Name: Scaling Smart: Real Global Employment Expansion Strategies That Work
Uploaded: 2025-09-09T14:30:42.516Z
Duration: 52 min 40 s
Description: Scaling Smart: Real Global Employment Expansion Strategies That Work

Transcript for "Scaling Smart: Real Global Employment Expansion Strategies That Work": Welcome everyone to today's session. My name is Bran. I I'm a lead knowledge architect at Oyster, and I'm thrilled to be your host for today. So going global used to mean hiring where the biggest demand for talent was. But as teams spread across borders, what worked in the early days can start to break, creating gaps in compliance, culture, and operations. So how do you move from the opportunistic hiring to a global strategy that actually scales? To talk about this, we have three amazing speakers joining us today. First, we have Oyster's cofounder and CEO, Tony Jamous. Tony, please join us on the virtual stage and introduce yourself. Thank you, Brian, and hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us in this conversation today. So as Brent said, I'm the CEO and founder of Oyster, but this is not my first technology company. I build a company before that was distributed in 45 countries, and we did it not because it was a strategic decision for us, but it was a reactive, need. So we've seen a lot of the challenges, that faces companies in in distributing their talent, and I'm eager to talk to you about it today. Thank you, Tony. Next, we have Oyster's chief people officer and chief of staff, Marina Farthouat. Marina, please share a bit about your journey in the field with our audience. Hi, everyone. I have been scaling Teams internationally in house as part of people teams for quite a long time, including at times similar to Tony when he was legal entity by legal entity. And then having had the relief of your platforms emerging, it's been great. And so I'm excited to talk about that today. Thank you, Marina. And for our third speaker today, joining us is Oyster senior director of expert services, Bianca Burke. Bianca, please tell us about your role and extensive experience. Hi, everyone. So my background is actually HR, and I've spent most of my career in the APAC region. I'm currently in the fifth country that I'm living and working in, and I'm in Portugal. But, in my pre-Oyster life, I spent a lot of time setting up new countries from an HR perspective and doing acquisitions. So now I lead, ExeterOffset OysterHR, and this is where we help our customers and, do this and also ensure that we're providing a really human centric team member experience as well. So thank you, Tony, Marina, and Bianca for your introductions. And before we begin the discussion, please know that you can ask questions in the q and a section of the chat during this session. In our last segment, I'll be reading these questions to our speakers in a dedicated q and a segment. So let's start with the foundations, the basics. Tony, from your CEO's perspective, how do you think about regional opportunity? What are the top indicators that a company might be ready to expand somewhere new and bring on talent to support that expansion. Before asking the question, Brian, you probably saw my son, Mark. And I just wanna say kids are now back to school, so you're gonna see that more often, on my calls. And this is also part of, distributed work. Right? So you bring your full self to work including, being at home and everything that goes with that. So talking about the distribution opportunity, Brian, that you've asked. If you look at it, there are really two use cases that companies have when they are employing people across border. Number one is they wanna open a market. They are pulled to go in a specific country. Maybe there is a demand they need to service locally. Maybe maybe there's a compliance reason they need to do that. Number one is opening a market. Number two is finding the best talent. And and this is really what was a driver of the acceleration in demand for cross border employment in the last five, six years. Companies that are unable to find great talent that is affordable with a 20 mile radius from their HQs or or or sometimes it might take them months to find that balance. So it could be also a speed to market that enable them to to choose that use case. And and and there are really two indicators that that, for me, make the company ready to tap into the global talent pool. Number one is, are they really facing a talent shortage? Are they hiring are do do they really need to hire top talent in a cost effective way sometimes? I think that's number one. And number two, do they have organizational readiness, to be able to make people successful no matter what they are? It means that they they need to employ distributed work model, use asynchronous communication more, and, and, and and and default to a culture of trust to make sure that people can can feel trusted even if their manager is seven hours away, from a time zone perspective. Thank you, Tony. And let's say we have met all of these conditions and they're in place. Bianca, for teams expanding into a new regions and market, why is global employment with an EOR often a better choice than opening up an entity right away? Yeah. So so, Grant, I've actually done both. I've opened up, new entities and and, worked with Oyster pre oyster life. But I think the main advantage, it's really your speed to launch. So if you are launching yourself, it takes, a lot of time. I can tell you bank accounts, they always say it's gonna take four to six weeks and it always takes three to six months. So it just slows down your ability to to start operating in the country. And it also monopolizes like HR teams and other internal teams' time, so it takes people away from other priorities. So this is where an EOR, can be a lot faster and and, give you more time back for your own team. The other part is cost. So if you are setting up from scratch, you do need to spend a