The publication
Notes on buying, building and backing private companies. For readers who want to understand what sits beneath the headline.
A reading room for missions
Business still happens in rooms. A supplier wants to meet before a first order. A trade show puts serious buyers in one hall for three days. A factory looks different in person than it does in a catalogue. When you cannot be there, someone has to go for you, and who you send matters.
These Dispatches explain how representation works in practice: what to put in a brief, what a representative can and cannot agree on your behalf, how to judge a site or a supplier from what you are shown, and how to turn a stack of business cards into conversations that go somewhere. A good representative comes back with names, notes and next steps, not just impressions.
Hadri takes on missions for readers and members: meetings, trade shows, conferences and site visits in any city, quoted per trip. Longer engagements abroad run as project management, from £1,500 a week.
Missions
Opening an office abroad is a sequence of decisions and deadlines, not one event. Here is the order companies actually follow, from choosing a legal structure to the first local hire, and where the real delays happen.
Missions
Opening in a new market is a project with a start and an end: an entity to register, a bank account to open, people to hire. Here is what running it actually involves, who typically does it, and when it turns into a registered local presence.
Missions
The two phrases get used as if they mean the same thing. They usually describe different roles with different legal consequences, and the difference comes down to one question: can this person commit you to anything?
Missions
A stack of business cards is not deal flow until someone works through it. Here is how to triage trade show contacts, what order to work them in, and what the law in the UK and US actually says about emailing people you met on a stand.
Missions
A factory visit before ordering checks that the business you are about to pay is real. The bigger risk is often not the factory at all, but where the money actually goes.
Missions
Yes, usually, but it depends which of three different things you mean by "attend": sending a representative, handing over your badge, or appointing a formal proxy.
Missions
Meeting a supplier in China in person still catches what a sample and a video call cannot, but going yourself is only one way to get that meeting. Here is how to check a supplier before you book anything, who can stand in for you, and what current visa rules mean for UK and US buyers.
Missions
The phrase covers at least three different arrangements, from a single mission to a continuing local agent, and the difference changes which legal and tax questions actually apply.
Missions
Sending someone else to a trade show is an old and ordinary practice, not a shortcut. Here is who actually offers it, what it costs, and how to brief a representative so the trip produces something useful.