Shane Parrish

If you change your name for every country, you start from zero every time.

If you keep the name and every market you enter adds weight to the same global brand, the name itself becomes part of the beachhead.

It does the work for you before you even arrive.

Harrison's brother Wallace took Australia.

In 1968, they started shipping fries from Florenceville following the same sequence that had worked in Britain and Europe.

But Australia broke the playbook almost immediately.

Refrigerator chips couldn't move frozen products thousands of miles in a sellable condition.

The boxes arrived badly damaged.

The low-risk first step of their expansion model, export and test before you commit, simply didn't work at this distance.

So Wallace had to skip straight to local production, which meant buying a plant before the market had been properly tested.

He found one and everything about it was wrong.

There was no storage, the roof leaked, and the factory barely operated.

So he scrapped it and started building from scratch.

Then things started to go wrong.

The construction firm went bankrupt mid-build and the unions turned hostile.

The final cost was double what they had estimated.

If McCain had outside shareholders breathing down their neck, they probably would have pulled the plug.

But Harrison and Wallace weren't answering to outsiders, so they pushed through.

Then Australia forced a second break from the formula.

In Britain and Europe, French fries alone had been enough, but post-war immigration had transformed Australia's diet.