Whenever an entrepreneur who is doing business globally tells you that everything runs fine, don’t believe him. Reality is dirty and messy.

The global market size is 100+ billion.

Every place on Earth can be reached within 24 hours on a plane.

Online meetings have shrunk the globe.

Good old times. Globalism is on the decline. With recent geopolitical developments, the world isn’t a single market any longer. What does this do to SMEs operating out of a neutral country like Switzerland?

A previous article illuminated the less-known challenges of doing business globally, such as local representation, dealing with sanctions, and insurance requirements. This article is about much more profane problems: Getting projects implemented around the globe, and getting paid.

As always, this article is based on real-life experiences that we have experienced in our international business activities at Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded..

Getting Projects Implemented

After a strenuous sales phase, often involving an RFP, the implementation phase starts. If you think that the hard part was winning the sale, you’re wrong. Implementing projects all over the world is hard, even if all the details for implementation were specified in the RFP.

Here are some real-life examples.

One of our customers complained that sync times to sync content from our solution to the mobile devices of their end-users were way too long. First, we thought the root cause was the massive amount of data the customer pumped into our solution. It turned out it was a much simpler reason: Although the customer was a large international company, their HQ didn’t have a proper WLAN solution with enough bandwidth in place. Imagine how much time and effort we had to put into this issue before we could settle it.

Another customer constantly insulted us for not fulfilling their requirements. When our project manager diligently reiterated our answers to their requirements in the RFP, they falsified our RFP responses. Finding somebody who cared in the customer’s organization was close to impossible; it took a letter to the Group CEO before we were even assigned an escalation contact.

Last but not least, we have customers who still haven’t fully implemented our solution, even after being customers for years. That’s neither due to a lack of WLAN infrastructure, nor due to falsified RFP responses. It’s simply due to a lack of willingness and/or ability to switch from paper processes to digital processes. Even sharing experience from customers who went full digital doesn’t help with those customers. Always remember, digital transformation is a marathon, not a sprint.

Getting Paid

The core agreement in business is that you deliver a defined product or service, and you get paid for delivering whatever product or service was defined.

So far, so good. This works well with most of our customers, and I am grateful for that. Nevertheless, getting paid can be strenuous in some cases.

Here are some examples.

Our customer with the shitty WLAN infrastructure also had a shitty payment morale. Whenever an invoice became due, a barrage of arguments was aired about why the invoice couldn’t be paid right now. We’re having liquidity issues, can we please postpone the payment by a month? We’re not quite satisfied with the sync performance yet, so we suggest paying half the invoice now and the other half of the invoice later. We’re still in recovery from COVID-19, so we are managing our finances tightly, and we will have to postpone the payment. The COVID-19 argument was raised in mid-2025, no kidding. Needless to say, we terminated the contract with this notorious late payer. We’re not a bank, and we don’t buy all the excuses.

Another customer discovered after the contract was negotiated and signed that the payment milestones would need to be adapted. Setting up and agreeing on the payment milestones was relatively easy, but the core problem was Ariba. Ariba is an SAP module that many enterprises use for invoicing. As a supplier, you can’t just send them an invoice with a PO number by email; you need to upload your invoice to Ariba. So far, so easy. But things got messy because the initial invoice was uploaded before the payment milestones were negotiated: Now the amounts didn’t match up anymore, and nobody wants to approve either the old or the new invoice. It took us months to get paid.

Conclusion

Business is easy in theory, but much harder in reality. Whenever an entrepreneur tells you that everything runs fine, don’t believe him. I’ve been in this business for too long to know that reality is dirty and messy, no matter how good an entrepreneur you are.