lot of, money with, consultants and lawyers making sure that you have all your compliance pieces in order. Also, like, sometimes you enter a country and you're not a 100% sure if it's going to work, so you might be testing the market viability. And your ability to exit that again and experiment is a lot easier if you're with an EOR rather than, you know, you now have a a whole structure in place that you now need to wind down. And I think the last bit is is a bit more subtle, but it's it's someone understanding the cultural nuance in the country that you're entering, because you're not going to know everything, at first and it's really good to to get some great guidance on how to to navigate some of those cultural challenges as you enter. So EORs are often the right route when growing quickly or bringing on specialized talent, also mitigating some risk along the way, than compared to opening up a new entity, which brings me to my next question is, Tony, when you were building Oyster, what was the exact challenge, for customers that you were focused on solving? Actually, what inspired me to start Oyster was, myself in the seat of a CEO in my previous company being being distributed in 45 countries, and we had to do that the old way. We had to set up entities everywhere. We use also a number of EORs, but it was fragmented. Essentially, we build our own internal oyster, and we spend millions of dollars to do so. We had a bloated cost structure when it comes to legal, HR, and finance. And, the result wasn't great because the employee experience suffered. People felt disconnected. And more importantly, there is always countries where we find a great talent, and my CHRO would tell me, sorry. We cannot hire in that country even though the person would be brilliant, right, especially in emerging economies. So and and when I started Oyster, I I went and spoke to a number of customers, and they confirmed these are the challenges they are facing. And when we start servicing customer, we realized that, actually, these were these were validated. We validated that these were the challenges that our customer facing. And, so that was kind of the the the inception of Oyster was the inspiration to solve that problem to make global hiring as easy as local hiring and give people opportunity around the world and give a consistent employee experience across borders. Thank you, Tony. So, Bianca, I wanna dive deep into your extensive experience again. If your company, is expanding to a new region, what are the top three things that are going to take up your HR team's time and energy to figure out? Yeah. So I think first off, I mean, depends if you've already identified talent. So you could be entering a new market because you found a niche talent there that you really wanna hire, or you could be saying, I want to go and see what we can do in this market. So trying to find the people that that can obviously take some time to to work out the best way to source people in different markets. The next is just how to pay people. So whether it's, you know, using an EOR or setting up those bank accounts I referred to before, which didn't take a while to set up, and make sure you're complying on everything. So I think one thing people kind of think about is how am I going to catch all the different compliance things I need to do like statutory insurance and making sure I have an employment agreement that's going to hold up and be accurate in that country and also appropriate and also things like registering for pensions. So yeah. Which brings me to a really good question for Marina. For those who want to get started hiring in a new location and region, What's the most important thing when you're putting together a hiring plan? Yes. Thanks, Bianca. I think, first of all, it's really valuable to understand that hiring in multiple locations actually unlocks your hiring plan. Because typically, people teams and I know in the audience today, I think we have, CEO cofounder profiles. We have people teams. We have talent acquisition experts. What tends to happen is that people teams and TA teams are given a need to balance speed and budget and find talent. So that's the hiring plan. So, a bunch of roles, people to find talent to locate on a budget in a specific way, in a specific time frame. Now that challenge gets completely unlocked when you have, access to the world's talent pools because you go from having maybe one or two locations being able to hire against your legal entities, say, I don't know, in The UK, The US, and Germany to all of a sudden having access to, you know, access to so many more pools. The thing to bear in mind with the hiring plan when you put it together is, oftentimes people think that they have to go everywhere all at once. That's not the case. It's actually, very important to identify operationally what are the needs of the company. For example, if you have an engineering team that needs to support customers twenty four seven, it's important to identify locations that allow you to have time zone coverage. So you can put together a hiring plan that allows for the right presence in the right markets at the right time to have the coverage. Operationally, that reduces your on call costs, for example, which helps with employee experience because people don't like to do on calls so much because they don't wanna work outside of their core working hours. And it also helps, not to to spend more on on, on call as well, which is expensive. And so, really, when putting together the hiring plan, hiring internationally unlocks all the parameters. Speed, you can hire probably with a lead time of time to hire thirty days instead of typically sixty to ninety, depending on the profiles, of course, budget and, operational coverage. And from there on, you can have a completely different plan to what you're used to if you don't have access to, broad talent pools. And I would like to stick with you, Marina, for a little