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Companies of 10 to 50 people, expanding for real reasons
Some are going abroad for the first time. Just as many already have a customer, a contractor or a warehouse in another country and have quietly been doing it wrong for two years.
The profile
Not a size bracket so much as a stage.
- Between roughly 10 and 50 people, usually run by a founder or managing director who is also doing three other jobs.
- No in house international HR, no general counsel, no corporate development function.
- Already trading, hiring or selling across a border, or about to be.
- Enough revenue that a mistake in a new market is expensive, and not enough headcount to prevent one.
- Little appetite for a six figure consulting engagement, and no patience for a report that ends at the recommendation.
Sectors we know best
These are the businesses whose problems we have seen enough times to be useful in the first meeting.
Trade and physical goods
These businesses usually need a local presence before they need an entity. Someone to meet suppliers, inspect goods, chase a customs authority, attend the arbitration hearing, and sit in the room when the distributor renegotiates. The common failure is signing an exclusive agency agreement in a market nobody from the company has visited.
Technology and digital services
The market is rarely the hard part. The hard part is hiring the engineer in Romania or the account manager in Dubai without creating a permanent establishment, working out whether your long standing contractors are really employees, and registering correctly for VAT and marketplace compliance in each country you sell into.
Professional practices
Regulated, reputation sensitive, and generally expanding by putting one trusted person in a new city and hoping it holds. Licensing and local ownership rules decide the structure before commercial logic gets a say, particularly in the Gulf. We make the first placement survivable and the second one repeatable.
If your business is not on this list it does not mean we cannot help. It means we will say so early if the fit is thin.
When companies usually call us
Rarely at the strategy stage. Almost always at one of these moments.
- A customer in another country wants a local entity, a local invoice or a local contact before they will sign.
- The person you want to hire is in a country where you have nothing, and the offer is going stale.
- You have been paying contractors abroad for two years and someone has finally asked whether that is allowed.
- A distributor or agent has gone quiet and nobody on the team can credibly go and find out why.
- A tender or licence requires local presence, and the deadline is in eleven weeks.
- The team doubled, the managers are new, and everything now takes three times as long across time zones.
If one of those sounds familiar, start with a conversation.
Send a short note about the market and the decision in front of you. We reply within one working day, and we will tell you plainly if this is not something we should be doing for you.