The Hidden Cost of Scaling My Agency Offshore

I made my first hire outside the US in 2018. I was living in Mexico at the time, so hiring there was the obvious move, not a strategy memo. It worked well enough that I kept doing it, first in Mexico, then across LatAm more broadly, for years.

It was the right way to start scaling an agency with no outside capital. It also had real costs that never show up on the invoice. Both of those things are true at once, and most posts about offshore hiring only tell you one of them.

Why offshore was the right call in 2018

I did not have investor money. I had a services business that needed to grow faster than its revenue could fund if every hire came at a US salary. Mexico solved that problem directly: strong, capable people, a cost structure that let the agency reinvest in growth instead of just payroll, and a time zone close enough to the US that a normal workday still overlapped.

That decision is a real part of why AMZ Advisers exists as a 500+ brand agency today instead of a lifestyle business that capped out around one founder's bandwidth. Cheap headcount is not a strategy on its own, but cheap access to genuinely good talent, at a stage when every dollar had to work twice, was. The full arc, hiring included, is on my about page.

What LatAm scaling actually bought us

Once the Mexico hires proved out, expanding hiring across LatAm more broadly was the natural next step. Results were good. The talent pool was deep, the cost efficiency held up as the team grew past the first handful of hires, and it let the agency take on more accounts than a US-only cost structure would have allowed at the same stage.

That is the part of the story that gets told at conferences and in the LinkedIn version of every offshore-scaling narrative. It is true. It is also incomplete.

What it actually cost

The part that does not get told as often: distributed, offshore-heavy teams carry a coordination tax that never shows up as a separate expense. It shows up as drag.

Time zone spread meant some decisions waited for the next overlap window instead of getting made in the moment. Communication friction meant instructions that were obvious to me took an extra round trip to land the way I meant them. None of that is dramatic. No single week of it looks like a problem. But stacked across years and a growing headcount, it is real overhead, and it is the kind of cost that is easy to justify away because the alternative, at the time, was not scaling at all.

I want to be direct about what this is not. It is not a story about a team that failed or a decision I regret. The agency grew the entire time this was happening. It is a story about a tradeoff that was correctly made at the time and that stopped being the only tradeoff worth making once the business changed shape.

Why I'm rebalancing now

New hires are increasingly going toward the US, Europe, UK, and Canada. This is not a verdict on the people already on the team, and it is not me walking back the decision that let the agency scale in the first place. It is a recognition that the org chart a founder needs at year one is not the org chart a business needs once it is a real, sellable asset.

That shift connects directly to something I wrote about after $150M+ in annual brand revenue: the businesses that scale are the ones that build systems instead of leaning on one person's effort, or one region's cost advantage, indefinitely. A team built entirely around cost efficiency is a system too. It just optimizes for the wrong variable once the goal shifts from surviving to being underwritten by someone else.

The diligence lens: a buyer needs to underwrite the team, not just the cost

Here is the part that actually changed my thinking. I have reviewed dozens of agencies as a buyer, and I wrote about the pattern in what's working across the agencies I review and where brand owners should spend. A cost-efficient team is not automatically a diligence-ready team. A buyer is not asking whether the work gets done cheaply. They are asking whether the team keeps producing the same output if the founder steps back, and whether the org structure is legible enough to model without three follow-up calls to explain it.

The IBBA and M&A Source track this every quarter in their Market Pulse Survey, which covers the small and lower middle market where most agency deals actually happen: key person and structural dependence shows up again and again as a reason deals stall or reprice. That is not a knock on offshore teams specifically. It is a reminder that whatever structure you build, a buyer eventually has to be able to underwrite it, not just admire the margin it produced. It is the same lens I apply on the other side of the table when I evaluate a business to acquire.

That is the actual lesson from eight years of building this team. Offshore hiring was the right way to start. Rebalancing toward a broader geographic mix is the right way to build something a buyer, or a partner, can look at and trust without having to take my word for how it holds together.

If you are thinking through your own team structure, whether that is hiring, restructuring, or getting a business ready to be evaluated by someone else, see how I work with operators directly. And if you want the version of these lessons that does not wait for a Thursday blog post, the newsletter is where I write about this stuff as it happens, not after I have had years to make it sound clean.

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