Dear reader,

Bastille Day has a different taste when you live abroad.

After 13 years in the UK, I’ve become more aware of what makes France… France.

I haven’t become more patriotic. Just more conscious of wanting to keep French culture alive.

This year, I’m reflecting even more on what that means in both my personal and business life.

The business side is easy: I literally chose to make it my business, helping French companies expand abroad and international companies develop in France.

I experience cultural differences, and sometimes things getting lost in translation, almost daily.

I observe and analyse:

The way people communicate. The way trust is built. The questions buyers ask before making a decision. The things that feel obvious at home but suddenly aren’t.

I see the same thing happening with many of the international leaders I work with.

They’ve spent years between countries. They’ve built teams across borders.

And somewhere along the way, they stop seeing markets as a map.

They start seeing them as different ways of thinking.

That’s when international expansion changes.

It stops being about exporting what worked somewhere else.

It becomes about understanding why another market makes decisions differently.

Thirteen years after leaving France, that’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned.

Personally, my children were born in the UK and are already navigating both cultures.

For us, it’s about choosing how to celebrate France and how to bring its culture and values into their own story.

Tonight, life has made that decision easy: France is playing in the semi-final on 14 July.

Life decided…

Happy 14 juillet to everyone celebrating, in France or somewhere else in the world.

Leslie