What's Actually Going On
Whenever the market environment shifts, I'm often asked the same question: "At this point, can I still get into the US market?" This is actually the wrong question to begin with — it compresses a complex market judgment into a binary "yes" or "no" choice, and reality is never that simple.
The genuinely useful question is "given the current market environment, what approach and what pace should I use to enter" — a question that can actually lead to a specific, actionable judgment, instead of staying stuck circling an anxious, overly broad yes-or-no question.
A Real Example
A factory owner kept asking, repeatedly, "can I still get into the US market right now" — and neither a "yes" nor a "no" ever actually resolved his anxiety. Only after reframing the question as "given the current tariff and channel environment, which products and which channels make more sense to enter with right now" did he get, for the first time, a specific, actionable direction.
So What Should You Actually Do
- Break the broad "can I or can't I" question down into specific sub-questions: which products, which channels, what pace.
- Accept that a market judgment is rarely black or white — it's most likely "yes, under these conditions, but it needs adjusting under those."
- Bring a specific product and your actual current situation to whoever you're asking for judgment — don't ask an abstract macro question in the void.