bit longer as I have another question, that I would like you to cover. We know that people teams are strategic partners to CEOs, and are focused on operational excellence. So when company leadership lays out expansion plans, how do people's teams focus on where, to find the right talent and, hire first? Yeah. That's a great question, Brian, and it really does depend. It depends on the company. It depends on the stage. It depends on the strategy, obviously. But the way I like to think about it is a three tiered approach. So first of all, skills driven planning. What are the key skills that you need as a company? Where might you find them? How do you contain cost against that? And how do you have a diverse workforce against the skills that you need? And how can you hire at speed like we just talked about? That's the first tier. The second tier, which is particularly important if it's a startup environment, early stage even scale up, is talent led hiring. So, basically, having the flexibility to be led by where you find the talent. So you might not have planned to enter back, I don't know, Spain initially, but you have a strong referral network happening amongst your team when you're trying to grow fast. And all of a sudden, you might have tapped into a talent pool of people in Spain. And so you kind of partially led, like, you've got your strategy on the one tier. And then the second tier is, like, you're being led by where the talent is, and you build some flexibility for that. Within that flexibility, though, there is another component that then arises, which I'd like to call the third tier, which is, how to how to achieve scalable and viable operations. So you don't want to ingest too much that, operational complexity by going into markets that are too heavy to to be able to cope with. So for example, in some countries where you might find that the landscape is a little bit too rigid, you might not want to grow an entire hub. You might hire one or two people, but you might not decide to have an entire team there. So having those three tier components when you actually decide where to scale is really important. And on the face of it, it sounds complex, but it actually isn't that complex if well, if you happen to work within the UI, it's not that complex because there is that expertise that's been, basically developed within the company to help guide you on that front as well. That's that's actually super interesting to see how all of those three tiers are also kinda interconnecting, and and creating a whole, journey for, for finding and hiring the right talent. So, I'd like to jump to Tony, and talk about doing this at Oyster. So, Tony, what was the most surprising thing, about employing people in so many countries? Because we have all these rules, customs, and even work styles that can vary drastically from location to location. So what's your experience with that? Yeah. At Oyster, we we kind of created an a social work experiment. Essentially, we employed people in 70 countries and, from all different backgrounds, gender equal across the board, including in leadership team and on the board. So we've run this social experiment of hybrid diversity and hyper distribution. And, what I've learned leading this company is that what appears to be a lot of local differences, such as, employment regulation, tax laws, cultural differences are actually overrated. And, and and the similarities are much more stronger and much more, I would say, truthful, such as everybody wants an opportunity to grow. Everybody is looking for meaningful work to do. Everybody wanna feel trusted and cared for. And and when you start designing an organizational structure that deal with this diversity of regulation and taxes, but then focuses on the core of what human needs, access to opportunity, meaningful work, feeling taken care of, then, this is where you you you increase your engagement levels and retention levels. Thank you, Tony. And, of course, we talked about now about rules and customs, work styles, and culture. But, I'm curious, Bianca, this one, is perfect for you. What would make a market more operationally challenging, when it comes to all of this? Yeah. So in in terms of from an HR perspective, I think you wanna kind of pay attention to things like, you know, how long are probation periods, how long are notice periods. It it may depend on what you're actually trying to accomplish there. There can be requirements in some countries like Save Works Council, where it's a trade union representation, if you're operating yourself if you hit a certain number of employees, for example. And then there can be some general admin. There's some countries that are a bit heavier on things like timekeeping, for example. So they may have to, get everyone to record everything and there's just more administration around these things. So, yeah, it really comes down to whether you want to do that yourself or you want to, work with a partner like an EOR, in which case, obviously, those operational challenges minimize quite a bit. And, Bianca, I wanna keep you on the stage for a a a little bit more. At the company where you have team members in dozens of countries, right, what are the top three tips for maintaining consistent standards so the employment experience is equitable across the board? Yeah. I mean, I think I think this is really, really important because if if you're in a location where there's maybe just a handful of people, it's gonna be more difficult to feel part of the company. So you have to really think about how you're going to make things as fair and consistent despite you know, there's obviously challenges and you can't make everything exactly the same. I think a a few things that I found effective before is one is I when I'm managing teams across multiple countries, I make sure that everyone's getting the same information so that no one's got any advantage or disadvantage from sitting close to other