Zach Selch uses the Mongol Empire to explain global expansion. The Mongols succeeded by entering multiple markets at once instead of one or two, and by absorbing local knowledge and talent from each territory. Modern companies should do the same to avoid overextension and sustain growth.
Chapters
Hi, I'm in Nisa Skitopolis, modern-day Beit She'an, one of the 10 city— one of the 10 Greek cities of Asia Minor that formed a trading union. And what we— what I know about this city is it was besieged by the Mongol horde just after the fall of Baghdad. And this is the southeasternmost point that the Mongols were going to get for hundreds of years until they regrouped and came back and attacked Austria and Hungary. But this is the closest they ever got to taking Egypt. The Mongol Horde I find very, very interesting. So we've talked before about people who have overextended themselves trying to expand internationally. But this is an empire that stretched essentially from touching the Mediterranean all the way to Korea. The biggest land empire the world's ever seen with very little technology. How did they do it? How did they successfully expand? I'm going to talk about 2 things that I think that are very important. One is they diversified their risk. Some people would have said, you know what? Let's just go into China. And what they did was they stretched into China, into India, into Russia, and western into Turkey and and the Arab countries as well. And if something had gone wrong, and if they had lost a battle in the beginning, if they had not diversified their risks, they might have regrouped and said, you know what? Maybe we can't be an empire. Maybe we just have to stay where we are. And what I find very often, even though expanding too fast is also risky, not being willing to diversify your risk is extremely risky. Because if you go into one country or 2 countries and you find that things are going too slow for you, or you find that they're not going as well as you'd like them to be, very often at that point people decide that it's time to give up on the international market. Hello, Cindy. So if you can diversify your risk, if you can go into several strategic markets at the same time, that's usually going to be much more successful than just focusing on one or two markets. And I think what's very common is people say, let's, let's spend 3 years on Latin America. If it works well for us, that's great. If it doesn't work well for us, we'll try something else. But really what you have to be looking at is saying, let's do a little bit in Latin America. Let's do a little bit in Latin America. Let's do a little bit in Asia. Let's do a little bit in Europe. Do it in parallel. Put your foot out there. Aim for strategic markets, diversifying that risk and not putting all your eggs in one basket. When you put all your eggs in one basket, it's very difficult to grow because as soon as you have a setback, as soon they have a problem, everything can collapse. And that was one of the big strengths of the Mongol Empire that allowed them to stretch all the way from Korea all the way almost to the Mediterranean. Then later on, they were able to get to as far as Vienna. Another thing that they did very, very well was they incorporated ideas from the areas they conquered. So the Mongol The Mongols were essentially horsemen who used composite bows. And what they really knew how to do well was ride and shoot. But they were willing to incorporate people who knew how to handle boats. They were willing to incorporate people who knew how to handle cannons. They were willing to incorporate engineers. And by doing so, they really got a lot more knowledge from other people into their systems. Now take a look, the Russian leaders, the Russian— take a look at what the Mongols have left us. Okay, a lot of their culture was passed over to the Russians, a lot to the Indians, a lot to the Chinese, a lot to the Arabs. Okay, by incorporating, by marrying local, by being willing to try local things and incorporate new ideas, They had a much richer heritage that they left. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
