Ask a European politician about the single market and you will hear about the absence of tariffs. Ask a company that exports to three EU countries and you will hear about something else entirely.

The tariffs are genuinely gone. That was the easy part, and it was a real achievement. What remains is harder to see and, for a small company, often harder to absorb: technical standards that differ, labelling rules that differ, VAT registration thresholds that differ, packaging and waste obligations that differ, and — the one that surprises people — employment law that differs the moment you post someone across a border for more than a few days.

**Why this hits small companies hardest**

A large exporter has a compliance function. It has someone whose job is to know that a product sold in one country needs a declaration that another does not require, and that the recycling levy is calculated on a different basis in a third. The cost of that knowledge is spread across a large volume, so per unit it is small.

A company with forty employees does not have a compliance function. It has a commercial director who is also doing compliance, at night, from a government website written in a language they read slowly. The cost of that knowledge is not spread across anything. It is a direct hit on the margin of the deal — and, worse, it is a hit that arrives *after* the price has been quoted.

This is the asymmetry that gets missed. The single market did not remove the cost of crossing a border; it converted it from a tariff — visible, calculable, priced into the quote — into an administrative cost that is invisible until you are already committed.

**What actually helps**

Not more information. There is plenty of information, and most of it is accurate and free. The problem is not availability; it is that a company does not know what it does not know. Nobody searches for a rule they have not heard of.

What helps is somebody who has done this before in that specific market, telling you, before you quote: here is what will catch you.

That is an unglamorous service. It does not scale into software. It is a phone call with someone who knows the destination market, made at the right moment — before the price is fixed, not after the shipment is held.

**The honest caveat**

None of this makes the single market a failure. A company exporting from Portugal to Germany today faces a fraction of the friction it faced thirty years ago, and the direction of travel is right. But 'better than it was' and 'frictionless' are different claims, and a company planning its first European expansion should plan for the second one.