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The tool · free to use

The Global
Growth Canvas.

Put the whole international growth question on one page: where you could go, how you would get in, and whether you can actually resource it. Nine blocks, one market at a time.

Download the canvas — free ↓ Have us facilitate it
9blocks, three questions
A3print or fill digitally
40+countries behind it

Most growth decisions
are made in fragments.

Someone in sales has a view on Vietnam. Regulatory knows the registration would take fourteen months but was not in the meeting. Finance has a number in mind that nobody else has seen. The decision gets made anyway, and the parts that were never said out loud surface eighteen months later.

The canvas exists to get all of it on one surface at the same time, in front of the people who hold the different pieces. It does not produce the answer. It produces a shared, honest picture of the question, and usually a shortlist nobody would have reached alone.

The canvas.

Nine blocks across three questions. Every market you consider gets scored against all nine, so an attractive opportunity you cannot resource is visibly different from one you can.

Where
Demand signal
What the evidence says about size, growth and who is actually buying, rather than what the country report says.
Access conditions
Tariffs, registration, ownership limits, agency law. What the market will let you do before you plan what you want to do.
Competitive density
Who already holds the channel, how entrenched they are, and whether there is a position worth taking.
How
Entry mode
Distributor, agent, joint venture, direct presence or acquisition. Chosen against the market, not assumed from habit.
Partner profile
What a partner would need to hold for this to work: licences, channel, coverage, service capability, capital.
Commercial model
Pricing architecture, margin structure, terms, and what exclusivity would be worth trading for.
Whether
Product readiness
Registration timelines, technical adaptation, labelling, certification. What has to happen before anything can ship.
Organisational capacity
Who owns this internally, what else they are already carrying, and whether the governance exists to support it.
Capital and appetite
What is genuinely available, over what horizon, and what the organisation can tolerate going wrong.
Sequencing
What goes first, what waits for proof, and what is off the table for now. The output most teams say they were missing.
Evidence gaps
Where the room was guessing. This becomes the research brief, and it is usually shorter and sharper than one written cold.

How to fill it in.

Four habits separate a canvas that changes a decision from one that gets photographed and forgotten.

01
One market per canvas
The moment you try to hold three countries on one sheet, every block becomes an average and the comparison you wanted disappears. Run it once per market, then lay them side by side.
02
Mark what is evidence and what is belief
Use two colours, or two pens. Most canvases look confident because nobody separated the things somebody actually knows from the things the room assumes. That split is the most valuable output.
03
Fill Whether before you fall in love with Where
Teams naturally start with opportunity and treat capacity as a footnote. Doing the right-hand column first changes which markets survive, and it changes them early rather than after a business case exists.
04
Date it and redraw it
A canvas is a claim about a market at a point in time, not a plan. Version it, and redraw when evidence arrives. The interesting part is usually what moved between versions.

Where it usually goes wrong.

Only commercial people in the room
The constraints live with regulatory, supply chain and finance. Without them the Whether column gets filled with optimism and the session produces a shortlist that cannot be delivered.
Entry mode assumed, not chosen
Most organisations default to whatever worked last time. If every row in How says “distributor” before anyone has looked at the market, that block is not being used.
Blocks filled with adjectives
“Strong growth” and “fragmented” are not entries. A number, a date, a name or an explicit “we do not know” are. The last of those is worth more than a confident guess.
No sequencing at the end
A ranked list with no view on order is a wish list. The question the board will ask is what happens first, and the canvas is only finished when that is on it.
Facilitated sessions

A canvas on its own
is not a decision.

The tool is free and works perfectly well on a wall with your own team. What a facilitator adds is the part most internal sessions struggle with: challenging the soft claims, keeping the quietest person in the room contributing, and refusing to let a block be filled with an adjective.

We have run the search and entry work behind this canvas in more than forty countries, which means we can usually tell when a block is wrong.

How the workshops work →

How a session runs.

01
Before
We agree the scope and pull what is already known, so the room starts from evidence rather than a blank wall.
02
The room
Six to twelve people, deliberately not all commercial. Regulatory, supply chain and finance hold the constraints.
03
The session
Half a day for a single region, a full day for a global screen. On site or remote.
04
After
The completed canvas, a ranked shortlist, and the evidence gaps written up as a brief.

Formats, the full agenda and who should be in the room →

When teams
run this.

  • The international growth conversation keeps restarting without resolving
  • A board has asked for a market entry plan and there is no agreed shortlist
  • Several countries are on the table and the choice is being made on anecdote
  • An entry was attempted before and nobody has properly examined why it stalled
  • A new commercial lead has inherited a footprint they did not choose

You have the canvas.
Here is what usually follows.

Next
Market intelligence
The evidence gaps, closed. Sizing, customers, competitors and regulation on the two or three markets that survived the session.
See the service →
Next
Distributor targeting
Where the route is clear and the question is who. Search, screening, shortlist and support through the approach.
See the service →
Or
Markets already built
If a market on your shortlist is on DistributorIQ Hub, the distributor picture is already there and searchable.
See the markets →

Take the canvas.
Use it however you like.

It is free, and there is no form in front of it. If you would rather have it facilitated, tell us the footprint you are weighing up and who would be in the room, and we will come back with a format and a date.

Download the canvas ↓ Book a facilitated session
A3 PDF · print or fill digitally · no sign-up