for example, so what do I do if I find out that the lock is broken or now the modern thing, various phishing attacks, I get an email and it looks weird to me, I go to the so-called service desk and say I got a weird email, and I take a screenshot.
This is the big difference it can make, I spend seconds on it and the ticket goes to the right person. And it also works from the other side, i.e. in the moment when for example I am the solver of your request, I can find out in a second who you are, what you are, where you are, what things you have solved before, what other information I need. It whispers more information to me. And that's what we do very well and uniquely.
Martin Hurych
That means, for simplicity's sake, if I understand correctly. Instead of Franta, I need a new chair, or Ana, book me in for a service, I need the tyres changed, I enter this request into 4Me, which is then automatically processed, and I know what to do when, where, who to do it, right?
Petr Běhávka
Exactly, that is, it still goes to the Annie you'd normally call, it just takes maybe a tenth of the time and works consistently.
How to prepare for international expansion?
Martin Hurych
This was one thing why you're here, but you actually mentioned it at the beginning, you're into selling expensive stuff all the time, selling new stuff in new markets. Your whole career is actually intertwined with international business, international expansion, and I've met a lot of people lately who are starting to think about international expansion. And I thought it would be a great idea to talk about your experience, what international expansion actually looks like, because you have experience both selling big corporate stuff in the Enterprise business, big B2B business with a long sales cycle, and just opening up the market for startups. What do you think is the first necessary step I should take when I think over a glass of red wine that the Czech Republic is too small for me and I want to go out into the world.
Petr Běhávka
I think the first step is to set a goal. If we were having a conversation together, the key for me is that I'm having a conversation with the owner of the business, this is an owner level discussion. The second question is what should it look like in 3, 5 years. The answer that I would expect, and this is the first thing I'm interested in, what proportion of sales would you like to see come from abroad versus the Czechs. That's the first thing, and that actually drives the whole thing i.e. if you said for example you wanted to have 50% of your revenue from abroad in 5 years, that means you effectively want to double the company.
Martin Hurych
So you just want to know what he thinks it should look like to be a success, you don't find out if the service or product has potential in that particular selected market, or how should I understand it?
Petr Běhávka
I think in an American way, which means that when you set a goal, you look for a path, so the first thing I'm interested in is what is the goal, where is the ambition, is the ambition small, big, medium, is it organic, is it a goal that is very aspirational, that you have to push for. And then it's further related to that, i.e. it's interesting to know how the company stands on the Czech market, how many customers you've had in the last, say, 2-3 years, how many new ones have been added and how. Because one of the things you are talking about now is the competitiveness of the product, which I forget, when you are successful on the Czech market, it always starts with the product, with the service.
But over time, the product and service becomes less important, or only 50% important, and the other 50% are references and brand. Paradoxically, this means that the solution, the service, if it stays on the Czech market, the competitiveness of the product goes down over time, in my opinion. And if you contradict me now, the question I would ask you is how you stand in relation to your competitors, and very often the answer is: we have 2 or 3 Czech competitors, I know everything about them and we are competitive with them, but that's not a good answer, the real answer is who is the competitor in Germany, in the UK, in Poland, in America, specifically, and then we go into detail what is the company, what is its history, what is its product, how does it do business, which customers are it losing. If we were then to go into detail in that strategy. I was used to that in Enterprise , but for the smaller segments it might be different, but it's important to know how the competitor really behaves, who the sales director is in Germany, what he says in meetings, how he motivates his people, everything, and if I don't know that, it's okay, but if I do, it becomes a big competitive advantage.
Martin Hurych
If I go back to the first thinking, from what you say, there is a difference between for example a startup that has been on the Czech market for 2-3 years, started to collect its first successes, has corporate clients in the Czech Republic, typically Škoda, Erste, Pilsen brewery, that is considered a big success, versus for example a manufacturing company that has been on the market for 15 years and now both want to expand out, is there a difference?
