Business Consulting
What to send before the first Korea meeting
Five sets of material to gather before a first meeting with a team in Korea - product data, brand assets, home-market sales records, goals and budget range, decision-makers and reply rules.
If a first meeting with a team in Korea is on the calendar, five sets of material go over before it — product data, brand assets, home-market sales records, goals and budget range, and decision-makers with reply rules. Send them in one folder 3 business days ahead and the first meeting starts with decisions instead of explanations. Without them, the first meeting becomes an hour of writing down questions, and collecting the answers adds 2-3 weeks.
What do you gather before the first meeting?
Five sets. Almost none of it is new writing — most of it already exists inside the company, scattered across departments.
| Set | What goes in | Form |
| 1 Product data | Full product name · item code · dimensions · weight · materials · contents · country of origin | 1 sheet · 1 row per product |
| 2 Brand assets | Logo source files · color values · typeface names · product photos · video masters | 1 folder |
| 3 Home-market sales | Last 12 months of units · prices · channel share · repeat-purchase rate | 1 sheet |
| 4 Goals and budget range | One-line 12-month goal · upper and lower budget bound · preferred start | 1 page |
| 5 Decision-makers and replies | Name · title · time zone · reply deadline · items needing head-office approval | 1 page |
Set 2 has to be source files. A logo captured off a screen or lifted out of a document has to be rebuilt for large screens and print. Send the logo as line artwork (SVG · AI) and photos as unresized originals (JPG · PNG), and write the RGB values for screen next to the CMYK values for print.
How far do the home-market sales records go?
The numbers do not have to be large. What gets used here is not size but shape — which product, at what price, in which channel, on which purchase.
| What to record | Format | What it also settles |
| Units by product | Last 12 months · monthly counts | Opening order quantity |
| Selling price | Home currency · list and actual | Starting point for pricing |
| Channel share | Own store · marketplaces · offline (%) | Which channel opens first |
| Repeat-purchase rate | Customers who bought again within 12 months (%) | How many months of advertising |
| Return · inquiry reasons | Five most frequent | Lines to put early in the product copy |
| Seasonality | Strongest and weakest month | Launch timing |
Put the currency next to every number (USD 29.00). Leave exchange rates out — the figure changes with the day it was calculated, so the won conversion happens together after the handover. Keep the slow sellers on the list too. A product that was weak at home sometimes moves differently elsewhere.
How do you hand files over across a language gap?
Not everything needs translating. What needs translating is the sentences someone has to read and judge; numbers and files go over as they are.
| Material | How it goes over | Translation |
| Product data sheet | As the table it is | Column names only |
| Legally required wording | Original, uncut | Not translated |
| Brand introduction · story | Original and English side by side | By meaning |
| Sales records | Number table | Headers only |
| Images · video | Both the clean master and the finished version | — |
| Video subtitles | Separate SRT file | As a file |
The point is to include the masters with no text burned in. If the only file has wording baked into the image, it has to be rebuilt from scratch to carry Korean lines. Subtitles the same — do not burn them into the picture; send an SRT, a separate file listing each subtitle with its timecode. Name files in lowercase letters, digits and hyphens only. Names in your own script break on other operating systems.
Which blanks do you fill in together at the meeting?
Some boxes stay empty on purpose. Filling them alone means doing the work twice. Leave them blank, but mark them as blank when you send.
| Blank | Send only this much | Settled at the meeting |
| Korean selling price | Home price and cost | Price band and discount room |
| First sales channel | 2-3 candidates | Which opens first, and the order |
| Korean product name | Original and pronunciation | The name people will say |
| Certification · labeling | List of home-market test documents | What to re-check, and where |
| Start date | Preferred quarter | Real start after lead time |
| Where stock sits | Current warehouse location | Whether to hold stock locally |
The certification row in particular is not settled in advance. Which documents are needed varies with the product. What goes over is the list of home-market test and certification documents and the names of the issuing bodies; what else Korea asks for is checked against the relevant authority's guidance and written in together at the meeting.
How do you set reply rules across time zones?
A time difference eats the schedule a day at a time. A question sent in your afternoon is read on their next morning, and the answer arrives the day after. Four rules cover it.
- Count the overlap first — how many hours of the two working days actually coincide. Fix meetings inside that window
- Write deadlines not as "within 2 days" but as "by 18:00 Thursday your time" — the date and clock time in the other side's zone
- Collect questions and send them once a day. One at a time adds a day per round trip
- Exchange holiday calendars first. Some Korean holidays follow the lunar calendar, so their dates move from year to year
What do you settle internally before sending?
Three things finish inside the company first.
First, a one-line goal. One sentence carrying product, quantity and period — "sell 300 units of product A per month within the first 12 months". "Raise awareness" does not tell anyone what to do first.
Second, a budget range. Not an exact figure but an upper and lower bound — "this much to this much across the first 6 months". Without the bounds, proposals of wildly different sizes go back and forth, and that time comes out of the schedule.
Third, decision-makers and the approval line. Who says yes last, and which items can be settled without head-office approval. List the items that need approval and send the list along — price changes, logo variations, adding a new product.
What to do today
Make one folder and put five empty files in it with names only — 01-product · 02-brand · 03-sales · 04-goal-budget · 05-contacts. Today, fill in number 3 alone. Moving the last 12 months of units, prices and channel share into one table takes 40 minutes. The other four are a matter of moving files that already exist inside the company.
