SMBs Go Global: Exploring International Talent

Lisa Reeves: Welcome. I'm very pleased to be here today in introducing Vernon Irvin, the Chief Revenue Officer of Globalization Partners, where he's responsible for the customer centric, go to market strategy for GP, or Globalization Partners. Prior to GP, Vernon held the role of a CRO, chief revenue officer, and the co-president position at Everbridge, a $2 billion publicly traded global enterprise software company.

Prior to that, he also held leadership roles at Fortune 500 companies like Verisign, SiriusXM and AT&T. Vernon has a proven track record of leading customer facing relationships and overseeing global teams across multiple domains. With that, I would like to introduce Vernon to the stage.

Great. Thank you.

So, today marks a big day for our two companies together as we really announced the latest evolution of our partnership. You've been a wonderful partner for years to TriNet, and today we're announcing a deep integration, a seamless integration between Globalization Partners, an employer of record, and the TriNet platform.

What this will enable us to do for our TriNet customers is to have a single pane of glass and the ability to see track and visualize the mixed set of employees, both international as well via Globalization Partners, as well as the TriNet employees that are domestic based. So, we're very excited to announce this and I think that one thing that's interesting for us is that when we think about a geographically distributed workforce, that's usually a handful of employees that have been working from home. We saw that with COVID and a number of remote employees.

But now we're really thinking about a different sort of mindset with really the diverse teams that we have that are both international and domestic.

Vernon Irvin: Yeah.

Lisa: So, I'm just wondering maybe—let's do a little poll right now. Does your company have workers outside of the United States? Would love to get some feedback on that. And then, maybe Vernon, when we think about trends that we're seeing in the market right now, certainly employers embraced the remote working during the pandemic out of a necessity. While we're seeing some rules transitioning back into the office, I think we're also comfortable working in this remote distributed environment.

So, there's a number of advantages that we see with that: lower cost, larger talent pool, so I'm just wondering, and also talent shortages. So, when we think about that with what's happening in the market right now, what trends are you seeing in the market as it relates to global?

Vernon: Well, clearly there's been a significant massive shift in the global workplace. You know, some people call it the future of work. And the largest and most impactful one, of course, was COVID. It turned out to be a tailwind for our company. That sounds awful, cause it is, but it produced a pretty growth opportunity.

Globalization Partners is about a $300 million AR company. We've been around since 2012, specially focused on the EOR market, employer of record marketplace. And we operate a global growth tech platform that's SaaS based. And the idea is—how do you unlock growth globally for small, medium businesses around the world?

Some of the trends that we're seeing there is—we have private equity and VCs who are parent companies, but also have small startups that are part of their portfolio. And because of the economic conditions, some of them have decided to retreat out of markets in terms of their dedicated staffs, but they like the EOR model because we actually take the employees over and manage the benefits and manage their payroll and manage a lot of the issues.

A lot of our small and medium business customers here in the United States are looking to move faster and what's neat about our platform is we afford small and medium businesses the opportunity to operate like a large enterprise. You can leverage the SaaS based platform in a way that I call it the easy button, I think that's trademark, so don't get me in trouble, but it is an easy button. I literally need to hire new staffs and people because I'm going to embrace AI. Digital transformation is real. How do I hire faster? And they're not in my backyard. So can you hire some software techs in Romania? Can you get me some folks in Asia Pac? Absolutely. And you can do it compliantly and easily.

Lisa: Great. And how many countries are you in right now?

Vernon: Today, since 2012, we're now compliant—that's an important word—in 180 countries. That's an excellent question. A dot on the I and cross the T there. The requirement to be compliant in 180 client countries is amazing. I was listening to that small business conversation and I was listening to Burton earlier, and he was talking about some of the state regulatory issues and taxes that you have to catch up with just here in the United States. Imagine being compliant in 180 countries. That's what the GP platform brings.

Lisa: That's interesting. So, if we think about certain geographies. I know that I have experience actually establishing a relationship with a talent hub that's in South America. And that's very appealing to a lot of our folks that are based here and previous companies I've worked out as well because of the time zone. And I'm just wondering, what are you seeing in terms of talent hubs in any developing areas?

