Entering the U.S. Market Is a Corporate Transplant

Most founders plan their move into the United States the way they would plan a product launch at home: a distributor, a trade show, a website in English, a budget for year one. The plan is usually competent. It is aimed at the wrong problem.

A sales plan assumes the market will accept you if the offer is good. A transplant assumes nothing of the kind. The organ can be healthy and the surgery flawless, and the body still rejects it because nobody prepared the body to receive it. In a market entry, the body is everything around the sale: tax, legal structure, pricing, compliance, and the habits of a buyer with more choice than almost any consumer on earth.

I learned this with my own company. The first time we tried to expand into the United States, we failed, and we had two American investment funds as partners. Capital and local shareholders did not protect us from the things we did not know. The second time we had learned, and we knew how to do it.

Capital does not stop the rejection

If money could buy acceptance, Tesco would have made it. In 2007 Britain's biggest retailer, one of the three largest in the world, opened Fresh & Easy in the American West. Six years later the chain had 199 stores and about 5,000 employees, had absorbed more than £1 billion of capital, and had never turned a profit against rivals like Trader Joe's and Walmart. Walking away cost Tesco another £1 billion in restructuring and one-off charges.¹ It had scale, data and a format that worked at home, and none of it decided what American shoppers put in their baskets.

The opposite case is closer to home. Grupo Bimbo did not try to transplant Mexican bakeries into the United States. It acquired American tissue: a California tortilla maker in 1994, Mrs Baird's in Texas in 1998, George Weston's U.S. brands in 2002 and 2009, and in 2011 Sara Lee's North American fresh bakery business, which roughly doubled its U.S. operation.² Few companies can buy their way in like that. Every company can do what those acquisitions did implicitly, which is to borrow local knowledge before committing capital.

The rules nobody tells you about

The expensive mistakes are rarely exotic. They are ordinary American rules that nobody at home had any reason to learn.

Take sales tax. For decades a seller with no physical presence in a state could not be required to collect that state's sales tax. In 2018, in South Dakota v. Wayfair, the Supreme Court overruled that principle. The case turned on a South Dakota law that applies to sellers delivering more than $100,000 of goods or services into the state in a year, or completing 200 or more separate sales there, and the Court found that sellers above that line are connected enough to the state to be taxed.³ After that ruling, the question for a foreign seller stopped being where the company sits and became where its customers are.

Or take the entity. A founder can open a Delaware or Florida LLC online in an afternoon. If a single foreign owner holds it, the IRS treats it as a corporation for reporting purposes: it must file Form 5472 attached to a pro forma corporate return, even though the LLC itself files no income tax return. Missing it costs $25,000, plus another $25,000 for every 30 days the failure continues beyond 90 days after the IRS notifies you.⁴ Neither rule is hidden. Both are invisible to someone whose instincts were formed in another system, and that is what I mean by local scars: people who already paid for these lessons, so you don't have to.

A buyer who leaves without warning

The other force that rejects newcomers is the American consumer. In my experience this buyer gives attention freely and loyalty rarely: in love with a brand today, gone to another tomorrow, with four generations buying different things and the youngest changing fastest. The channels move just as quickly. Online sales were 17.1% of U.S. retail in the second quarter of 2026, and they grew 12.2% in a year while retail overall grew 6.7%.⁶

Friction can be measured. Baymard Institute, which studies checkout usability, found that 17% of U.S. online shoppers have abandoned an order because the checkout was too long or complicated, and that the average U.S. checkout shows 23.48 form elements when 12 to 14 can do the job.⁷ Add a slow delivery promise, an unclear returns policy and a support line that answers in another time zone, and a good product at a good price still loses the sale.

Charm is not a market strategy

Latin American business runs on relationships, and that is a real strength. It travels badly when it is used as a substitute for structure. An American buyer will enjoy the dinner, then send your contract to legal, ask for your certificate of insurance and check whether you can deliver to a warehouse in Ohio on a Tuesday. As I say in the reel, friendliness and charm do not replace sophistication and discipline.

Check the premises before the money moves

The reel ends with the method in one sentence: before you invest, check that the premises and assumptions your U.S. business rests on are valid. This is how I would run that check.

This check is where every U.S. market entry engagement starts, and it is why the AEGISS™ diagnostic exists: to test the premises while changing them is still cheap. If you make products in Mexico and wonder why being close has not turned into American customers, read the border is only the beginning. If your plan starts with the Hispanic market, read the nostalgia market trap first. The full map, with cases and checklists, is in Destino USA.

The United States is the largest consumer market in the world,⁵ and it is ready for the companies that are ready for it. If you have decided to come, welcome. Start with the premises.