people or far from other people. So one way I practically do this is I make a loom, which is like a video each Monday, and I share all the information with everyone. So I'm not using one on ones and things to bring people up to speed with information. Everyone's got the same, so no one feels left out. The other part is, I think sometimes people think, well, you know, people can watch the recording, but actually people wanna participate live. So it's it's it's making sure people have an opportunity to contribute their opinions and ideas, and not always saying, well, you can do it async, but everyone else will do it sync. So it means you may need to rotate times or get creative of how you're getting the input. So, like, I use something like Miro sometimes so that everyone can share their thoughts. And again, no one's at a particular advantage because where they said everyone's having a kind of equal opportunity to participate. And I think one of the most challenging things, when we're looking at consistency, is when it comes to compensation and benefits. So for those of you in HR, you will be aware that employees tend to cherry pick and compare benefits between countries and say, why did I get this and we don't get this, that's not fair. The reality is markets operate extremely differently to each other. So what I find helpful here is being able to articulate in just one or two sentences what your company's position is when it comes to compensation and benefits. So it may be something like, we always pay at the sixtieth percentile or something like this so that that's consistent, but we pay at local market rates. And from benefits, we focus on health. You know? So something like that so people can see how that actually applies in their market even though it may not be exactly the same as in another location. Thank you, Bianca. And reading it, you just reminded me about something when you mentioned Loom, and I would like to ask Marina something. This is something, Marina, you and I have talked, quite often, and I will love for you to share your insights. How important are tools and culture for engaging talent in different markets? Oh, yes. Great question. And in fact, I think it might have been listed as a topic for a few people who joined us today who wanted to find out more about this. Tooling is indeed very important because we're talking about a remote setup with people in different geographies. So a lot of the interaction is going to be happening through tools. One of the first things is actually something that on the surface seems counterproductive, but it's actually very important, is designing ways for people to have interactions that are totally informal and not at all work related. So for example, you know, having a Slack channel, obviously, most companies that are remote or hybrid have Slack channels that are very social. So at OysterHR, we have Oystergram where people, you know, share pictures of their weekends and, you know, the equivalent of having a a catch up at, the office. If they were in an office together, they'd be grabbing coffee and talking about their weekend. It's the the equivalent of that. And sometimes, if we're not used to working in the remote setting, we might think that's a little bit of a waste of time. People chatting on Slack or people opening a meeting in a one to one asking, questions about how they are doing versus getting to the agenda items. But actually, in the remote setting, it it is incredibly important because this is where connection is built. People are people. They need to connect with their coworkers. And if budgets allow, of course, upsides in person help a huge amount. But nevertheless, what tends to happen is through the tools, people form connections. I mean, I was hope opening our Slack channel last week at OysterHR and seeing that some people flew on the other side of the world to attend the colleague's wedding, and they've never met before until they actually attended as a guest to someone else's wedding. So so you can create very strong bonds, remotely, contribute to what some people say. It is about making sure that the interactions have space to be informal. The biggest mistake would probably to shape a culture to be to to shape a culture where you actually only have work interactions, because then there is absolutely no opportunity for people to get to know one another. And if on top of that, they don't see each other, then that I can see that that would be, almost impossible to build a dynamic. The good news is most remote companies, ultimately find their footing on this and manage to build great cultures, and there are many examples of that. So Adding, Lebron, adding to what Marina said, I added kind of a different, additional perspective here is that, what we found very useful in the beginning of starting Oyster was to, codify how do you use the tools and when. We call them the rules, the rules and the tools, the tools and the rules. That was called the Oyster Academy. And, essentially, we we train people. This is not this is how you use Slack. You use Slack for asynchronous chat. You use Zoom for live communication. You use Google Docs to create a temporary document, and then you move them into Tototion when they need to stay for longer longer term. This is there's three type of meeting. This is how you do each meeting. And and that codification of how how we work together and why this is important for our productivity effectiveness, but also opportunity because we give people opportunity no matter what they are. So if you wake up in the morning in Manila and your manager is on the other side of the world, you're still affected and know what you need to do and access to the information that you actually a strong culture because culture, shifted. It's not anymore what sort of conversation or having afternoon drinks on on Thursdays. It is really how we work together and how we relate to each other. So would it be safe to