In the winter after the crash, I flew from Canary Wharf to Midtown Manhattan to save a quarter of a million pounds. In those days we our a global fund management magazine was run from our London office, and three of Wall Street’s biggest names had been loyal advertisers for years. Then, one after another, the renewals stopped arriving.
The meeting was friendly, the coffee was dreadful, and the verdict was delivered with real regret. “We love the magazine, Richard. We just can’t buy it from a British company any more.” After the crash, the procurement departments had pulled up the drawbridge, and the new rule was American suppliers first.
I went back to my hotel and did what any self-respecting Englishman does when he’s turned away. I sulked. I drafted a mental letter to the Financial Times about protectionism. I worked out how to break it to the team. Then, somewhere over the second gin, it hit me that nobody in that room had said no to the magazine. They’d said no to the postcode.
Think of a New York nightclub doorman. A Brit who’s told he isn’t on the list says “fair enough”, apologises to the doorman for having a face, and goes home to tell his wife the place was overrated anyway. An American who’s told the same thing asks, in all seriousness, what it would take to get on the list. Then he goes and does it.
I now spend half my time in America, between New York and Florida, and I’m convinced this is the whole difference between our two business cultures. It isn’t intelligence, or capital, or even the weather, though Florida does make a strong case. It’s what happens in the four seconds after somebody says no.
In Britain, no is a verdict. It’s handed down from on high, like a planning refusal or a ruling from the Rugby Football Union, and the decent thing is to accept it with dignity and a bit of grumbling. In America, no is the opening position in a negotiation. It’s a form to fill in. Show an American a locked door and he’ll ask where the locksmith is. Show a Briton the same door and he’ll write a well-argued complaint about doors.
So we filled in the form. Within weeks we’d set up a legal entity in New York, with an American address, American bank accounts and an American invoice header. Same magazine, same journalists, same quality. The clients signed again, and almost with relief, because they’d never wanted to lose us. They just needed us to be on the list. Since then that American business has more than quadrupled.
Business readers will recognise the principle here, because it’s the oldest one in selling: the customer’s constraint is your product specification. A buy-local rule isn’t a wall, it’s a requirement written down. When a buyer tells you exactly what they need before they can pay you, they’ve handed you the brief. Most British firms read it as a rejection letter.
The figures suggest that reflex is alive and well. Bibby Financial Services found that 36 percent of SMEs report a reduction in US export turnover following newly imposed tariffs, while 27 percent have actively reduced their US exposure. I understand the instinct. I’ve written before about tariffs squeezing British exporters, and about Britain’s stay-at-home problem. But walking away from the world’s biggest consumer market because the door has a new handle is just the doorman story played out at national scale.
None of this means rushing in blind. The sensible advice, as Business Matters reported this year, is that “the British businesses most likely to succeed are often those being pulled into the US by real customer demand and that have a well thought out strategy to make the most of that opportunity.” That was exactly our position. The demand was there. All that was missing was the willingness to change shape for it.
That’s the American gift, and we should steal it shamelessly. They don’t see restructuring a business to suit a customer as giving in. They see it as just how business works. We treat our corporate structure like a family heirloom. They treat theirs like a suit, and if it doesn’t fit the room, they get another one.
I still think about that hotel bar, and the letter to the FT I never sent. It would have been beautifully argued, completely correct, and worth absolutely nothing.
These days, when someone in New York tells me I’m not on the list, I ask who’s in charge of the list.
Richard Alvin
Richard Alvin is a serial entrepreneur, a former advisor to the UK Government about small business and an Honorary Teaching Fellow on Business at Lancaster University. A winner of the London Chamber of Commerce Business Person of the year and Freeman of the City of London for his services to business and charity. Richard is also Group MD of Capital Business Media and SME business research company Trends Research, regarded as one of the UK's leading experts in the SME sector and an active angel investor and advisor to new start companies. Richard is also the host of Save Our Business the U.S. based business advice television show. Richard is also the founder of the CBM Foundation, Capital Business Media's charitable foundation, which gives 1% of the group's time, product and profit to charity every year.
