By Bennett Sewell | Sewell Consulting

Early in my time in Argentina, someone described a local businessman to me as educado — educated. I nodded. I understood the word. What I didn’t understand was what it meant.

In English, educated means schooled. Degrees, credentials, formal training. In Argentina — and across much of the world — “educado” means cultured. Well-mannered. A person who carries himself with dignity and treats others with respect. The two words share a translation and almost nothing else.

That small gap in meaning cost me more than I’d like to admit. Not because of any single catastrophic mistake, but because of the accumulated weight of small misreadings — moments where I thought I understood what was being said and didn’t. Where the words were clear and the meaning was not.

If I had to do it all over again — and I mean all of it, the volunteer consulting in Budapest, the furniture factory and technology company in Romania, the nineteen years in the Argentine wine industry — the first thing I would do differently is learn the language. Not just enough to order a meal. Enough to catch the nuance. Enough to hear what isn’t being said.

Without that, you are dependent on someone else to filter the world for you. And filtered information is, by definition, incomplete. Your translator — however skilled, however loyal — decides what matters. You lose the ability to read a room, to pick up on hesitation, to laugh at a joke in real time, to notice when a conversation shifted two sentences ago. You can also begin to feel isolated in ways that are hard to describe: surrounded by people, understood by no one.

Language is the foundation. Everything else builds on it.

The second thing I would do differently is arrive better capitalized. This sounds obvious. It isn’t — because the consequences of undercapitalization in a foreign market are faster and more severe than most owners anticipate.

When a company begins to run short of money, the owner feels it first. But the employees feel it second, and what they feel is insecurity. That insecurity does something predictable: it triggers a kind of quiet defection. People don’t leave immediately. They start to dial in their effort — showing up, collecting paychecks, waiting to see if the company survives. The business begins to decay from the inside before any external sign of trouble appears. In a foreign market, where you already have less visibility into what’s happening around you, that internal decay can be well advanced before you recognize it.

Capital isn’t just a financial buffer. It’s a signal. It tells your employees, your suppliers, and your partners that you intend to be here tomorrow.

The third lesson is more specific to developing markets, but worth naming: be prepared to be priced as a rich American. In many countries, the assumption is that foreigners — particularly Americans — don’t know local market rates and can absorb a premium. You will be bid above market on contracts, vendor services, and construction. Sometimes far above. The solution is straightforward: know what things cost before you agree to anything. But you can only do that if you’ve built the local relationships that give you access to honest information.

Which brings everything back to language. And trust. And time.

I spent decades learning these lessons in places where the cost of a wrong assumption was measured in real money, real relationships, and real consequences. That experience is part of what I bring to every client engagement — a working knowledge of how businesses actually fail, built somewhere other than a classroom.

Bennett Sewell is the founder of Sewell Consulting, based in Austin, TX. He works with small business owners on strategy, operations, and AI integration.