Most of them happen in the first 12 to 18 months. Nearly all of them come from the same assumption: that the US is an adjacent, familiar market. It isn't. Not for your reputation, not for your value proposition, and not for how US buyers staff, evaluate, and measure the work.
International defense and dual-use companies lose the most time and money in the US by assuming what worked at home will transfer—their reputation, their value proposition, and how buyers staff and measure the work. The costliest mistakes are skipped customer discovery, premature offices and hires, and late discovery of clearance and export-control constraints. All of them are avoidable when the first 12–18 months are run as a genuine early-stage effort.
Three things rarely transfer cleanly:
A strong reference in your home market, or a product that's "proven" there, often lands in the US as unproven or misaligned. What feels substantial at home can look small, niche, or incomplete to a US buyer.
US buyers frequently have different expectations about:
Companies regularly discover late that their offering needs more out-of-the-box scalability and configurability, less reliance on expert intervention, or a completely different position relative to the customer's own workforce. These mismatches are expensive to fix after the fact. One company's version of this story is on US Touchdown.
Even experienced companies have to restart discovery almost from zero. Your customers and use cases at home don't substitute for direct, repeated conversations with US buyers about how they actually buy, evaluate, staff, and measure success.
Skipping or rushing this step is the single most common source of wasted time and money.
Formal entities, offices, and early hires feel productive. They're also the visible move—and they often lock in cost before the real requirements are understood.
A soft presence and disciplined listening almost always outperform premature infrastructure.
Access to many relevant programs, facilities, and conversations is gated by clearances and secure facilities that foreign companies—and their personnel—can't easily obtain.
This isn't a paperwork detail. It fundamentally shapes what work is possible, with whom, and on what timeline. Discovering the constraints late is costly.
US export controls—ITAR, EAR, and related rules—shape what can be discussed, and with whom. Finding these constraints after conversations have started creates avoidable friction, and sometimes irreversible damage.
The companies that struggle most act as if they're expanding into an adjacent, familiar market.
The ones that make progress treat the first 12–18 months as a genuine early-stage effort: heavy on listening, light on assumptions about value, scale, staffing models, clearances, and how work actually gets done in the US.
See what a US foothold should actually do—or fill out a short intake and tell me where you are. The questions are direct. Your answers tell me whether I can help, and which of these mistakes you're closest to making.
No sales call. No deck. A conversation about whether and how to proceed.