Vernon: Splendid question. We see the talent hubs operate uniquely by continents. So, in the United States, a lot of the North American companies are looking for adjacencies in Canada, in Mexico and then outside the United States, so obviously you're looking for English speaking places.

So the UK is pretty big, Spain's also one of our large ones—India, pretty big, Canada, Philippines and Spain. So, the folks in Europe tend to focus on adjacencies in Europe. So Germany and Spain are two of the biggest locations that are there, but we see quite a bit of activities. I mentioned the Philippines and China and other locations. So again, usually about four or five key geographies.

Lisa: Interesting. And so if we go back to the poll, does your company have employees outside of the United States? Keep me honest, because I don't know if I can read that far. I guess it's 52%. And yeah, so a little bit more than half of the poll participants. Is that surprising or is that what you would expect?

Vernon: It's surprising because there's a Gartner study out that talks about the fact that three out of four employees wanna work at a global company. Well, it looks like they're doing it. And about 30% of companies are also thinking about how to actually start to employ folks globally. The use cases I run into—I just saluted a young lady who's going off to the UK, which is in the marketing team, her husband is getting transferred. And she said, "Hey, I want to move to the UK and it's not going to cost you anything." But now we're saying, "Okay, great. Let's put our stuff into action." Off they go.

Lisa: That's great. And then I think a second poll just came through. Are you looking for employees outside of the U. S.? So this one's very interesting. 70% said, "Yes, they are looking for employees outside of the United States."

Vernon: Well, I believe it. And in fact, one of the largest cohorts of customers that are in our platform got over 10,000 or close to 10,000 professionals on our platform. Those folks today are all over the world. And, today when you look at sort of the mandate for what we're looking for, I'd say technology is the top cohort. This whole idea of AI and data and transformation of digital is really happening.

You all know that as part of small business, how do you digitize your business? You're looking for that talent and not necessarily, the other magnet study said that in 2024, they expect the competition for talent to be even more aggressive than in 2024. So again, how do you leverage an EOR kind of platform with our partnership around global growth technology and be able to press that easy button and say, "Look, I found developers in India or in Romania or other locations. And you can help me find the talent. You can help me hire the talent. You can help me onboard the talent and then manage them on a high-tech platform," and effectively do that without having to go deploy your own infrastructure.

Lisa: And in a compliant way.

Vernon: In a compliant way. That's really important because you can get in trouble quick if you're not complying in those countries.

Lisa: Right. I think this is such a fascinating topic because I feel like COVID did accelerate this. With COVID, people found out that you can work just as productive, if not more. If you build the right culture, you can do it remotely on a small scale. You've always seen international workforces and larger companies, but I feel like COVID kind of accelerated that and really allowed it to expand to a much broader set of companies, and especially SMBs where there's just huge value.

Vernon: Well, yeah, the horse is out of the barn. You're absolutely right. Now you read a lot of different hybrid models that are out there today, but I think it'll remain hybrid for quite some time. The other thing besides COVID—which reminds me to get my shot—one of the other things that we saw was the emphasis on diverse workforce. So, adding DEI and diversity in the workforce also drove this idea of—how do we expand our remit so that we can actually bring people from all over the world? And there are lots of studies that show that organizations that have embraced diversity from that perspective are far more productive, growing faster and I'm glad to see it. So, I'd say there's probably a couple of big forces there: COVID plus the focus on global growth.

Lisa: Right, right. What about any trends around industries or size? For people who are thinking about this, what does it usually look like? What is the pattern? Are there any things that you can connect there?

Vernon: Yeah, I think at least from a GP perspective, we are most certainly seeing global growth and employment happen with small businesses. It's happening very quickly and because we created sort of this global growth technology in the SaaS space—one of the things that Lisa talked about in our announcement—is we're building technology between our companies, APIs and connectors, so that when our mutual customers come for global growth, they can basically press the global growth button and get access across 180 different platforms.

