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For growing companies, international markets can be an attractive proposition. Particularly fast developing economies.

With business headlines dominated by digital upstarts making a global impression with relative ease, you’d be forgiven for thinking all you need to break into a new market is a steady broadband connection, skype and a ‘can do’ attitude.

But despite the hype, the fact remains doing business in another country will always be different, and more difficult, than doing it at home.

It’s something I like to call the liability of foreignness – those inherent challenges every company has to adapt to overseas.

Here are three things guaranteed to stop a foreign business venture in its tracks.

1 – Poor Relationships

Building relationships is critical. It underpins everything from securing access to customers, to navigating a country’s complex regulations.

You have to do your research and gain friends on the ground to be successful. But there can be significant cultural differences in how relationships are built.

In the US, it can take as little as an elevator pitch. In the UK too, relationships can form quickly.

But in India, they can take years or even generations to establish. Despite being constitutionally abolished in the 1950s, the caste system can also determine who does business with whom.

Few Scottish distillers have managed to penetrate India’s whisky market – one of the largest in the world – because they haven’t developed relationships with the right groups.

2 – Bad Organisation

Simply put, if you aren’t organised, you won’t build relationships. Charging into a new market without a plan of who to meet and how to meet them is nothing short of foolhardy.

For starters, you can end up with a rather large travel bill with nothing to show for it.

But perhaps the more fundamental concern is that risking your reputational capital if you don’t take the time to research the contacts you want to meet and do business with, and conduct due diligence on their operations.

UK fashion group Arcadia were just the most recent in a long line of UK companies to face a backlash, when emerged that its ‘Ivy Park’ clothing line – endorsed by Beyoncé – was being made by sweatshop workers in Sri Lanka.

3 – Failure to Learn

Every business failure overseas comes down to a failure to learn. If you don’t learn what it’s like on the ground, what the local customs, regulations and logistical challenges are, you just can’t do business. So it’s important to find someone with the right local knowledge, the will and the time to teach you.

Despite dominating the UK and being one of the world’s largest retailers, Tesco was with its Fresh & Easy stores.

The company believed its focus on fresh wholesome food could carve a niche alongside bigger wholesale retailers. But it underestimated the US customers’ preference for cheap bulk buying and had to pull the plug on its 199 stores across the Atlantic at a brutal cost of £1.2 bn.

Professor Simon Harris is Chair in International Strategy at University of Edinburgh Business School. He will host a two-day masterclass on Building an International Business on 27 and 28 September.