9h • General discussion
The wrong expansion strategy
Your bilingual employee is not your expansion strategy.
They're a workaround. And workarounds break at scale.
This is one of the most common moves US companies make when expanding into LATAM or they address Latinos within the US.
They've got someone on the team who speaks Spanish. Maybe grew up in a bilingual household. Maybe studied abroad.
So they hand them the responsibility of bridging the entire cultural and operational gap between the two markets.
It works. Until it doesn't.
Until that person leaves. Until the complexity outgrows one person. Until a mistranslated HR policy creates a legal issue. Until a client meeting goes sideways because the nuance wasn't there.
*** Because language and culture evolve. ***
- Language fluency isn't the same as cultural fluency.
- Cultural fluency isn't the same as operational expertise.
Expansion requires all three.
- Language fluency
- Cultural fluency
- Operational expertise
Language fluency: natives who read, stay informed, follow trends and use the right tools for the right purpose, getting the messaging right today.
Cultural fluency: how are countries, regions, socially and politically, today?
Operational expertise: Based on the above, is our operation aligned with the dynamic changes in the market and customer behaviour across the different regions where we have a presence?
The companies that scale successfully in LATAM don't rely on one person.
They build systems, processes, and partnerships that work without a single point of failure.
P.S. If your entire LATAM bridge is one employee, you don't have a strategy. You have a dependency.
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The wrong expansion strategy
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