Most of the damage is done before anyone realises there is a problem.
A structured consultation with a US expansion specialist that stress-tests your plan, validates your strategy, and identifies the gaps before they cost you. The outcome is a business that is better prepared, less exposed, faster to revenue, and more attractive to investors.
The founder spends the first three to six months doing the things that feel productive.
Flying to the US, taking meetings, signing up a couple of early customers, maybe hiring a local salesperson or engaging a contractor to represent them. Revenue trickles in. Confidence builds. They assume the hard part is behind them. Then the problems start arriving. Usually not all at once. Usually at the worst possible moment.
Contractor reclassified as employee.
The contractor they had been paying for eight months gets reclassified by the state. Backdated payroll taxes, penalties, and potential personal liability for the directors follow. The contractor did not know. The founder certainly did not.
Sales tax nexus triggered unknowingly.
A letter arrives from a state tax authority. Selling into California or New York above the economic nexus threshold without collecting sales tax. The liability is retrospective. Voluntary disclosure would have limited it significantly. They did not know it existed.
US sales hire fails after nine months.
Made too early before the proposition was validated for the US market. The fully loaded cost ran sixty percent higher than the UK equivalent. The correction costs another six months of runway and management attention.
Brand name registered by someone else.
Trading in the US for two years but never filed with the USPTO. US trademark rights go to the first filer, not the first user. The legal bill to challenge it, if it can be challenged at all, runs to six figures.
Permanent establishment created unknowingly.
The UK parent invoiced US customers directly because nobody set up the entity properly. The IRS determines this constitutes permanent establishment. Three years of back taxes assessed. No protective filings. No statute of limitations defence.
Transfer pricing never documented.
The arrangement between UK parent and US subsidiary was never put in writing. HMRC and the IRS both take an interest. The intercompany charges that were assumed to be fine are not fine.
Product liability claim not covered.
Exposure that did not exist in any meaningful way in the UK becomes existential in the US. One claim results in a damages award the UK insurance policy does not cover because nobody checked whether it extended to US operations.
Structural separation never maintained.
The US entity was formed but the separation between it and the UK parent was never properly upheld. Every liability flows straight through to the UK parent and its directors personally.
The cumulative effect is not usually one catastrophic event. It is a series of expensive, avoidable corrections that consume the capital that was meant to build the business, distract the founder from the commercial work, and in a significant number of cases result in a retreat from the market entirely.
None of this is inevitable.
A structured consultation that turns the things you do not know into things you have decided.
The Assessment is a working session with a US expansion specialist who has done this hundreds of times before. We stress-test your plan against the issues that most commonly determine whether a US expansion holds together or quietly comes apart. We surface what is missing, what is mis-sequenced, and what carries risk that has not been priced. Within seventy-two hours of the consultation you receive a written report covering your specific situation. Where specialist support is needed, we make the introductions.
Better prepared
Strategy validated. Gaps identified. Plan stress-tested before capital is committed. You go to America knowing what you are walking into and which decisions matter most.
Less exposed
Tax positions, compliance gaps, and liability exposures identified and addressed before they accumulate into expensive problems.
Faster to revenue
Commercial approach refined. Channel chosen. Hiring sequenced correctly. The detours that cost most companies twelve months avoided from the start.
More investable
A business built on foundations that survive diligence and signal to investors that the work has been done properly. The US story becomes an asset rather than a list of unanswered questions.
Forty years of doing this. Refined into 450 assessment nodes. Organised by management function.
The Assessment is a human consultation. Free-flowing where it needs to be, but anchored by a proprietary framework so nothing material is missed. The framework is the product of decades of direct experience taking UK and European companies into the US, refined across more than three thousand five hundred international expansion programmes.
Where it adds value, the Assessment can run as parallel sessions with different members of the management team. The framework is organised by functional role, so commercial, financial, legal, and operational leaders can each work through the domains most material to their remit, and the findings come together as a single picture of US readiness.
Book a discovery call to discuss the Assessment.
A thirty-minute call to understand your current position, answer any questions about the Assessment, and agree whether it is the right next step for your business at this stage.
You will be taken to our booking page where you can choose a time that works.