By Ellie Edwards-Scott, Co-Founder of The Advisory Collective
Expanding into a new market is often treated as a milestone rather than a strategy. Companies celebrate the decision long before considering the execution. But in reality, market entry is one of the highest-risk moves any business can make — and the data is unforgiving. A significant proportion of startups and scaleups entering the UK or Europe fail not because their product is poor, but because their go-to-market strategy is non-existent, generic, or built on guesswork.
After nearly a decade working with global ad tech, and digital companies, one truth has become clear: market entry is not an experiment you can afford to run twice.
At The Advisory Collective, we’ve seen brilliant technologies stall because they misread buyer needs, underestimated the local competition, or attempted to replicate their home-market playbooks in a market that behaves entirely differently. Although they had good intentions – their execution lacked a robust framework.
With the UK Adspend market forecasted to reach £46BN by 2026 and having had a 10% yr on yr growth it’s no surprise that many companies look at the UK as the golden goose that will propel them to financial success and ultimately to the exit that they’re after. However, when you go beyond the headline number and look at where the spend goes, you’ll see an awful lot of companies fighting for their share of what is left of the pie once the walled gardens have taken their share.
I speak to so many founders who, after gaining traction in their home market, are eager to leap straight into the UK without doing the essential groundwork. But without clearly defining your Ideal Client Profile, analysing how competitors position themselves, understanding how buyers perceive your solution, validating your pricing model, identifying the real opportunity and size of the prize as well as adapting your product or service to local expectations — how can success realistically follow?
Market entry isn’t a ‘quick win’ it takes time, effort and money to do it well.
The companies that thrive here do so because they make a deliberate choice:
they invest in understanding the market before they try to conquer it.
The UK is not a plug-and-play extension of another market. Without a strategy built around local dynamics, competitors, and customer pain points, failure becomes the default outcome.
