Starting a business in the Dominican Republic as a foreigner: what the business plan leaves out

Many foreign founders set up in the East: Punta Cana, Bávaro, Cap Cana, Uvero Alto, La Romana, Bayahíbe. It makes sense. The region is the front door for international tourism: according to the Central Bank of the Dominican Republic, Punta Cana airport received 72.6% of the non-resident foreign passengers who arrived in the country between January and April 2025.

That concentration creates a market with its own rules. Three economies live side by side and feed each other:

• Tourism: hotels and hotel groups, tours and excursions, restaurants, leisure, ground transportation.
• Tourism real estate: developers, sales companies and brokers selling to a buyer who often does not live in the country.
• The supply chain: the companies that supply the first two with food, beverages, equipment, maintenance, technology or services.

The opening mistake is treating the East as if it were the whole Dominican Republic, or as an extension of your customers' home country. It is neither. Your buyer may be foreign (a tourist, an investor), but the chain between you and that buyer is Dominican: the hotel's purchasing director, the local broker, the tour operator with an office in the area, the distributor who already runs the route.

If your business supplies hotels, Selling to hotels in Punta Cana and the East goes into the detail. If you develop or sell property, see the sales plan for a tourism real estate project. If you run a hotel, read the hotel distribution channel mix. Here we stay with what all of them share: how decisions get made.

The table summarizes the gaps we see most often between what a European or North American founder takes for granted and what they find. Read it as starting patterns. Some Dominican companies run more formal buying processes than many European ones, and some foreign founders arrive having already learned the lesson. The table tells you what to ask, not what the answer is.

Three rows deserve their own section because they cost the most money when ignored: relationships, channel dependence and the absence of data. We cover them below. For turning all of this into a method that works across markets without rewriting it, the tool is the local layer: same method, different vocabulary, decision-makers, channel and pace.

Founders from markets where buyers compare proposals side by side tend to read the weight of relationships as a flaw. That is a misdiagnosis. In a market where data is scarce and contracts are applied with room for interpretation, the relationship is the mechanism that lowers the buyer's risk. Whoever buys from you is also buying the assurance that, if something goes wrong, they know whom to call and that person answers.

That is where the intermediary comes from: the broker, the agent, the well-connected consultant, the local partner who makes introductions. Some add real value. Others charge you for a door you would have opened anyway. The difference lies in what they contribute and how you pay them.

Criteria for deciding on an intermediary

• Verifiable access: can they name the decision-makers at your ten target accounts and get you a meeting with at least one of them within an agreed window? If they only promise access in general, they do not have it.
• What they do after the introduction: if their role ends at the introduction, their fee should be one-off. If they sustain the relationship, follow up on payment or resolve issues, a recurring fee can be justified.
• Pay tied to results: commission on collected sales, not on signed sales. No exclusivity without measurable targets and a review date.
• Shared information: an intermediary who keeps you from knowing the end customer makes you dependent on them. Agree from the start on access to the customer and to the data on every deal.
• An agreed exit: what happens to the accounts if the relationship ends. Your lawyer drafts it; you set the commercial criteria.

The logic is the same one we apply to distributors in distribution channels in the Dominican Republic: exclusivity is earned with measurable commitments, not handed over in the first meeting.

A significant share of the Dominican business landscape is held by family groups that run several companies at once: a hotel and a construction firm, a distributor and a retail chain, a trading company and a farm. For anyone selling to them, that has two consequences.

First, the person you are talking to may not be the one who decides. The purchasing director recommends; the decision is made by a family member who may never show up to a meeting. Second, a decision at one company in the group affects the others. Good work at one can open the rest, and a conflict at one can close all of them.

The instrument for this is the decision-maker map: for each account, who decides, who influences, who blocks and who pays, with their motivation and their likely objection. It builds on Webster and Wind's buying center, which describes roles rather than titles. That is exactly its strength in this market: it forces you to ask what role each person plays, regardless of what their business card says. The full framework is in the guide to the B2B buying center.

The classic model falls short on the group dimension: it thinks about one organization making a purchase. In Dominican family groups it pays to add a layer: which other companies in the group could buy from you, and who connects them. That layer gets built by asking, which is why it comes back to relationships.

Two timelines run longer than founders expect: the one from first meeting to signature, and the one from invoice to payment. Neither gets fixed by pushing. Both get managed through planning.

The decision timeline shortens when there is a relationship and when the buyer's main objection has been resolved. It stretches when the proposal arrives cold, when someone is missing from the decision-maker map or when the client's season absorbs everything. In tourism the last point is decisive: a hotel in the middle of high season does not evaluate new suppliers with the same attention it gives them in low season.

The payment term depends on the client's policy, on its cash position and on where you sit on its priority list. A new, small supplier usually sits at the bottom of that list.