say that tools are kinda replacing the typical office environment and that culture is weaved in through the processes and the usage of those tools? So the culture is omnipresent. As Marina and Tony already pitched in on this, moving it to Bianca to hear a little bit about her insights on the subject. Yeah. I I think, like, following on what Marina and Tony said, that you need to be very intentional about this. It doesn't happen by accident. So you need to create a space. And one thing I have found in remote environments is people sometimes you need to be a bit clever about it because sometimes people don't see, like, we'll set up a social thing for the team, and people are like, they prioritize work over it. They're thinking about their work. So you really need to go out of your way to encourage people to participate in these things, and sometimes you even need to put in the few tricks. So one of the things I would do in my team meetings is the first thing we would do is a social thing, and so no one knew exactly when the agenda was gonna start. Right? So people would come on time, we would have our social bonding, and then we would get into the agenda. But it is important people have the connections. But I have to say, like, in this remote environment, I think it's, like, one of the strongest cultures that I've ever seen. We have a colleague coming, I think, two weeks' time from Finland. I've never met her in real life. We're all looking forward to meeting up. She's just on a holiday. So, I I really don't buy the whole you can't have connections in a remote environment. To be honest, I think they're the strongest I've had in any company so far. I I can definitely agree with that. Marina, I I see your eyes. I think you have something to add to this conversation. Yeah. Yeah. No. Similarly to to what was just said by Bianca and Tony, I I've also formed the strongest bonds with colleagues in remote environments. Also because of the nature of how you work in the sense that in an office, you catch up with people, you walk around, and you are subjected to the patterns and movements of the practical office. So for example, if you're in a global company, but you're in London, you see the people in London, you form stronger connections with a subset of people, and you don't have the opportunity to form really strong connections across the board. So there is an aspect of equal footing, which is super valuable, particularly for CEOs and cofounders and people teams to access everyone consistently and build a good consistent culture. And I would say something else actually that's really it marries the culture and the hiring plan together. The first arguably the first 200 people, but especially the first 35 to 50 people that you hire are very important for your culture. And so it's really essential to, identify people who are not only very talented and very skilled, but also who actually wanna bring something to the company and feel really passionate about working remotely and being part of something new and being happy to experiment and also happy to engage. And, so I think that people who actually do do care about being part of something that's growing or or if you're already an existing company at scale and you wanna shift more to remote, people who actually wanna engage in this, you know, leveraging, that interest from people makes a big difference because you can now have all the social Slack channels you want. But if nobody takes the time to engage, then, of course, you you don't have a culture. But the thing is people do engage. So it's just about making sure that you, you you hire talent who also wants to be part of this and and excited about working remotely? It's definitely very exciting to overcome those challenges when you have a distributed team spanning across different countries and how those cultures, are enriching our environment. I can watch for that myself. But I would like to kinda turn this discussion a little bit back to EORs, and we established that, they're super important for getting the employment standards right. But in our business, we hear EOR misconceptions all the time. Right? And for the group here, I would like to share three misconceptions about using an EOR. And I wanna demystify this, and I'm gonna ask you each to tell me why those misconceptions are, misguided. And I'm gonna start with Bianca. And, Bianca, people think their EOR is only there so people get paid on time. So what's one way of, what's you that you can encourage companies to think about their EORs as a partner in order to thrive, rather than just like a transactional vendor? Yeah. I think if you use an EOR as a transactional vendor, you're not getting the full value that you can get. I think a good EOR, they they will take as good a care of the team member as you would yourself in your own HR team. So I I like to think of a good AOR partner as an extension of your company's HR team. So, there will be that balance. Right? So they will be ensuring that there's a fair, great human experience, but also, you know, balancing the commercial realities. Like, we all know that there's commercial realities of hiring people and and, you know, a good EOR partner will balance both for you and work with you collaboratively. So I think what I would really encourage is, you know, for companies that are engaging with the EORs is to talk to the EORs like they are a member of your HR team, because there's a lot of experience within, and it should help you get a lot more confidence about global expansion because you can really test things out and, you know, have open conversations, so that you can kind of go eyes wide open in into, you know, decisions that you wanna make around your company and expanding into new markets. Thank you. Thank you, Bianca. That's a wonderful answer. And I would like to turn to Marina for, misconception number two. And that one is people think that working with an EOR means giving up control