The technology is improving. Imagine the complexity of 180 countries. The real secret sauce for GP, they say, is really the fact that we have a human infrastructure that's powered by technology. So, what's really unique about our business is—you can't just have technology in this business; you have to have people who speak the language, know the culture, know the tax laws, are compliant, understand tax and billing and payroll and all the sort of things you do here in the United States, which is why I think this makes a really good partnership because customers that are your PEO customers but want to get global growth can now come to TriNet and get that expansive growth that's happening around the world.

Lisa: Yeah, that's great. We'll talk about culture in just a minute and engagement and how important that is to a productive workforce and so we'll circle back on that. I think I love the push the button.

Vernon: Yeah, that's what we want, right?

Lisa: So for those who might be thinking about expanding internationally, do you have any advice, things to consider in terms of distributed workforce and when the timing is right or other considerations?

Vernon: Excellent question. Look, for this audience and for most SMBs, I would say you could certainly go down the path of exploring it yourself—spend money with a consultant or most of your organizations probably don't have expansive knowledge as it relates to 180 countries and all the compliance and that sort of thing.

So, it's expensive to set up your own entities in countries. In fact, what we see is a lot of our customers actually come to us to set up the entity for them because we're compliant. And then what happens is they gain sort of traction in a particular market and say, "Hey, you know what? I think it might be time to spend the money to get it set up." So, I will say that for folks that are looking at global growth, this EOR model and our global growth technology platform really enables, for the first time, for small businesses to embrace sort of this hyper growth outside the United States. One of the biggest trends I am seeing though now, are now large companies are starting to embrace this model too.

And it's not for what you think. Interesting, small businesses using it to grow. Large corporations are using it, actually, to contract, given the global headwinds in the economy. And so they're receding out of like Italy and saying, "Hey, look, I've got 300 people here, we want the revenue, we want the customers and the growth, but not necessarily the burden of also having the infrastructure in place to support the people, so GP, EOR, TriNet, can you guys manage those folks for us and put them on your EOR platform?" And we're seeing some successful large customers in that model.

Lisa: Yeah, I guess the beauty of it is it allows you to flex up or flex down, and that level of flexibility and agility, that's pretty powerful.

Vernon: It is, right? I mean, I think companies that put velocity as something that's core to their values in this marketplace. Most of you all notice, I say it all the time, though, the consumerization of business has happened, right? So none of us now will go to a business and wait online or wait for a chatbox to get back to me. It's like, I need what I need. So, I think these kinds of models like EOR and things that we're working on together provides a whole level of velocity and transparency and trust that I think small businesses need.

Lisa: Right. So, I see that we have another poll.

Vernon: Oh, excellent.

Lisa: Let's see. What are the top challenges associated with an international workforce? So multi select. And while we're on that, maybe we could just touch on compliance.

Vernon: Okay.

Lisa: So, that's really a huge part of the value proposition that kind of at the heart and soul, that you provide that level of compliance that's necessary to operate in all of these countries. So, payroll benefits in particular. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about compliance and the value that you bring.

Vernon: That's an excellent question and not one to fool with, I'll tell you that. So one of the reasons why we have a human platform powered by technology is for this very reason of compliance. So in each of our core markets that we support for the 180 countries, we have local service providers, LSPs. And those LSPs are expert in tax and payroll and language. And they're able to provide sort of our ability to be able to remain compliant. So the thing about 180 countries is it's a moving target.

At any given time, 10 or 15 of those countries have decided to change the laws. And so how do you, as a small business, maintain the ability to keep up with the ever-changing landscape? So we leverage our human infrastructure on the technology, but it really is those tax experts, those payroll experts, legal experts in Germany, in France, and in different countries and different currencies, that really understand the nuances of how to remain compliant.

Lisa: Got it. Interesting. And what about hiring? When I think about bringing a new employee on, the first thing I'm thinking about is—how do I source the individual? How do I hire? Sure, there's all the—once you get them on and then onboarding and the complexities that we just talked about. How do you handle hiring? How hard is that? I know it's a challenge in the United States, so I can only imagine what a challenge it is outside.