Petr Běhávka
I think it's big. From what I've experienced, those manufacturing companies very often don't make sales. Or they think that the sales is there, and it's definitely there, but it's at the level of existing relationships that are concrete. I'll take a specific case, if I'm a supplier to a manufacturing company, I'm a manufacturing company, I'm supplying to another manufacturing company, very often the person who makes the decision on suppliers operates under some filter and for some reason I can have a meeting with them but my competitor can't. And that's a huge barrier, so then I start to confuse the ability to get new contracts, new projects, with the ability to sell, it's that farmer's sale versus hunter's sale. That is, if we were talking to a manufacturing company, the first question is how do I win new contracts, do we sell new to new, the answer is the market is saturated, we can't, and what I would start with is how do we open up new conversations. Create a process, create a small team, which can be one person with two or three freelancers who help him with the content, with a database of contacts that continuously every day, every week, every month, every quarter, they expand the amount of companies they talk to, i.e. If I'm supplying the automotive industry in the Czech Republic, I should start communicating with the automotive industry in the rest of the world, and I don't measure it by business, I don't measure it by opportunities, I measure it by conversations, and in two years we can see what those conversations look like. I would expect us to get to maybe 50, 100 companies and 2,000 contacts that we're going to nurture in some way. That's the first step I would take, and I would take that as a necessary investment in getting the business off the ground.
Martin Hurych
Did you say two years?
Petr Běhávka
I think so, I haven't experienced anything lasting less than 2 years. Having said that, usually the results come afterwards in another 2 or 3, these major structural things are for a 5-year period in my opinion. And if not, it's usually some sort of exception, one in a thousand.
Martin Hurych
I see it the same way. On the other hand, I see the expectation of those who have decided to expand that either they will save their situation here at home because they have stopped doing well here at home, or for whatever other reason they are expecting quick results and the traders are under enormous pressure, and if the results don't come in six, nine, twelve months, then often the expansion is seen as a failure.
Petr Běhávka
And that's why I really like the consultation that you provide, you're able to talk to the owner and set expectations the right way. And I'm glad that you do these type of podcasts because what owners need to know is that they need to start early with this and that it's solvable and there's a high probability of success if they do it reasonably right, so I don't have to be afraid to go abroad when I'm selling from a small village in the Czech Republic, I've got 3 customers, I'm afraid I'm going to lose one of them and I don't know how to market to the UK, so that I can build that competence. That's definitely, there's no way not to build it up. Maybe I'm going to say it arrogantly, it's impossible to fail. I don't believe it, it's just a matter of time and investment.
Martin Hurych
Going back to the steps to expansion, isn't this a bit of an age issue as well? Because I'm split roughly down the middle, I don't want to say you old, but more experienced entrepreneurs, versus the young levers, and I have to say I'm pleased to find that the younger generation sees it very differently. They, just like you, have a much more predatory mindset already. We can't fail, we'll be a global hegemon in 3 years time, the fact that that's not really a very realistic option is another thing, but I like the fact that they don't really see borders anymore, whereas my generation still lives in the belief that we're being oppressed outside or actually international expansion is nonsense and as such doomed to failure or extinction.
Petr Běhávka
I think that's a big misunderstanding, and if I have something that people are willing to buy, and I have an ambition to get some of the revenue from abroad, I believe it's impossible to be unsuccessful. Where we're going to differ is the degree of that success and the speed of where I get to and when. It sounds arrogant but it's realistically true, I've learned a lot in the covid era.
Using the example of my dear mother-in-law and her new patisserie in a small village of 990 inhabitants, including dogs and cats in Kladno. After three or four years the cake shop is in the black, it's not making any money, but my mother-in-law has managed to get the business to a level that is amazing, she sells cakes, people love it. She's one step away from turning it into a working business. But it means that she had a goal, she wanted to sell the best cakes, I call it organic, she uses the best ingredients for unbelievable money, and she's going after that path and that path is winding, this is exactly the same.