over the employee experience. So how do you help companies understand what they can still own and influence when working through an EOR partnership? Yeah. Well, that's a really great point because, actually, having used EORs myself in house for a very long time, I'd argue the opposite. I would actually say that the URL gives you back the control of the employee experience. Why? Because if you do everything in house without using an URL, you are dedicating a lot of time as you should to compliance, to contracts, to policies, to administration, and you don't have as much time to spend on other topics. As a people team, you only have so many resources. Right? Whereas if you use an EOR, you actually can deploy your people team on the topics that are really high impact, partnering with the business, having, employee engagement initiatives, focusing on employee experience. And the EOR runs the operations for you, and it's it's really valuable. I mean, imagine a people team where you kind of there's two of you based in The States, and you're you're doing the start up is becoming really successful, and you have to expand all those countries, Spain, maybe France or Singapore. And you you've never worked in those areas, and you're interested and you're very competent. But why would you handle all the complexity of contracting, understanding PTO rules, understanding employment law when you can actually have someone that handles that for you and you focus on growth, you focus on what matters most for the leadership team, whilst at the same time, knowing that you can pilot the EUR by asking all those questions that you wanna know about and being savvy about which country you wanna go into and how things work. So it's actually, for me, a massive win when it comes to employee experience. The other thing I would say is when you choose your EOR, it's important to not only look at the surface of how they come across, but also understand how do they handle ticketing, how do they handle escalations, and making sure that in practice, you remain the, I mean, I've always remained the escalation point in house for queries so that I knew that my team members that were, looked after by an EOR, if anything didn't come to the right level of, of service that they expected, they knew they could come to me or someone in my team. And so that's I think that's really useful because you can have the lines of a definition where as a people team, you decide. You're empowered to know when does a query ultimately land for you to look into, when does the EOR handle it. And so from that perspective, I think it becomes a great tool for people teams. Very convenient. Interesting. And I I'm really curious to think about, like, what what companies should look in when they're trying to select the right EOR partner, because it it it seems that that partnership can empower you to do so much more and cut down on so much, let's say, complexity that you will have to deal, otherwise when opening up an entity. That said, the third misconception is that people think EORs are just short term solutions, until you go and set up that entity. Right? So, Tony, I would like to hear from you. What's your take on when an EOR actually becomes a long term strategic advantage rather than just a stepping stone towards creating your own entity in the region? Yeah. So more than six years ago, the ER industry, by the way, existed for four years, but was driven by professional services, approach, was very expensive. And it was three, four times the price that they were paying today per employee per month. And it was designed, for short term use. It wasn't designed for long term employment. So a lot of these Fortune 500 companies that uses UR at that time, they, they were using URs as a test mechanism for a market, but things have dramatically shifted in the last few years. The the UI is not only for Fortune 500 companies. It's for mid market mid market companies and and small and medium sized businesses as well. This is where the power is. UI enables smaller organization to act like multinationals. And and the price have dropped significantly, and it became software driven instead of professional services only driven. So, and that enabled you are to shift from being a transactional short term usage to a strategic, strategy opportunity for businesses to create more agility in that talent acquisition strategy and their talent distribution strategy. So, essentially, you can look at the planet as one employment market and use in your platform to keep you compliant, create a consistent employee experience across geographies. And then, you essentially, free up your company from choosing this country or this country when it comes to employment. The world is your Oyster when you wanna employ people. And and that's why UR becomes a strategic asset for companies because it create agility in their in their need to employ create talent cross borders. Thank you. Thank you, Tony. And now, we are going to I have a question for Marina. I'm curious. Is it better to focus on one market at a time, or can you successfully launch in multiple regions if you have the right EOR partner? So what's the best approach there? Well, again, it depends. I'll I'll open stop my answers with it depends. But it depends on what you're trying to achieve. Are you are you a company that wants to grow a hub all of a sudden, or are you actually just, looking at your hiring plan and trying to kind of, hire, as fast as you need to in multiple countries? In the past, before we had EORs like this, where you had the good tech and you can actually do it easily and hire all over the world, you had to hire first in one country and focus because you were opening a legal entity, and you typically didn't have the resources to go in multiple countries. You had to kind of, have the finance team, the legal team, the people team aligned on, like, doing handbooks and doing contracts of employment. And you