MBA2627 Q&A Wednesday: Should I Hire Locally or Overseas?

0:00Barry asks a smart question this week, should I hire locally or overseas? And here's my take. If your product or service serves a global market, you're trying to impact the world. Your team should reflect that. But let's break this down in today's episode, the real pros and cons of both options, because the right answer depends on what you're building, who you're serving, and where you want to grow. Who you hire shapes the quality of your product, how well you understand your customers, and how fast or slow your business grows. It's not just about cost. It's about capability. It's about communication.

0:31It's about culture. So let's start with hiring overseas. Let's explore what it's like.

0:43Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business. I've made a lot of overseas hires, hires across the globe, six different continents. And it's, I mean, the only continent I didn't hire in is Antarctica. So let's go over the pros of hiring overseas. Number one, I found that your costs are generally lower. You can often hire amazing talent at a fraction of what your local rates are, especially if you're living in a Western country like US, Canada, the UK, Australia, whatever it might be.

1:23I also say they get more for your money. So you might get a senior developer engineer at the cost of maybe an entry level engineer. This allows you to build your team earlier and even on a budget. Number two, global perspective. And I believe this is more important, more valuable than the cost pro of hiring overseas. If your customers are in different time zones, they speak different languages, have different cultures or from different regions, then a team member that is international in that world, in that culture can serve them better. When I was building Webinar Ninja, my software company, I wanted this to be a global product, a global brand, and I needed to represent the world with my team so that they can inform my product to be able to be impactful for everybody in the world.

2:16So we made sure that, for example, our UI was easy to understand and use regardless if you're a native English speaker or not. It's just intuitive. And this is why our product sold very well overseas in non-English speaking markets. So again, if you want to impact the world, you need to have the world represented in your team. There's also small little things like one of our UX UI designers was from Bulgaria and in her country, everybody uses Android. They don't use iPhone or at least a very small minority use iPhone. So for her, our app needs to work really well on Android. It's even more important than working on an iPhone in her perspective.

2:53And it's great to have that perspective so you understand that not everybody's like you. Not everybody's like your country or your culture. The third one I absolutely love is 24-hour coverage. If you are a champion of customer support in your business, if you want to make sure that your company is synonymous with amazing support, then 24-hour coverage is something that you want to think about. And if you want to have people working in regular hours or daytime hours, you need to have a global team. That way they could support your product and services while you sleep. That's a huge advantage. This also means that you're a global brand.

3:27That means your business is serving your customers 24-7. It doesn't matter where they are, what time it is, you got their back. But it's all roses. What are the cons of hiring overseas? Well, time zone challenges. Collaboration can be slower if your team is spread out, meaning that if you have a team across six continents like I had at one time, you will have to use asynchronous communication a lot. This means that when your team members are posting something on your team collaboration application like Asana or Basecamp or whatever it might be, somebody might be sleeping and then they'll wake up in the morning and they'll see that post and then they'll respond to it.

4:06And then when they wake up, they'll see it. So you could see everything's kind of taking 24 hours. Now, it's not that bad if you have long cycles of development or work or nothing's time sensitive. One of the things that you can do to challenge or to remedy this challenge is to make sure that your teams are all in the same time zone. So, for example, all of the customer support team might be in the Philippines or all your engineers might be in Eastern Europe or Europe in general. So there's some overlap where all your writers are in North America, whatever it might be. The point is, is that when they need to collaborate with other people in their team, it's easy in terms of their time zones.

4:47Number two, this is something I know a lot of people talk about, but it needs to be talked about. And that is cultural differences. This isn't always bad, but it can affect how you communicate, give feedback or build relationships. What you might consider to be friendly might be rude and vice versa. So when I work with a global team, I make sure that we over communicate. We also communicate our intentions. Like I say, I'm telling you this and this is why I'm saying this. So people understand, okay, this is where it's coming from. And I never assume that people will understand me or read between the lines.

5:21No, we have to be super clear because some things are a little bit more subtle when it comes to culture and comes to communication. Let's make sure there's no subtleties. We're just clear and transparent. Number three, hiring takes more intention. You need strong documentation when you're hiring internationally, clear SOPs, you need the tools to support a distributed team like a great project management tool like Basecamp or Asana or whatever it might be. The point here is that you need to be streamlined. You just can't use Google Chat or Slack and just hope everything's going to work out. You need to have systems in place to make sure nothing falls between the cracks.

5:58So let's talk about hiring locally. What are some of the pros? One, generally easier communication and collaboration, especially if you're building fast, especially when you're in the beginning or the early stages of your business. Number two, easier to build a strong company culture in person if you're in the same office with real communication. Your team members will trust you faster if you're seeing them every single day. Now, I know this is like the age of remote work and not a lot of people wanna go into an office, but a lot of startups and a lot of new businesses benefit a lot by being in the same office at least a couple or three times a week so that they can build those bonds, build that trust, communicate what they need to communicate with each other so they have some momentum and they can build faster.

6:43And sometimes for specific roles like sales or legal, having someone local just makes more sense. For example, I had a global team, but when it comes to finances and legal, I always have a local person that I'm working with. But what are the cons of hiring locally? Well, costs, plain and simple. So like I said, if you're in a Western country or a high earning per capita country, hiring locally can be expensive, especially in major cities. You also have a limited talent pool. The best person for the job might not live near you. And of course, inflexible schedules, especially if you're trying to cover multiple time zones.

7:19You know, it's hard to get a hire to wake up in the middle of the night to do a night shift or a graveyard shift for customer support. So what's the right move? In my opinion, if your product is local, say you're serving customers in a specific city or country, then hiring locally may give you cultural nuances, in-person collaboration that matters for your business. So say for example, you have a cleaning company that cleans people's homes and you're based in a major city like Sydney, Australia. It makes sense for you to hire people that understand where the areas are that you need to go to to clean these houses, you understand the culture of Australia, understand that when school holidays are and that's not a good time to do house cleanings maybe, and your local market is Sydney, then it makes sense to build a local team.

8:05But if your business is global, your customers are everywhere, let's say, for example, then your team should be too. So if you have an online business, an online digital product that's serving the world, I recommend you diversify because that diversity will give you better products because you're going to get better feedback from your team, smarter marketing decisions, and a company that reflects the world it's selling to. That's what we did with Webinar Ninja, our software company that grew for 10 years. We had team members across six different continents, and it made for a better product. No doubt about it.

8:36Here's the truth. It's not local versus overseas. It's about the right person for the role. Sometimes they're down the street, and sometimes they're across the ocean. What matters is building a team that helps you serve your customers better. Your customers are of the most important thing. They allow you to grow. And when you have a team, you move faster and you bring your vision to life, no matter where they're based. Thanks, Barry, for your Q &A question today on Q &A Wednesday. If you got a question you want to ask and you want answered right here on the show, just go to 100mba.net slash Q, submit your question there, and we got your back.

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9:44Sign up for any of our guides and it'll be added to our newsletter automatically. Thank you so much for listening, for consuming today's podcast episode. You are a doer. You're an action taker. You're my kind of person. You're my people. I can't wait to see you in the next episode. So I'll see you then. Take care.