Of course, this means that I have to innovate the product somewhere, that if I'm competitive in the Czech Republic, I don't have to be in Germany or somewhere else, and the second thing it can fail on is finance. If we acknowledge where we are and where we're going, put an appropriate budget to it so that we don't bleed as a company, then we can't fail. That's the biggest problem, investing too much or too little. But we're talking about five years, 2-5 years.
Martin Hurych
To get back to that, for you the first is the conviction or decision that I want. And painting that final goal of what it should look like so that I consider it a success, whatever that looks like. Creating activity, even with a minimal team, but creating activity and not passively waiting, I get that. Create activity where? How would you choose the territory you would first step into?
Petr Běhávka
Depending on where the company is located. If it doesn't have any customers anywhere, then I would have completely simple questions for that type of owner, which country would they want to live in, because one of the big accelerators of foreign expansion is that the owner moves somewhere for two years. If I take Europe for example, we can say Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland. Where he would like to go, that's the first thing.
Martin Hurych
I'm sorry, I get it with a startup, but what if the answer is: but I can't leave the manufacturing company because I run the whole thing.
Petr Běhávka
If we stick with a manufacturing company, that might be different. That's right, there's somewhere else to go. At a manufacturing company, I would probably map out the competition and the customers where they are. It's interesting for, say, a software technology startup to be somewhere in a country. For manufacturing, it's just a little bit different. I would look at the competition. I would definitely look at the ability to travel to those countries, I believe in remote sales and everything, but it's important to be able to come to that country, spend some time there. I would look at the money. One of the key things I hear that gets overlooked is things like political risk and currency. We've talked about this together, and to give you specific examples, American companies were some of the first to start pulling out of Russia and Turkey, and that's well over eight years ago give or take, that currency started going, the wrong way.
Martin Hurych
I see you did a lot of PESTL analysis in your corporate career.
Petr Běhávka
No, I never did it, but I did get some reflexes, I remember, and please, I had an English boss for many years, and he is used to the fact that as soon as he hears some catastrophe, for example, what's happening now in Afghanistan, which is probably destabilising the whole region, they would immediately stop all investment, all development, they would divide any targets by two or three and make new plans based on that. It's going to take a week, they're not going to mess with it at all.
Martin Hurych
I had it the same way...
Take on an external consultant for international expansion
Petr Běhávka
And after all these years, I've found that there's a lot of wisdom in that, so I would go that way, that's one, two, you need to have a partner as a business owner in that foreign expansion, somebody to consult externally. Someone who has the knowledge, who can advise, who wants to be part of the process and create a plan. It's important to make a good plan in my opinion and then be prepared to abandon it, as Eisenhower said, planning is everything. But the plan from day one starts to be different and the questions can be detailed, I remember the first time I discussed this in some detail, coincidentally it was earlier this year with a successful owner and entrepreneur, we spent hours. Our first call started at 3 on a Friday, we ended at 2 in the morning and it was only because of the wives on both sides stepping in that we were shouting through the house, so clearly this can be a very ambitious topic and interesting for businesses. And specifically from manufacturing, if you look at what's happening in the automotive industry right now, I believe that more than one company is going to have a hard time staying in the market because the moment I start to see my order volume drop within my two or three customers or even one dominant customer that does 90% of my sales, at that point to start doing demand-gen, it's just too late, it's impossible to keep up.
Martin Hurych
I have the same experience, I have a plan, I know where I want to go, I'm active, I have the hundred, two hundred conversations we talked about, after a year and a half, two years, I start to get leads. I know that the company, I know that the region is therefore a prospect for me. What's next? Should I build my own team there, should I build my own company there, should I look for a partner who knows the region better? What would you do?