you really can only focus on so many countries at once. But now you can go into multiple countries. And depending on how demanding your hiring plan is and how quickly you're growing, arguably for a company that needs to grow fast enough, multiple countries does make more sense. In addition to that, once you actually hire in diverse countries, you realize that the diversity of of people and the diversity of talents that you can hire is so valuable. Because you see, what happens is each country has its own thing to offer. Academically, institutions are different. Skills are different. If you're hiring software developers, in some countries, they have a particular niche where, you know, you find the best engineers in that particular area versus another. And so soon you'll find that specific countries have specific skill sets to offer that are too valuable to restrict yourself to only one or two. But I'm talking from experience because some of this happened organically as hiring, you know, hiring in multiple countries. All of a sudden, you realize can't go back to one or two countries alone because you need access to those skills that are very diverse. I hope the this answers your question, Brandon. Yeah. It it it pretty it pretty much covers, that area. So it's really interesting to start thinking about what, the need is and how we are trying to achieve that. And that's really good advice on how to keep that, focused, Marina. And I there was I I wanna kind of focus a little bit on some smaller pet peeves that may sound like that, but could be a a a very troublesome thing for people that are operating across, different countries. Bianca mentioned, something that bank account setup take forever when establishing an entity. Right? So what's the typical timeline difference between, like, going the entity route versus using an EOR for a new market, entry? Bianca, if you can share some light around that. Yeah. Sure. I mean, within the EOR, of course, it does depend on the circumstances. But as long as everyone's got the information, shared, it can be very, very quick within a day or two. If you are setting up your own entity, it very much depends. Right? So it depends if you are in a market where you need certain licenses to operate, so that so if you're in finance, for example, that could have a big impact. I mean, in my experience, when we've set up entities, I think the shortest is probably three months, and that would be limited to only a few markets. I think you're more looking at six months, and at the more extreme end, nine months. So yeah. But the bank account thing can take it's usually three months. I'm gonna be there. But it just depends on also what advisers how much you're outsourcing, or how much you're doing in house to set up your own entity. So it it does also depend on how much you're willing to send to Fastrack and entity set up as well. And I think, I think there's also an interesting point of, if decide to open up an entity and that entity is ultimately unsuccessful, closing down the entity is probably a completely different beast, and and and a new package of, things that you have to navigate through to get that done. I have a question that arrived, via email or socials, and they said they're very nervous about employment termination laws in Europe since, they're used to at will employment. So how do EORs help navigate those differences? Would you like me to take this one? Yeah. Sure. Great. So I I think in most countries at the world, except for, you know, there's some bigger market like The US and and maybe Singapore, but most places are not at will employment. So it is a bit of a different concept if you're not used to it. But I think the main thing is just to be like, educate yourself and, again, a good EOR would educate you here about how it works and understand, you know, particularly things like probation periods, like the thing that you don't want to do is kind of work out that someone's not working out and then but, you know, decide you want to action that three days after the probation period's finished. So being really aware of your probation period dates and making sure you're really utilizing probation periods where they are applicable in the country to make sure you're really assessing if this person is fit. I think the other thing is being very clear about what you are seeking to, achieve with the person that you're hiring, because if people are not meeting expectations, there's usually ways to manage that, but you need to be clear yourself around that. So and the other thing is I would just say take advice. Do not try and navigate this by yourself because there is complexity in this area. So, you know, it depends on the circumstance, but while lawyers can be helpful for this, you actually want some pragmatic advice on this as well in terms of like, okay, with this scenario, how do I deal with it in this culture, in this circumstance? And usually, it's not black and white, and you need to work with someone maybe a little bit creative and pragmatic here to find solutions if things are not working so well. That's great. Marina, would you care to comment on this one as well? Yes. I think when it comes to termination in countries that are not at full employment and for people based in The US, that is very, frightening at the beginning, because then the perception is that if I hire this person, they might be doing great during probation. But then what happens afterwards? It becomes costly. How do I terminate employment? I think the very important thing that personally I have noticed hiring internationally is that when you actually employ people remotely, the rate of involuntary termination, so dismissal for performance problems, drops dramatically compared to when you hire in one or two locations. And why? Because, well, the talent pools have expanded, remember? You can actually hire from so many different locations. So the bar on talent, the bar that you can