You would not open an office in Oslo if your customers were concentrated in Madrid. Yet UK companies do the American equivalent constantly: they land in New York because it is the city they know, or in San Francisco because that is where technology is supposed to happen, and then discover their buyers are in Ohio, or Texas, or a cluster of three counties in the Carolinas nobody in London has heard of.
The word "US market" is the problem. It sounds like a single place with a single door. It is not. It is fifty states with different tax regimes, different regulatory bodies, different procurement rules, and different industrial clusters — closer to the European Union than to any one European country. You would never treat Germany, Poland and Portugal as one interchangeable "European market." America deserves the same respect.
Where the customer is, not where the noise is
Every sector in the US has a geography. Aerospace suppliers cluster around specific programme sites. Medical device adoption runs through particular hospital systems in particular states. Defence procurement concentrates where the primes and the bases are. Energy and grid work follows the utilities and the state mandates. The map of where your buyers actually make decisions is real, specific, and almost never the map a first-time entrant draws from London.
The noise — the famous cities, the marquee conferences, the states that dominate the business press — is a poor guide to it. Silicon Valley is the right answer for a narrow band of companies and an expensive distraction for everyone else. The question is not "where is American business?" It is "where, precisely, is the American buyer for what I sell?"
Don’t set up shop where the industry is famous. Set up where your customers sign.
Why the wrong landing is so costly
Choosing the wrong first location is not a setback you correct in a quarter. It compounds. You hire in the wrong place, so your team is hundreds of miles from the customers they are meant to reach. You build relationships with the wrong regional players. You spend a year learning that the pipeline is thin not because the product is wrong but because you are simply in the wrong part of the country. By the time the diagnosis is clear, the budget is spent and the board is asking hard questions about whether America was a mistake.
It was not a mistake. It was a map problem. And map problems are entirely avoidable with work done before the plane ticket is booked.
What to do before you land
- Locate the cluster. Identify where your specific buyers concentrate — by industry, by procurement pattern, by the regulatory and incentive environment that favours what you sell. This is research, not intuition.
- Follow the decision, not the headquarters. Where a company is registered and where it actually buys are often different places. Chase the buying decision.
- Weigh the state, not just the city. Tax treatment, employment law, and sector-specific regulation vary enormously between states and can shape the economics of your entry before you have sold anything.
- Pick two or three, not fifty. Depth in the right region beats a thin national presence every time. Win one place completely, then use it as the proof that opens the next.
The companies that succeed in America are rarely the ones with the biggest budget or the loudest launch. They are the ones who did the unglamorous work of finding out where their customers actually were — and then went there, specifically, rather than everywhere, vaguely.
This is the kind of question we work through with clients before a single dollar is committed to a US location. If you are weighing where to land — or suspect you have already landed in the wrong place — that is exactly the conversation to have.