Petr Běhávka
The safe choice is the local person and the local entity. That's the traditional answer. I would say it depends on the level of innovation of what I do, that is, if what I do is highly commoditized, I try to make the purchase, the relationship as low risk as possible for that customer. So I would try to have someone locally, show commitment to that market and region. On the other hand, the moment that I'm different and price might be just one of those factors, I just do things differently, I offer some competitive advantage, something that I'm really different in, that's when that customer is willing to tolerate a lot of other things, so those are the two extremes. I do everything from the Czech Republic and the other extreme is I start a local team. Paradoxically, the local team is nothing fundamentally complicated. But of course it means that once I set up an entity in the UK, for example, I'm automatically expected to submit a report every year, so there is publicly available information about what my liabilities are, how many employees I have, and this report, unlike in the Czech Republic for example, has to be delivered, and if it's not delivered, the company has a problem. It is also related to the fact that during the first three years, for example, the ability of the entity to function becomes very visible.
Martin Hurych
A lot of people are building an affiliate network in between. Is that something that maybe in 4Me you're even considering as an alternative?
Petr Běhávka
It is important to have partners in the technology sector. My take on it is that the partner network is all the stronger, all the more successful, the more successful just direct sales, direct sales. And it's important to do these things in parallel together.
Martin Hurych
So I can't avoid direct sales.
Petr Běhávka
Absolutely
Martin Hurych
Because a lot of the people that have passed by me in the last six months believe there's a partner out there that's doing something similar, he's going to take our catalog and start selling us. I can actually avoid that direct sales in that particular country by actually delegating my ambitions and my goals to the partner that's in that country. In my experience this tends to lead to a lot of disillusionment after a year or two, what's your experience with this?
Petr Běhávka
I think with both of those approaches it's important what activities we're talking about and what results I'm looking for i.e. None of the partners, none of the distributors and none of the value edit reseller, none of the strategic partners for the vendor will do lead generation, will not do market awareness, will not do branding with exceptions. I imagine one out of a hundred will, but generally no, meaning realistically a partner won't get me into that market. He can help me close the first one, maybe two deals, but he's not going to do the brand for me, he's not going to get to that market in terms of hundreds and thousands of conversations to make that market aware of me.
This is the first thing, this is why I need to have a direct sales process. How do I then close that deal is a pretty good question because one of the very successful strategies is to have a direct deal, that is, direct salespeople creating demand, driving the conversation across the deal cycle, doing all kinds of activities, and then at the end of the day, I actually close the deal through a partner, which loses margin, makes the deal smaller, makes it more complicated, and increases the risk of failure.
The reason why I do this is because I want to build a partner network, i.e. I feed the channel with business and this is what fast-growing, well-functioning start-ups that have a good product are willing to do for three or four years. Not a couple of months, not a couple of quarters. And the moment that partner grows to a certain size or that partner's business. It may be in revenue, it may be in people, I'll change the rhetoric, meaning I'll say, now you have enough money, enough profits, I need you to build a sales team, and also the best practices that I've acquired as a vendor. At 4Me we're doing that in the UK right now, so I'll want the partners to start doing the same. But it's in a situation where my product is already generating enough revenue for them and is key to them, i.e. it makes sense and it's possible. Of course, for a lot of companies this may not be natural. But because there's already some revenue, I'm able to motivate or compel that owner, that company to do that, positively or negatively.
Theoretical advice in practical application
Martin Hurych
Now you've taken it off my tongue, in 4Me this is what you're going through, or going through. What stage are you at and how are you actually implementing these recommendations step by step in practice, and what are the results?
Petr Běhávka
I'll give it some more context. We are a company with origins in the Netherlands and we do business with through an American entity, which is against all recommendations. The reason it works is because we have a huge advantage from an architectural perspective, that is specifically as we've talked about what the software does, we allow the business to be broken up into what we call support teams and they can operate interconnected or separately. This is a huge differentiator in terms of impact, in terms of cost, in terms of everything, both for small companies and large companies. It means we have sort of a key architectural and functional competitive advantage that no other company in the world has. And the reason I say that is because it allows us to do things differently and those results are different, the quality of those results are different, so when I take that.