How to carry this into the plan

1. Three sales-cycle scenarios per segment. Fast, expected and slow, with the slow one as the basis for cash planning. Deliverable: one table per segment with the three timelines and the assumption behind each.
2. Observed payment terms, not agreed ones. From the first invoice, log the issue date and the actual payment date for every client. Deliverable: a monthly log that replaces the business plan's assumption.
3. Commercial terms that protect cash. Deposits, payment milestones, credit limits per client. Your lawyer drafts the contract language; sales leadership decides who gets credit and how much. Deliverable: a one-page credit policy.
4. An alert threshold. Which level of outstanding receivables triggers a conversation with the client, and which one stops new orders. Deliverable: two figures, written down and signed off by leadership.

In the East, a new business often finds a channel that works early and leans on it entirely: a tour operator that fills the excursions, a broker who sells most of the units, a distributor who places the product in hotels, an online booking platform that brings in the reservations. At first it looks like efficiency. Over time, that channel sets your price, your terms and your calendar, and it knows your customer better than you do.

We do not argue for diversifying on principle. A small business cannot sustain five channels at once, and opening channels without the capacity to serve them is worse than depending on one. We argue for measuring dependence and deciding what level you can live with.

The tool that organizes this work is the activation sequence: which channel switches on first, which measurable condition moves you to the next one, and what stops if the condition is not met. For a hotel, the balance between direct sales, tour operators and online booking platforms has its own guide: the hotel distribution channel mix.

The first local sales hire is usually made on instinct: someone recommended, who presents well and knows people in the industry. Six months later the founder cannot tell whether sales are low because of the market, the product or the rep, because no one ever agreed on what to measure.

A rep's book of relationships carries a lot of weight in this market, and it is reasonable to pay for it. But a book without a method runs dry: the rep calls on people they already know, closes what would have closed anyway and stalls. A method without a book takes too long. You need both, and the company can supply the second.

Sequence for onboarding the first rep

1. Define the profile by segment, not by industry. Whom they will sell to, which decision-makers they must reach and which objections they will hear. Deliverable: the decision-maker map for the two priority segments.
2. Verify the book in the interview. Ask them to name five decision-makers from your target list and say when they last spoke with each one. Deliverable: a verified book, not a declared one.
3. Write the playbook before their first day. Messages by segment, contact sequence, objection handling and support material. Deliverable: a short, usable playbook built from action sheets.
4. Agree on three activity indicators and two outcome indicators. For example, meetings with decision-makers, proposals sent and new active accounts; plus collected sales and margin. Deliverable: a one-page dashboard.
5. Review on a set date. A short weekly check-in and a monthly or quarterly period committee. Deliverable: minutes that record decisions, not impressions.

Tying variable pay to collected sales rather than signed sales is the decision that saves the most trouble when payment terms are long. The specific design, and its employment-law implications, goes through a local labor advisor.

Every action in the playbook is written as an action sheet: owner, cost, KPI and date. If a field is missing, it is not an action.

Foreign founders usually size their market with industry reports. The Dominican Republic has good macroeconomic and tourism statistics, published by the Central Bank and the Ministry of Tourism. What is scarce is the fine-grained data: how much a hotel of a given size buys in your category, what share each distributor holds, how long a unit in a given segment takes to sell.

There are two bad responses to missing data. The first is deciding on instinct and calling it experience. The second is freezing while you wait for a number that will never arrive. The good response is to build your own data from day one and decide with what you have, knowing which assumption you are making.

• Size bottom-up, not top-down. Instead of starting from a market size that does not exist, list your target accounts one by one, estimate their spend through interviews and add it up. It is slower and far more reliable.
• Write down the assumptions. Every figure in the plan carries a note on where it comes from and when it will be checked.
• Sign the baseline before you move anything. What gets measured, from which source and who owns the data. With a signed baseline, every later result is read against an agreed starting point, not against each person's memory.
• Replace assumptions with data every period. The first-year plan is a hypothesis; the second-year plan should be built almost entirely on your own data.

Without market data, the advantage goes to whoever measures their own first.

To prioritize whom you go after first with incomplete information, the winnability matrix scores each segment on volume, winnability and value. It works with qualitative estimates and improves as data comes in.

Almost every foreign founder hires an agency early: website, social media, photography, campaigns. That is reasonable. The problem starts when the agency fills the gap a strategy should fill. It produces what it is asked for, proposes what it knows how to produce, and no one in the company has the judgment or the time to tell it no.

The result is familiar: lots of visible activity, reach and follower metrics, and no clear link to sales. It is not the agency's fault. It was not hired to decide which segment comes first, with what promise, through which channel and against which success metric. If no one decides that, the agency decides it by default, using the criteria of its own craft.