Vernon: No doubt. I just got a headache just listening to you describe it. So, I think the thing that's really neat about our platform is, and I talk to customers all the time, when a customer or prospect comes or knocks on the door and says, "Look, I need in Romania" and we said, "Okay, do you have employees you want us to take over?" "Oh, no, I need 20 to 50 engineers," and we go, "Okay."

So, we actually, with our platform, have a recruiting infrastructure that's part of that LSP infrastructure in those 180 countries. And so we can help you find, recruit, hire and onboard in all those countries. So again, I keep using easy button.

I don't have to pay somebody for keep saying that, I'm sure. But that's the sort of thing that we've sort of put in place is the ability to have small, medium businesses to do it reliably, compliantly and quickly. We can find, recruit, hire and onboard employees as fast as 30 days.

Lisa: Great.

Vernon: In some cases, yeah.

Lisa: So I'm just stuck on the 180. Are you going to add more countries or have you been at 180 for a while?

Vernon: We have been at 180 for a while. If we're going to expand more than 180, I don't know about it. They haven't told me. 180 is plenty and I think we're very unique in that the platform is interconnected in all those countries, plus the fact that we've deployed the largest human group that powers all those capabilities worldwide. But I don't think we have any plans to expand it. But I will tell you, every once in a while, we do get a call. In fact, I got one last week for 181. And the discipline is—wait, what's the opportunity? How big is it? Does it ever return? Is it strategic force, et cetera? But I think we'll probably hold at 180 for a while.

Lisa: That's like me in product, when everyone comes with a new idea. And I'm like—how big is the market? How much can we sell? How will we excite the customer?

Vernon: Absolutely. I heard another person speak. By the way, the entertainment this morning was amazing. I happened to be in South Africa when they were performing there, so that was pretty awesome. But I heard somebody say, "Capital is king." It still is, right? I mean, to your point, somebody comes in and says, "Look, can you build two antennas and a new handle on my car," and it's like, "Oh, wait a minute, how much is that going to cost? And why would I do that?" So, we certainly have to continue to be disciplined.

Lisa: That's great. Let's see, didn't we just have a poll up? I'm not sure if the results, maybe they're not in yet. We can come back. Okay, well, as a product person, I have to ask you—are there any features, products, solutions, anything that really resonates with your customer base? I know it's service and it's technology, very similar to our offering as well, but I'm curious on the actual tech platform itself—are there any capabilities that are highly valued by the customers or areas of opportunity?

Vernon: Yeah, it's a really good question. In the EOR model where we're actually the employer for lots of our customers, sort of the details below that description means—how do I administer benefits for an employee? I want to go on vacation, extended leave. I need to do management performance. I need to manage people up or manage them out.

So, the whole idea of benefit management for employees is a really big one for our platform, getting the tax nuances right too. I'm not a tax accountant, but getting that right in 180 countries and a use case is required, you've got certain income brackets, you've got people who are in two different countries, it gets pretty complicated quick.

So taxes—something we get right, benefits is a pretty big part of it. Another one which is very interesting is expense management. We actually do expense management for companies as well. Now you can imagine how interesting that gets in 180 countries. "Wait, you mean I can't expense my new shoes?" "No, you can't expense those." And then of course the whole idea of legal in those markets is the four biggies, if you will, for what we deploy on our platform.

Lisa: Interesting. I'm curious. What about in the area of talent, culture, engagement, capabilities there? Is that something that when I just think about as a remote employee being able to kind of pull them into your culture, that you've established in the United States, I was curious what kind of feedback or what kind of requests you get in that area.

Vernon: Oh, that's awesome because I was in the UK three months ago with the team visiting customers and one of the things that came up around culture was—employees want close association with the company that actually, they work for. So, if you work for Company ABC, in fact, per our contractual platform, you're an employee of GP. But employees want to know they're connected to Company ABC.

