We have a current project that is open in three countries. In another one the client is doing R&D and component sourcing in his home market while development and design is run from Sofia, Bulgaria. We have clients tracking moving objects in real-time across international borders. Dynamic movement over a wide geographical area is a feature of IoT projects, not a bug.
Handoffs, not heroics
It means the clients can be in one location, the end user in another and connectivity and hardware provider in a third. A few things tend to become pivotal at that stage. The first is handoffs, not heroics. Someone in another time zone needs to diagnose and fix common problems without waking up the person who built the entire system.
At infrastructure scale, buyers don’t just evaluate the hardware or the brand. They ask: Who answers when something fails at night? They want answers. A credible answer is a competitive advantage. A weak one loses the deal even if the product line is better.
For a growing company (like this one): The story gets sharper first, then the knowledge gets organized. Operations come last because you’re still catching up with your current workload (cycle times are very long: 9 months +). But this process carries risk. If presentation pulls too far ahead of support and coverage, you win infrastructure-level deals and then struggle with the first serious out of hours incident. That begins the negative spiral of distrust and recrimination.
Support matters more than presentation
With bigger clients, that first incident shapes the relationship more than the sales process ever did. Closing the support gap matters most just as the presentation starts gaining traction. Defined response hours, a named contact and remote diagnostics on devices. Clear escalation paths and sometimes formal agreement on what counts as “not urgent enough to call at 3 am local time.” Each step of the support plan becomes something new you can offer clients, as it goes live.
Know the risks, build mitigation strategies
We’re currently living this context. Our CEO is also our technical lead. This means he is pulled in many directions simultaneously. To run an effective global business and support projects that are running 24/7 requires an investment in operational structure. How did we get here? We got here by aiming to get to the point. That is the adventure. We know the risks, now we build the mitigation strategies.
Partnerships begin to matter more at a certain stage in the evolution of a business. The workload stays the same, what changes is how much of it you can hand off. When you know those tasks are in “good hands” things begin to move more quickly. That feeling that you can rely on a partner is exactly the same feeling the client and end users have developed with you. It is that validation that begins to scale exponentially.
We will come back to this topic, because it is deep and wide, but the key takeaway on this one is realism in the face of known stage gates. Every small business that became a large business went through these steps. Even the ones given boatloads of cash by investment junkies had to build out real business contingencies behind the bluster. That prima donna sheen wears off pretty fast when customers call before first light.