Specifically, what drew me to join 4Me in June was when I heard what kind of customers they had as a company and suddenly I heard about the Dutch Ministry of Defence or the Belgian central administration. A startup that at the time had 30 employees. That's total nonsense. Completely out of any framework. And related to that is our situation in the UK, specifically in England. So when I joined, I found out after a month what our current situation was. We have two big customers. Coincidentally, they're large companies, but in the commercial segment, above commercial is major and above major is still enterprise. So two major firms, two major references, one is a firm that runs all the restaurants in major airports globally, and the other firm is a major private health insurer. And we have some very small customers on top of that. There are five partners. Of those five partners, one of them sells and has customers, the others are kind of sitting on the fence, so this is the situation I started in three months ago. And there's no pipeline, so I took over a pipeline with about forty items, some ten, fifteen that I vetted, the quality of that vetting was such that I asked my colleague who manages it, we use HubSpot, to delete it all, so that's where I started.
Martin Hurych
Sorry, so now you're going to implement the steps we've listed here on yourself and validate them.
Petr Běhávka
Exactly, we have I would say a four-item strategy: one is direct sales, i.e. me and my colleague, reach out to competitor accounts, cold calling, advertising on Google, optimization, that's the first step. The second one, we onboarded one major partner, a company that is not much on the Czech market, but if I were to make a comparison, it would probably be someone like AutoCont, a major service integrator on the market, someone that when we say they are our partner, it has a ring to it and coincidentally they are also our competitor's partner, they are called SCC, interesting company. The fourth strategy is to motivate small partners to do leadgen, meaning the moment for example I land an opportunistic, that was the first thing I did, one small opportunistic, I started working on it with a partner to see how it works, so that we could develop a working relationship.
What is important is actually the activation of the people who are around us at the moment, and this will of course lead to 80% of them dropping out and 20% staying. Because under pressure, it will become clear where there is some benefit and where there is not. And the last thing, and this is the thing we're adding now, is relationships, so we've started working with a person who helps us in strategic networking at board and CEO level of selected companies, selected major companies in England. So that's kind of the strategy across those segments. And I'm actively rolling out cold calling right now, which is definitely working, which is also an interesting thing by the way. I've been hearing for years that cold calling doesn't work in Germany. For years. You're not allowed to make calls, it's GDPR now, nobody answers the phone. We're not used to it, nothing like that, until I believed it. In 4Me, specifically Germany is about 3 years ahead of England. That's one of the three most mature markets for us. A lot of revenue comes from Germany and the pipeline we have now is purely from cold calling.
3 prerequisites for international expansion
Martin Hurych
Great, that's interesting. Peter, if we were to summarize all of our talk about international expansion into three to five points, a kind of vocal checklist of what needs to happen in order for me to be able to at least theoretically, or actually not theoretically, because you said success is guaranteed, to be able to think about success, what would be, three to five points that you would recommend?
Petr Běhávka
The goal, the resource, the team, being clear about who's going to do what, how, we need this plan. And the third thing, tailoring the product to help that foreign expansion. I mean, being successful in this market is partly about the brand, partly about the product. And the stronger the brand, the more likely that product becomes less and less competitive, and that's the third thing we need to kick-start. That is, if I ask you about the service or the product that we offer, what are we going to do now in terms of development to make that product more attractive to foreign countries. This is what I think is key.
Martin Hurych
So to spark foreign expansion, you need to know what you want, have the people to do it and have a competitive product.
Petr Běhávka
Exactly, and if I don't have it, I have a plan to get there.
Martin Hurych
Primo. Thank you very much, Peter.
Petr Běhávka
Thank you very much.
Martin Hurych
Okay, that was Peter Běhávka. If this episode sparked your plans for international expansion, we'd love to have you tune in to Zážeh on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, and don't forget to check out my website www.martinhurych.com for more free accelerator tools. Thanks and good luck.
(edited and shortened; automatically translated by DeepL)