Viva la Difference!

For a little more than three and a half years, I’ve been trying to fit in. Not trying to become British, exactly, but striving to meld my American drive to produce with the British focus on protocol.

I should have been putting a bit more emphasis on my American origins and UK location, and meeting as many people as possible.

That turns out to be more desired than anything else about me. Marketers will tell you that I made a classic mistake by trying to fit in too well. I don’t have a Unique Selling Proposition if I am no longer unique.

Life hit me over the head with a large stick to make me pay attention, and now business is perking up better. A USA startup needs help entering the international market, but isn’t ready for the cost and complexity of opening their own foreign branch. A team I’ve called together can handle it all for them, at low cost to rapidly generate a multimillion-pound sales pipeline, with great C-level access to one of the world’s largest concentrations of good prospects for their breakthrough legacy software migration service… and the team approach we’ve created can do the same for other American companies that want to cross the Pond in a similarly cost effective way.

It can work in the other direction, too. It actually makes more sense that way, especially for the UK. The British economy is in worse shape than the USA’s, and the market in the USA is much larger. The math stacks up much better going from the UK to USA than in the other direction. But business is done differently in the States. A British firm entering the market there without help can get chewed up.

My consulting businesses are not the only beneficiaries of this life lesson in the value of being different. Even the property management firm is gaining a little from it. Yes, the firm is entirely Chattanooga based. But the VW factory being built there has attracted some international attention to the area, and we have a unique perspective about it which the other firms in town lack. For example, we notice when European investors start buying property in the States instead of on their own turf, which props up the USA’s real estate market in ways that hardly anyone else is discussing. We write about such things in our newsletter. And yes, we have avoided getting caught by a scam precisely because we knew how to check out someone who claimed to be getting transferred into the States by a multinational company. Many property management firms would only know how to run a background check within their own country.

It’s politically popular right now to attack immigration, to complain that the newcomers aren’t fitting in as well as they should. If you are an immigrant, as I am, there’s a lot of pressure to conform. But especially in times of great distress, new skills and new ways are much needed. I know how to be a honeybee for businesses in the States, bringing ideas and techniques from one venue to another as I go from project to project. Now I should be a honeybee with a wider range, spanning the Atlantic.

Viva la difference!