set for the quality of, of talents that you can actually hire into your company has gone way up. So if your your talent acquisition processes are strong, and that's where the key is really, and you identify very smart people, very motivated people who, by the way, value the the the role because it's remote and it's not always achievable to have opportunities in in certain locations. So people put high value on the role. They're very motivated. They're very skilled. The probability of having to dismiss them for performance issues all of a sudden is much lower than another context that we might be used to in a kind of single or dual hiring location. So that's one. Nevertheless, when it happens, it's still a problem. But the thing is, with an EOR, you get the the the the support. The EOR is used to managing it. They're having country knowledge. They know exactly how it can be done. And whilst there might be some level of complexity, there is a partner there on hand. The other thing to bear in mind is it often changes your company culture in a good way as well because it means that your managers, sometimes as people teams, we have a frustration that managers go from saying to someone, you're doing great, you're doing great, to one day telling us, I wanna let them go. And so we have a whole partnership to develop with managers to kind of help, like, have good discussions around performance and and and help people understand the expectations. That's muscle, so to speak. You have to to develop it even more in this environment because it isn't you can't just let people go that easily. And, arguably, that's not a bad thing in some ways because it builds managerial capability. And, ultimately, if you still need to, terminate, you will. And and the OR will help. So, hopefully, that brings a little bit of color to this because it is an important topic. And I think we're we're thinking about. And I'm not surprised that, some of our audience today, like, have actually mentioned it when they signed up, and they said it was an area of interest. Great. And, Marina, we had another question come in before the session. It's about how do you handle career progression, and internal mobility when employees are technically employed by an EOR? So can they still, I don't know, transfer between countries, get promoted normally? How does that work? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it it doesn't, it doesn't change. The principles are the same. It means that internally, this is one of the things though that, you can have your in house people team focus on a lot more because you've released that capacity away from operations. If you give operations to the EUR, you can have your people team focus a lot more on career development, and that's, I think a huge asset. Because the EUR, on the other hand, will not do that for you. So having the right framework, at least not at this point, but that's something that you also will probably, you know, probably expand in and give more advice. But in terms of the career framework that you have in house and moving people along that in terms of their levels and their compensation, that's something that can happen the same way. There are some operational aspects because in certain countries, you need to to actually define levels contractually. But, again, the EOR helps navigate through that. It doesn't dictate how you can move people along, and and that's the beauty of it. When it comes to international mobility, if we're talking about international mobility, I mean, there's internal mobility, but that's a career development topic. But when it comes to international mobility, so for example, if as a company, you have super talented people in, say, I don't know, eight countries, and you're open to them moving around as they need to because they're valuable and because you might want them to. You might want someone to move from Spain to The US, for example. Well, again, having a NEO helps because you can you know, Oyster is present in so many countries that you won't even have to leave the platform to be able to employ someone in another country if you need to move them. So that's another positive. Fantastic answer. Marina, thank you so much for, providing a little bit more clarity on that. I I would like to ask Tony the next question. And it's about Tony, this is about your vision, for the opportunities this all creates for talent globally. So can you speak a little bit on that? As you make the planet Earth to be one employment market accessible, then you actually start moving towards a world that is more equal. I mean, if you think about it, these country borders and barriers are man made. They they are they are unnecessary for the fluidity of labor. Actually, Brian Kaplan, the economist from George Mason University, argues in his book, Open Borders, that if you remove the concept of borders from talent mobility, you can triple the world economy. So, having having this opportunity to tap into the global talent pool as one market actually, create creates a more equal world. And I believe now more than ever with AI coming into our workplaces, we are going to see the unit of output output of workers to start to equalize no matter where people are. The the the work will become geographically agnostic, and I hope we are far from that today, and there's many steps that need to be taken. I hope that at some point in the future that the economical value of that output will also equalize. Thank you for that, Tony. And with those words, we are going to conclude the today's session. I'd like to thank everyone for our attending our event and our speakers for sharing their valuable insights. Of course, if you'd like to consult with an employment expert at Oyster about growing your team, you can, click click the link posted in the chat, or you can visit our website at OysterHR.com. So thank you everyone, and have a wonderful week ahead. Goodbye. Thank you, Aaron. Bye bye.