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

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts. So doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium support, and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster. And with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Barry asks a smart question this week. Should I hire locally or overseas? And here's my take. If your product, your 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 your business grows. It's not just about cost. It's about capability. It's about communication. It's about culture. So let's start with hiring overseas. Let's explore what it's like. Welcome back to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. I made a lot of overseas hires, hires across the globe, six different continents. I mean the only content 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. I also say that you get more for your money. So you might get a senior, you know, 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, are 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. So 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. 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. And 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. 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 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. That means your business is serving your customers 24, 7. Doesn't matter where they are, what time it is, you got their back.

Hey, Fidelity. Can I get a second opinion on stocks in the Fidelity app?

With Fidelity, it's easy to get an outside opinion from independent experts in a single score. And then when you're ready, trade US stocks and ETFs with no commissions.

That's right.

I am always right.

Investing involves risk, including risk of loss, online US equity trades and ETFs and retail fidelity Account Sell order Assessment fee not included Some account types and securities Excluded details@fidelity.com commissions Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member NYSE SIPC ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people, 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 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 and 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. Or all your riders are in North America, whatever it might be. The point is, is that that when they need to collaborate with other people in their team, it's easy in terms of their time zones. Number two, this is something that a lot of people talk about, but it needs to be talked about and that is cultural differences. This isn't always. 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. No, 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 are 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, is that you need to be streamlined. You just can't use Google Chat or Slack and just hope everything's gonna work out. You need to have system place to make sure nothing falls between the cracks. So 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 want to go into an office, but a 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 could build faster. And 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, cost, 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 town 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. You 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 you know when school holiday 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. But 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 we grew for 10 years. We had team members across six different continents and it made for a better product. No doubt about it. Here'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 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 and A question today on Q and A Wednesday, if you got a question you want to ask and you want it answered right here on the show, just go to 100mba.net q. Submit your question there, and we got your back. If you want more help building your business the smart way, subscribe to my Three Things newsletter at 100mba.net. Just sign up for any of our freebies, any of our guides, and you'll be part of our newsletter. Every week, I'm gonna send you three things. Something to think about, something that's gonna change your mindset. Number two, something to do so that you are moving forward every week. And number three, something to learn. So you are growing as an entrepreneur. It's my way to coach you from afar. It's no fluff, just practical help for entrepreneurs just like you. Again, 100- MBA. NET sign up for any of our guides and you'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.

When the flu is keeping you up at night. Don't try to tough it out. Knock out your flu symptoms with Nyquil Intense Flu. You got this. It provides powerful relief of your flu symptoms so you can sleep well through the night. Nyquil Intense Flu the nighttime sniffling, aching, aching fever. Best sleep with a flu medicine. Use as directed. Keep out of reach of children.