What Building a Business in Emerging Markets Actually Teaches You — And Why It Changes How You Think About Business Everywhere
Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures
I've spent a meaningful portion of my career helping businesses enter and grow in markets where the rules aren't always written down, the infrastructure doesn't always work, and the assumptions you built your business model on back home simply don't apply.
It's humbling. It's frustrating. And it is, without question, one of the best educations in business a person can get.
What you learn building in emerging markets doesn't stay in those markets. It changes how you think about business everywhere.
The First Lesson: Infrastructure Is a Variable, Not a Given
In developed markets, we build business models on top of a vast invisible infrastructure — reliable banking, consistent contract enforcement, functional logistics networks, stable power supply, predictable regulatory frameworks. We treat these things as constants. We design businesses that assume they work.
In emerging markets, they're variables. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. And your business model has to function either way.
I've watched experienced executives enter new markets with strategies that were entirely sound — in theory. They collapsed in practice because the execution depended on conditions that didn't hold: a payment processing network that proved unreliable, a logistics partner that couldn't scale, a regulatory environment that changed mid-implementation. The businesses that survived and ultimately thrived were the ones that anticipated fragility and built redundancy and flexibility in from the start.
That mindset — designing for conditions that may not hold — is enormously valuable back in developed markets too. Supply chains break. Banks fail. Regulations change. The executive who has learned to build for variability is fundamentally more resilient than one who has always built on assumptions.
The Second Lesson: Relationships Are Infrastructure
In markets where formal institutional infrastructure is weak or unreliable, relationships substitute for it. And I mean that literally.
Want to move goods efficiently across a border where customs processes are slow and unpredictable? The company with deep relationships in that ecosystem moves faster and cheaper than the company navigating the formal process alone. Want to understand the real regulatory environment — not just what the law says but how it's actually applied, by whom, and under what circumstances? You learn that through trusted local relationships, not through reading the statute.
This is not corruption. This is how business gets done in most of the world. Relationships create the informal institutional infrastructure that accelerates execution when formal infrastructure falls short.
What this teaches you, applied universally, is that relationships are not merely social capital. They are operational leverage. The most effective business people I've worked with treat relationship-building as a core business function — not networking in the cocktail party sense, but genuine, reciprocal, long-term investment in people who matter to their work. That mindset doesn't come naturally to many Western-trained executives. It is second nature to anyone who has built a business in a relationship-primary market.
The Third Lesson: Speed of Learning Matters More Than Speed of Execution
The conventional wisdom about emerging market expansion is that you need to move quickly to capture opportunity before competitors do. There's some truth to that. But I've seen it cause more failures than wins.
The businesses that build durable positions in emerging markets are almost uniformly the ones that invest in learning before they invest in scaling. They enter small, on purpose. They instrument their operations to understand what's actually working versus what they assumed would work. They hire local talent not just for execution but for insight — people who can read the market with the cultural fluency that no headquarters team possesses.
And when reality diverges from assumption — as it always does — they adjust quickly, without defending the original plan. The willingness to treat the original strategy as a hypothesis rather than a commitment is what separates the companies that adapt from the ones that fail expensively.
This is, again, a lesson that applies everywhere. The businesses I've worked with that struggle most with strategic adaptation are the ones where the original plan became the official story and diverging from it felt like failure. Speed of learning matters more than speed of execution in almost any environment. It's just more starkly visible in markets where the environment is less forgiving.
The Patience Premium
There's a concept I've come to think of as the patience premium: the outsized return that accrues to companies willing to invest over a longer time horizon than their competitors in emerging markets.
Most foreign entrants underestimate how long it takes to build the right foundations in a new market — the relationships, the local understanding, the operational adaptations, the trust. They set a timeline based on financial modeling rather than market reality. When results don't materialize on schedule, they exit or pull back. They leave the market to the patient player who was willing to stay.
The companies that build generational businesses in emerging markets are almost always the ones that committed to decades, not years. The patience premium in high-growth markets can be extraordinary. But you have to earn it by surviving the early years when the returns haven't arrived yet.
What It Changes in You
I said at the start that building in emerging markets changes how you think about business everywhere. Here's what I mean specifically.
It makes you more humble about your assumptions — because you've watched your best assumptions fail. It makes you more relationship-oriented — because you've seen firsthand how much relationships can accomplish when formal systems fall short. It makes you more adaptable — because adaptation wasn't optional; it was survival. And it makes you more patient — because you've learned what patience can compound into.
These aren't traits you can teach in a classroom. They're forged by experience. And they are, in my view, among the most valuable a business leader can carry.
Scott Gelbard is the Founder of SGI Global Partners Inc., a boutique family office and strategic advisory firm, and Managing Partner of Peak Ventures, an international business consulting practice. He has advised businesses across North America, Europe, and Asia for more than 25 years. His work focuses on strategic growth, international expansion, capital markets, and governance.
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