So there's a real fine line we walk there. Now, the way the platform works is—the customer that buys the EOR platform has full, complete control of the platform and those employees. We just sort of operate it for them, so the culture is extended from the company that they're employed. We don't try to impose a GP culture on those professionals.

It is completely on the customers. If you think about two buckets, there's a professional and there's a customer that signed a contract with us. So the culture that is from the customer actually manages the sort of culture part of that. But they leverage our platform to communicate in it, brand it that way, etc. So it feels natural that it's employee of GP, but culturally managed by the customer.

Lisa: And so I think that's the key. And when we talk about our partnership, now the ability to pull the GP information seamlessly, friction free, right into the TriNet platform, then the administrator and the management team who's in the TriNet platform now has a full view of their employee population, and that's really the power, you can see it in an org chart, you can see it in tracking and various reports and other areas. And I know for many of our customers, this was definitely of interest to have that total single pane of glass, single experience and being able to view the employees.

Vernon: Yeah. You know, since you asked me the trends, probably the biggest use of the platform is data and dashboards. Right? So the customers want that information. They want to know—did they clock in and check in and it's sick time and they're being managed and are they productive? So our dashboard provide that information on our platform and now extend it over to our TriNet partnership. So the importance of building that APIs and connectors into your platform, giving visibility and transparency of those employees for your customers and our customers is really worth a great deal. I think that's what customers want. They want, like you said, single pane of glass access.

Lisa: Right. I was just reading an article actually this morning in Forbes. They did a research project on first year employees, so generally young employees, and why they end up leaving, and the percentage is actually quite high, and they tracked it back, and the number one driver is lack of engagement, lack of culture, not understanding what the parent was doing, and there was a section on it as well about company or employees that were outside of the United States. So it's an issue whether you're in country or out of country.

Vernon: It's certainly an issue and it varies by country. I heard earlier today also about the fact that the pool of people available in Japan are shrinking, but still growing. And so when you think about the opportunity to keep up with that growth, but not necessarily with the folks that are resident in that country is a challenge, but we see opportunities come and go, meaning, some countries see sort of headwinds when it comes to GDP growth, or shrinkage, or layoff, and that has an exacerbating effect on morale and people.

And it often can be a very difficult situation. And we have to manage the attrition on our platform as well. And then you have other countries that are just going gangbusters. Right now, as you can imagine, India and tech is just over the top. In fact, on our platform, small, medium business customers not only want the employees, they're asking us to buy the equipment for computers. They're asking us to lease the office space for them. They want a complete turnkey capability because they've got just tremendous exponential growth. Because of those resources we have on the ground, we do know the real estate companies and the IT companies that can move pretty quickly in countries that are growing pretty quickly.

Lisa: It's interesting—just the .speed and agility. We've talked on that a couple of times. Can you provide just a little bit more detail? When we say speed, are we talking about two weeks? Are we talking about two months? How should we think about how quickly you could spin up or down?

Vernon: Well, I'll give you an example without naming the company. In fact, I got the email today. There's a Vista equity company backed in the UK. They're going through some PE investment, divestment, that kind of thing. And they announced that they want us to take over 70, a hundred people, so we're gonna do that, but they'd like for that to happen in the fourth quarter. So that's pretty quick, right? So that means the way it works at GP, I have to immediately contact my back office and say, "Hey, look, we got potentially 70 people that we gotta onboard. And in this case, I think it's 40 countries and you're going to have to do it pretty quickly."

So we could move as quick as 30 days. I don't know if we're doing it faster than that. Some companies actually choose to take over a year to say, "Hey, look, I'm going to do it. I'm going to give you 300 employees, and I need to do that over a 12-month period." And we'll work with them from that perspective too. Now, the way it works in our business model, it's better that we put people on the platform faster, because that's when we get paid. So we prefer to move fast just from an economic perspective.

Lisa: Makes sense. Great. Okay, so, I think the poll question, honestly I can't read it. Can you read it?

