Doing Business in Turkey: What Foreign Companies Always Get Wrong

Turkey is not difficult to understand. It's difficult to understand quickly. Foreign companies that succeed here are almost always the ones that slowed down when everything in their playbook told them to move fast. The ones that fail are usually the ones that treated Turkey like a slightly exotic version of a market they already knew.

I've built companies here. I've watched foreign businesses enter and exit. The mistakes repeat so consistently that they start to look less like individual errors and more like a structural mismatch between how Western companies approach new markets and how Turkey actually works.

The First Mistake: Treating a Meeting as Progress

Turkish business culture is warm. People will meet with you. They will be gracious, interested, and encouraging. They will say things that sound like commitments. They are not commitments.

Foreign executives fly into Istanbul, have three days of meetings, leave with a full calendar of follow-ups and a strong feeling that things are moving. Six weeks later, nothing has happened. They assume the Turkish side lost interest. Usually, the Turkish side is still perfectly interested — they were just waiting for something the foreign side doesn't know to provide.

In Turkey, the meeting is not a step in a process. It's the beginning of a relationship. Relationships here are built through repeated contact, demonstrated reliability, and earned trust — not through a compelling pitch deck and a signed NDA. The foreign company that shows up once with a polished presentation and then follows up by email is invisible. The one that keeps showing up, keeps investing time in the relationship, keeps demonstrating that they're serious — that one eventually gets somewhere.

The practical implication: budget for multiple trips. Don't try to close anything on the first visit. Come back.

The Second Mistake: Working Through the Wrong Intermediary

Almost every foreign company entering Turkey tries to find a local partner. This is right. The execution is usually wrong.

The most common approach is to find a Turkish person with a good LinkedIn profile, a Western education, and fluent English — someone who feels familiar and easy to work with. These people exist. They are not necessarily connected to the people who actually make decisions in the sectors you're trying to reach.

Turkey runs on networks that are built over decades, through industry associations, family ties, regional connections, and shared military service. The person who went to school in London and speaks English like a native may have a very thin network inside Turkish industry. The person who never left Ankara and doesn't return your emails in English might be the one with the actual relationships.

Vetting a local partner in Turkey requires understanding their real network, not just their resume. Who do they actually know? Who will take their call? What deals have they closed in this specific sector? These questions are harder to answer than looking at someone's education and English skills, but they're the ones that predict outcomes.

The Third Mistake: Underestimating How Much Context Matters

Turkey sits at the intersection of multiple political, cultural, and economic worlds — and which world is most relevant shifts depending on who you're talking to, what sector you're in, and which region of the country you're operating in.

Istanbul finance is a different environment from Ankara politics, which is a different environment from Anatolian manufacturing, which is a different environment from trade across the Eastern border. Foreign companies that treat Turkey as a single homogeneous market almost always find that what works in one context fails completely in another.

The regulatory environment is also more complex than it appears from the outside. Not hostile — but layered, and often dependent on informal processes that don't appear in any official documentation. Permits that should take two weeks take three months, unless you know who to ask and how to ask. Approvals that seem impossible become straightforward with the right introduction.

This context is hard to acquire through research. It mostly comes from people who have already navigated it — which is why the quality of your local relationships is not just helpful but determinative.

The Fourth Mistake: Price-Driven Decision Making

Turkey often looks attractive partly because of lower costs relative to Western European markets. Foreign companies arrive with cost assumptions built into their business case, and then find reality more complicated.

Labor costs are real but come with regulatory requirements around hiring and termination that differ significantly from Western norms. Currency volatility means that contracts denominated in Turkish lira carry exchange rate risk that can eliminate margins in a quarter. Operating costs in Istanbul — particularly for commercial real estate in business districts — are higher than most first-time entrants expect.

The companies that succeed in Turkey don't come here because it's cheap. They come because of geography, because of the talent pool, because of market access to 85 million people plus proximity to CIS and MENA markets. Cost arbitrage is not a sustainable competitive advantage here. Market position is.

The Fifth Mistake: Underestimating the Strategic Position

This is the mirror image of the previous mistake, and it's less common but more costly when it happens: companies that come to Turkey focused purely on the domestic market without seeing the larger opportunity.

Turkey is a gateway. Istanbul is a hub. The Middle Corridor — the trade route connecting China to Europe through Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey — is one of the fastest-growing trade lanes in the world. Companies that establish operations in Turkey gain access not just to the Turkish market but to the entire corridor, with logistics, regulatory, and relationship advantages that are hard to replicate from a distance.

The companies that build the most durable positions here are the ones that understand this and structure their Turkish presence accordingly — not just as a local market play, but as a regional base for operations that span multiple geographies.

What Actually Works

The companies that build real positions in Turkey share a few consistent patterns:

They invest in relationships before they need them. They identify the two or three key people whose networks are genuinely relevant to their sector and spend time building those connections before a specific deal is on the table. When the deal comes, the relationship is already there.

They hire local leadership early. Not a local liaison or a country manager with limited authority — actual decision-making leadership that can operate with autonomy and represents the company to senior Turkish counterparts as a peer.

They stay. Recurring presence signals seriousness. The company whose representative is in Istanbul every quarter for years is taken more seriously than one that sends someone for a one-time blitz and then manages from headquarters.

They learn the real regulatory landscape, not just the official one. This usually means working with advisors who have direct experience navigating the specific approval processes relevant to their sector — not just lawyers who know the rules as written.

Whether to Come at All

Turkey is not the right market for every company. It requires patience, local relationships, and a long enough time horizon to build the position that produces returns. Companies looking for a quick win or a low-effort expansion are usually better served by markets with more transparent processes and lower relationship requirements.

But for companies that are serious about global trade, logistics, regional access to CIS and MENA markets, or building a presence in a country that is becoming significantly more important — Turkey is worth the investment it takes to do it right.

I work with foreign companies on exactly this: understanding the market, building the right relationships, and navigating the specific challenges that come with entry into Turkey and the broader region. If that's where you are, the advisory page is here.