Distributed global teams have posed a number of new and unexpected challenges for PE and mid-markets going through the pandemic and a new way of hiring global talent.
We’ve seen this firsthand, operating in tandem with a handful of PE portfolio firms and several global market leaders with 500 – 1,000 team members, previously working in 1 to 5 international offices on-site, and expanding that horizon during the pandemic WFH period of 2020-2023.
In the last 2 years, we observed 20+ instances of governance risk or tax management challenges based on employee location status or remote working requirements, access to VPNs and internal systems, data protection and credentials management.
This wasn’t as apparent in 2020, but certain market data leaks in 2023 and later on the dark web also brought up questions on data access and ownership – specifically, large enterprises in finance or healthcare or social with intimate access to internal systems, data logs, healthcare records, and limited monitoring over time.
It’s multiple different risks that always remain true, but get significantly harder to manage effectively with hiring ad-hoc individual talent across the globe – or even in different states (and failing to comply with employment laws, tax requirements, syndicate needs, and many many more).
I’ve provided some DevriX examples of how we’ve been managing this in the past decade – moving in-house in Europe to strengthen both velocity times (delivery + iteration cycles) and data protection requirements (the good side of GDPR and PII needs) while acting as a standalone hub for our partners – with some PE firms or mid-market leaders with us for 6, 8, 10 years now.
Our “retainer-first” model also incentivizes long-term collaboration vs. project delivery. And the agency model also provides a variety net: it’s no longer “this 1 employer vs. the other offer”, but a very symbiotic way to maintain relationships for a decade or more.
Our talent also works on 2-4 projects simultaneously (which also provides variety plus backfills plus larger teams backing one another over time).
All legal, accounting, HR work happens in-house – it’s a closed unit operating independently within the contract. Pretty hands-off compared to building and assembling a team, looking for office space, dealing with plumbing, HR, recruitment, attending events for hiring, handling shifts and sick leaves, managing performance plans…
At the same time, it’s not a BPO and a “body shop” with assigning 3-5 random people full-time working remotely. It’s teams working and collaborating with the in-house demand gen and R&D machines working on AI integrations or integrating the latest GTM tracking tools, collaborating with partners from HubSpot or Amazon or Google on testing the latest features, and running them on 6 different production projects to gain insights at scale (not just an isolated case).
And we keep hiring in-house as it works so well.
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The True Cost of Distributed Global Teams is Becoming a PE Portfolio Challenge
Mario Peshev
