Repatriate or expatriate?
I’m back in the US after almost a decade of entrepreneurial fun in Latin America. As luck would have it, despite my best efforts to the contrary, I’m thrust once again into my, as they say in Argentina, metier – surfing the waves of creative destruction.
After 3 months here, the big finding is: it’s not all that different. Sure, there are less obstacles, some advantages even, but the stiff competition still makes running an SME in the developed world as much of a challenge as anywhere else. Probably the biggest difference is where we would start laughing at the hockey stick graph – here, it takes more zeros to make folk snicker. As a matter of fact, if there aren’t enough zeros people will snicker.
I think that I like it here, current economic woes notwithstanding. As I mentioned to friends of mine while we contemplated staying here, the best times in a developing market still require more effort than similar activities in the Great North in the middle of an economic shakeout.
