Ask a company why its market entry ran two quarters late and you will hear about a hard problem. Look at the plan and you will usually find something duller: work that could have happened at the same time happened in a queue.
Key takeaways
- Only a handful of dependencies are genuinely sequential. Most of the queue is habit.
- A country manager search takes twelve to sixteen weeks; incorporation takes two to eight. Run in sequence, the entity sits empty for a quarter.
- Bank account opening and payroll registration are frequently the slowest items after incorporation.
- Appoint the local accounting and payroll firm during incorporation, not after the first deadline is missed.
- E-invoicing platform onboarding is a new 2026 item on the critical path in several European markets.
Market entry is not one project. It is four or five that touch at a handful of points. Treated as a single sequence, with strategy, then legal, then finance, then hiring, then launch, the critical path becomes the sum of every step. Treated as parallel tracks with explicit dependencies, most of that time disappears.
What genuinely has to wait
Only a few dependencies are real, and they are worth naming precisely, because everything else is habit.
- Local employment contracts wait on the entity. You cannot put someone on a payroll that does not exist. But recruiting, interviewing, and offering do not wait. Only the signature does.
- Bank accounts wait on incorporation, and often on identified directors. In several markets this is the slowest single item, measured in weeks after incorporation rather than days.
- Payroll registration waits on the entity, and in many countries must complete before the first start date.
- E-invoicing onboarding waits on the entity. Where you are established in a market with a live mandate, platform registration and testing add weeks that cannot begin until the entity exists and is registered.
- Office leases usually wait on a legal person to sign them, though short-term serviced space rarely does.
That is close to the whole list. Note what is not on it: market prioritisation, pricing, positioning, channel design, candidate pipelines, partner selection, and the entire structuring decision. All of it can proceed while the entity is being formed.
The delays that come from queuing
Three patterns account for most slippage.
Hiring started after incorporation
A country manager search takes twelve to sixteen weeks in most markets, longer where you have no employer brand. Incorporation takes two to eight. Run in sequence, the entity sits empty for a quarter while the search runs. Run in parallel, the search is the critical path, and it starts on day one instead of week eight.
Structuring decided market by market
The second market repeats the first market's analysis from scratch, then the third repeats it again, and by market four somebody notices the structures are inconsistent and a rationalisation project begins. Designing the model once, for the markets on the roadmap, converts a recurring six-week analysis into a one-week local application. The structure decision itself is the same work either way; doing it once is simply cheaper.
The ongoing-services gap
The entity exists, people are hired, and only then does someone ask who is going to file the statutory accounts and run the monthly payroll. Selecting and onboarding a local accounting firm takes weeks, and if it starts after the first payroll is due, the first filing is already late. This should be selected during incorporation, not after.
A rough parallel plan
Weeks 1–4: market prioritisation and entry model · structure design · recruitment brief and search opened · accounting and payroll partner shortlisted.
Weeks 3–10: incorporation filed · candidate pipeline running · workspace options gathered · registrations mapped with owners.
Weeks 8–14: bank account opened · payroll registered · e-invoicing platform onboarded · partner appointed · offers made subject to entity.
Weeks 12–18: contracts signed · first payroll run · handover of ongoing filing to the local partner · selling.
Two conditions make parallelism safe
Running tracks at once only helps if two things are true.
Someone owns the whole board. Parallel tracks fail when four separate advisers each optimise their own lane and nobody watches the joins. The recruiter offers a start date before payroll registration is possible, or the lawyer picks a structure the tax model did not assume. This is the practical argument for one party coordinating the set-up: not that one firm does everything, but that one team is watching every dependency.
The dependencies are written down. Not implied by a Gantt chart, but written as explicit statements: offers may be made from week eight, contracts signed only after entity registration completes. Ambiguity here is what produces a start date nobody can honour.
The cost of the queue
Two quarters of delay is not two quarters of expense. It is two quarters of revenue that never arrives, a competitor's head start, and a hiring pipeline that goes cold and has to be rebuilt. The work itself was never the hard part. The order was.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to enter a new market?
With workstreams run in parallel, eighteen weeks from decision to first payroll is a realistic target in most established markets. Run sequentially, the same work commonly takes two quarters longer.
What is usually the slowest step?
After incorporation, bank account opening is frequently the slowest item, followed by payroll registration. Hiring a country manager is the longest single track overall, which is why it should start before incorporation rather than after.
When should we appoint a local accounting and payroll partner?
During incorporation. Onboarding takes weeks, and in markets with e-invoicing mandates the partner also has to be connected to the right platform before your first invoice is due.
Sources
Primary sources for the rules described above. Regulatory dates change; check the source before acting on anything here.
Written by the Nexus Notabu team. If this raises a question about a market you are considering, tell us where you want to grow.