What you need is someone who:

• writes the brief from the strategy, with segment, promise, proof and a business KPI;
• reviews what gets produced against that brief before it goes live;
• measures what the agency delivers against the baseline, not against the agency's own reports;
• says no to whatever does not serve the plan, however good it looks.

That is the role we cover in strategic direction. We do not replace your agency and we do not produce assets: we design it, brief it and review it, and whoever produces it today keeps producing it. The client decides. We direct. Third parties execute.

Starting a business in the Dominican Republic as a foreigner involves decisions about corporate structure, taxes, residency, employment and, for many tourism projects, incentives. Those decisions matter and they have commercial consequences: they shape your costs, your timelines and your pricing structure. But they are not our trade, and they should not be the trade of any strategy consultancy.

Our recommendation is practical:

• Retain a local law firm and a local tax advisor from the start, with experience in foreign investment and in your industry.
• If your project is in tourism, ask them whether Law 158-01 on tourism development applies to you. Its application falls to the Tourism Development Council (CONFOTUR). Whether it applies, and on what conditions, is a question for specialists.
• For residency and work permits, an immigration lawyer.
• Carry their answers into the sales plan: if an incentive, a corporate structure or a permit changes your costs or your timelines, it changes your price and your calendar.

1. Carrying over the home-market playbook unchanged. Cause: the playbook worked, and no one separated what was method (transferable) from what was market (not transferable). The fix is the local layer: keep the method and rewrite decision-makers, channel, vocabulary and pace.
2. Mistaking access for sales. Cause: the intermediary got meetings and the founder read that as traction. Meetings are not an outcome indicator; collected sales are.
3. Signing exclusivities early. Cause: fear of having no channel. An exclusivity with no targets and no review date leaves you without an alternative exactly when you need one.
4. Planning cash on the agreed payment term. Cause: back home, the agreed term was the real one. In the Dominican market you model on the observed term.
5. Hiring reps without a dashboard. Cause: the assumption that a good salesperson knows what is expected without anyone writing it down.

If you are exporting rather than setting up locally, most of these mistakes have their counterpart in the guide to exporting to the Dominican Republic, written from the side of the company that sells from abroad.

Hypothetical. A Canadian founder opens a private small-group excursion company in Bávaro. Her business plan counts on three channels: direct sales through the website, agreements with hotels so their concierge desks recommend the excursions, and a tour operator with an office in the area.

A few months in, the tour operator brings in almost all the sales, the hotels do not recommend her and the website barely converts. Her agency proposes spending more on ads. No one has measured anything against a starting point.

What we would do, in order:

1. Sign the baseline: sales by channel, margin by channel, the tour operator's actual payment term and the website's customer acquisition cost. Without this, every decision is an opinion.
2. Map the decision-makers at the hotels: who decides which excursions the concierge desk recommends, what they get in return and what worries them. The door is probably not the general manager.
3. Rewrite the agency brief: the website is not optimized to attract cold tourists, but to convert people who have already heard of the company at the hotel or through the tour operator.
4. Set the condition for the second wave: hotels switch on as a channel when an agreed number of them actively recommend the excursions over a set period. If that does not happen, the offer gets revised before any more money goes in.
5. Period committee: a monthly review against the baseline, with three possible decisions for each action: continue, change or stop.

What changes is the conversation: from how much to spend on ads to which channel delivers margin and which condition unlocks the next step.

We are Spanish consultants with experience in the markets of Spain, the United States and the Dominican Republic. What makes that combination useful is not the passport but the translation: we understand what a founder coming from another system expects on timelines, data and contracts, and how the Dominican market works on relationships, channel and pace. That translation is done with method, not anecdotes.

We work remotely, on an agreed cadence, in three phases and three contracts: diagnostic and strategy, playbook and strategic direction. We do not do social media, websites, photography, campaigns, reservations management, hands-on revenue management or real estate brokerage. What we do in the East is described on the page for our marketing strategy consulting in Punta Cana. If your project includes taking a product to the national market, the guide to launching a product in the Dominican Republic covers the path from distributor to point of sale.

1. Separate method from market in your plan. Mark each commercial assumption in your business plan as transferable (it comes from the method) or local (it has to be tested in the Dominican market). The local ones are your work list.
2. Draw the decision-maker map for your five priority accounts. Who decides, who influences, who blocks, who pays. Where you do not know the name, write down how you will find out.
3. Calculate your channel dependence. What share of the last three months' sales came from your main channel, and whether you have the end customer's contact details. If you do not, that is your first conversation with the channel.
4. Log your real payment term. Take your latest invoices and note issue and payment dates. Replace the plan's assumption with that.
5. Write a one-page brief for your agency. Segment, promise, proof and one business KPI. If you cannot write it, the problem is not the agency.