Why "Everyone Is Going to the US" Is Not a Strategy
There is a sentence that gets said in almost every export meeting, and it is rarely examined: we should be doing the US.
Ask why, and you will get one of three answers. Because that is where the volume is. Because our competitors are already there. Because it is the biggest market in the world.
Notice what all three have in common. They are statements about other people. Volume is about other people's demand. Competitors are other people's choices. Size is a fact about a country, not a fact about your factory.
None of them says anything about you — about what your evidence supports, what your certificates actually cover, or what your cash flow can survive. And a market decision made entirely out of statements about other people is not a strategy. It is a bet using someone else's reasoning.
The default answer, and why it feels like a decision
The United States becomes the default answer for a good reason: it is the easiest market to research. Trade shows publish exhibitor lists. Import records are searchable. Industry associations publish their standards. Buyers have English-language websites, and so do their competitors.
That transparency is genuinely useful. It is also the trap. The same openness that lets you study the market lets every other exporter study it too. When information about a market is free, information stops being an advantage. What is left is price and proof — and price is the part you can least afford to compete on.
So the correct reading of "everyone is going there" is not the market is validated. It is the market is crowded with people who also could not answer the question.
The costs people forget to price
Most exporters who count the cost of entering the US count freight and duty. Those are real, but they are also the parts you can look up. The parts that decide whether you make money arrive later.
Standards and certification. Every market recognises particular standards through particular bodies. What matters is not whether you hold a certificate. It is whether the certificate covers the product you are actually shipping, whether it was issued by a body your buyer's compliance team recognises, and whether the factory address on it is the address that will produce the order. Buyers verify all three. A certificate that turns out to cover a different product line is worse than no certificate at all, because it looks like an attempt.
Liability. Once goods circulate in a mature market, responsibility travels along the chain to whoever can pay. That is why insurance, traceability and defect clauses come up in the first meeting rather than the last. If your quotation has no position on them, you are not cheap — you are undefined, and undefined is expensive for the buyer to carry.
Channel depth. Mature markets are layered: importer, distributor, dealer, contractor. Each layer needs a margin, and each layer will ask you to hold stock, extend terms, or protect their territory. Your ex-works price has to leave room for a chain that may be three parties long. A price that works in a market where you sell to the end user directly does not survive that structure.
Payment behaviour. Long-established buyers expect to be invoiced and to pay later. That is normal, and it is a financing cost you carry. A business that cannot fund sixty or ninety days of receivables is not ready for the market it is aiming at, however good the product is.
None of these four is solved by working harder. They have to be priced in before you quote — which means the decision to enter has to be made before the decision about what to charge.
When following the crowd is actually right
It would be dishonest to say the crowd is always wrong. Following it is efficient when it is a shortcut past work you do not need to do. That is true when:
- You already have a partner there. An existing customer, an agent, a joint venture, a licence — somebody whose name can be put in front of a new buyer. This is the strongest single reason to enter a market, and it is not a reason that comes from the crowd.
- Your documentation is already recognised there. Not "we hold certificates", but "these specific certificates, from these bodies, cover these products, and our buyer's compliance team has seen them before."
- You can absorb one significant claim. Not the value of the claim itself — the disruption while it is resolved, plus the reserve you will have to hold afterwards.
- The volume fits capacity you already have. If you are adding a market to fill idle lines, follow the crowd if it fits. If you are adding a market by building capacity first, the crowd's opinion is irrelevant and your own careful reading of a smaller market is probably better.
Four out of four, and going to the US is not a bet at all. Anything less, and you are not following a strategy. You are following a queue.
Ask a different question
The question that produces a decision is not which market is biggest. It is which market will read the evidence I already have.
Three questions get you most of the way there, and none of them costs anything.
1. Who has already spoken for you? Is there a name, a shipment, a project or a partner in that market you can point to? A buyer in a new market is looking for the shortest path to trusting you, and an existing relationship is that path. If the answer is nobody, every other question gets harder.
2. Does your documentation count there? List what you hold — quality systems, product certificates, test reports — and for each one write down who issued it, what product scope it covers, and whether that body is recognised in the target market. This takes an afternoon and it changes the shortlist more often than any market report will.
3. Can you survive the first claim? In a market with enforceable liability, assume there will be one. Not because your product is bad, but because that is what a mature market does. If the answer is no, the market you want is smaller, with a shorter chain and faster payment. That is a perfectly good market — it is just not the one everyone is talking about.
Run these against two or three candidates and you will often find the largest one is not the one to start with. How to Pick Your First Export Market Without a Research Budget is the two-week process for doing exactly that with no budget.
Using the crowd as data, not as a verdict
None of this means ignoring what other exporters do. Their choices are real information. But they are hypotheses, and a hypothesis is only useful once something tests it.
The correct use of "everyone is going to the US" is to write it at the top of a list as candidate number one, then run the three questions against it and against two alternatives. Sometimes it survives — and then you have something better than enthusiasm. You have a decision with reasons you can revisit when the first results come in.
What you should stop doing is treating a market as chosen because it was chosen by other people. Their reasons may be excellent. You simply do not know what they are, and you are the one who has to pay for the answer.
The one thing to remember
The US is not a wrong answer. It is a hypothesis that has been repeated so many times that people have stopped testing it.
Test it. If it passes, go — with your eyes open about what the market will ask of you. If it fails, the fact that everyone else is going is not a reason to follow. It is a reason to look at what they might be missing.
If you want to talk through which market your evidence actually supports, that is the kind of question I write about — get in touch.