Two people in a market you don't operate in
How to decide whether a small local team is worth building — and which of the four ways of building it fits.
The decision arrives in a fairly consistent shape. A customer, or a customer's customer, is in a region where you have nobody. To serve them properly you need one or two specialists in local hours — a support consultant, an implementation lead, an engineer who can be awake when the client is. The revenue is worth having. The commitment required to earn it looks disproportionate to the size of the team.
Most companies resolve this by not resolving it. The opportunity is deferred, then quietly declined, and the reasoning is never written down anywhere. It is worth writing down, because the analysis is not actually hard — it just gets skipped.
First: separate the capability question from the location question
The two get merged constantly. "Should we open in Singapore?" is a different question from "do we need people who can support this account in Asian hours?" The second is answerable from your pipeline. The first depends on the answer to the second, plus a dozen things that have nothing to do with this customer.
Answer the capability question first and in plain terms: what has to be true operationally for this account to be served well. Hours of coverage. Language. Whether someone has to be physically present. Whether the work needs product depth or process discipline. Write it as a description of the work, not as a headcount request or a country.
Second: price the four routes honestly
There are broadly four ways to get two specialists working in a market you are not in. Each has a genuine best case.
Your own entity
Correct when you already know the market will carry a real business, and when local presence is itself part of the proposition. Wrong as a first step, because the cost is not the incorporation fee — it is the accounting, payroll, employment-law learning curve and management attention that follow it permanently.
An employer of record
Very effective at what it does, which is employing a person you have already chosen in a country you have already chosen. Note the two assumptions. If you do not yet know who, or do not yet know where, an EOR is a tool waiting for a decision you have not made.
A BPO or outsourcing provider
Strong where the work is a well-defined process at volume, and where handing over the function is genuinely what you want. Two specialist roles that need to sit inside your own delivery organisation is close to the opposite of that, and provider economics usually reflect it.
A managed arrangement above the infrastructure
Someone decides the location and model with you, sources and assesses the people, arranges whichever employment structure is appropriate, and gives you one commercial relationship — while the people work inside your teams. This is what HBN does, and it is the route that does not require you to have already made the hard decisions.
Third: check what actually decides the location
Cost per head is the number everyone starts with and it is rarely the number that determines whether the arrangement works. In practice the decisive factors are whether the specific skill exists in depth in that market, whether the working hours genuinely overlap both your team and the customer, and whether employment there is practical at the scale you need rather than at the scale a provider prefers.
Two consultants in a market with shallow supply of your particular specialism will cost you far more in attrition and re-hiring than the salary difference between two candidate countries. Weight the factors for this role. A generic country comparison table is not the same analysis.
Fourth: decide what integration means before you hire
If the work is complex — judgement, context, continuity, real collaboration — the people need to be inside your organisation: your channels, your standups, your escalation path, your review process, sometimes in front of your customers. A structure that places them outside it will produce exactly the outcome you were worried about, regardless of how good the individuals are.
Decide this early, because it eliminates options. It is usually the thing that rules out handing the function to a provider to operate, and it is the reason a small integrated team is a different purchase from a small outsourced one.
And be honest about the one-person case
Where an operating structure already exists in a market, a single specialist is entirely workable. Where it does not, one role rarely justifies establishing one — and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you the setup rather than the outcome. That is a reasonable question to put directly to whoever you are talking to, early.
The order matters more than the answer. Capability, then location, then model, then people. Reversed — which is how it usually happens — you end up choosing a country because a provider has an office there, and a team size because that is their minimum.