Vernon: No, I cannot, sorry. Oh, that's terrible. Sorry. Here we go. Close your right eye here and just, A. No, that's the wrong letter. I'm sorry, I can't.

Lisa: What are the top challenges associated with international workforce? What's that red bar? 56%... what? Oh, compliance. Okay.

Vernon: Yeah. That's consistent with our conversation.

Lisa:
Yeah. Compliance.

Vernon: Compliance. Exactly right. Probably once a week I get some kind of movement, a note saying, "Italy changed the law." Everybody jump in. We got to get back to making sure we're compliant. So it happens. And that's why this is, we try to make global growth, simple and easy for small, medium businesses and that's our problem.

And now our combined opportunity is to be able to give you all the opportunity to grow your companies, do it affordably, cause the other part of this model is—this is not, "I have to set up my own entity, get my own legal force, put my own compliance group in place, build my own legal entity and capability, build a SaaS platform to support it." It's now turnkey through this partnership to deliver that global growth for small and medium businesses.

Lisa: Great. So we've mainly been talking about SMBs that are based in the United States and thinking about going international. But when we kind of flip it the other way and we're thinking about non-U.S. based employers that want to leverage U.S. workforces, do you have a place to play in that model as well?

Vernon:
We do. And because we started the EO market here in the United States, but focus on global, we've got the inverse model here. So, 80% of what we do is the other way around, which is helping U.S. companies employ worldwide. That's where most of our growth is coming from. We are now starting to turn attention to larger companies and small business customers who are looking for that opportunity for an EOR model.

Now if they're not, great partnership for PEO, right? PEO is the parent model and the EOR model. But in some cases, we are finding that the U. S. companies are looking for an EOR model in the United States. And it's something that we're going to focus on. But for now, a good part of our business attractions happen on global growth. This partnership, though, will afford us the opportunity, I think, to be a better partner for TriNet from the perspective of U. S.-based companies.

Lisa: Great. Wonderful. Maybe you could just give us a little bit of a snapshot on Globalization Partners. I know you're based in Boston and maybe just a little company backgrounder would be of interest.

Vernon: Yeah, the company's grown significantly. We've got close to 1,300 people worldwide. And we have those employment centers that are deployed in 180 countries. Like I mentioned earlier, about $300 million in ARR—that was all done organically. It was no acquisitions whatsoever. So just goes to show you that this thing is growing pretty quickly. We operate a Saas based platform and our chief product officer is based in Silicon Valley and doing a great job for us. We operate our legal and compliance group, is really the group that goes on the beach head to open up a new country and kind of get that right.

Our technology is evolving. We just rolled out a new platform called Meridian. And Meridian has a suite of products that now, SaaS based, so a small, medium company can pick from a menu of services and a bundle of services that we have put in place to make it simple to buy from. What I like about the platform is—we're also now thinking about what other things can we start to deliver for that.

For instance, we have built a marketplace. And so when a small medium business customer—we're building a marketplace—who wants things like equipment and software and things that are ancillary to being set up, they're going to be able to go into the marketplace and deliver solutions. We expect to continue to grow significantly, well above 20% this year, so it's a fast-growing marketplace.

I talked about some of the more exciting countries like Canada and India and the Philippines and the UK—they have grown very quickly for us, and the partnership with TriNet, we're really excited about primarily because you all are the leading provider, PE provider here in the United States.

And I heard Burton talked about, and Michael, about global growth potential. Well, one and one here is three. Our ability to be able to take the 1,200 men and women, plus the infrastructure and capability and SaaS capabilities that we have, and connect it with the TriNet PEO capability is really, really exciting.

Lisa: Yeah, it's just a different workforce now. It's a diverse global workforce and maybe some things that were hard to access before for small, medium business is becoming much more mainstream and easier to actually access and think more broadly and more globally.

Vernon: Yeah, hopefully, if nothing else, I hope we depart information to the small business owners that global growth is real and it's got great potential. And because of technology and companies like GP and TriNet, you can now afford to take full advantage of that growth and use it so that it's transparent and a lot of velocity and simple for you to do and utilize.

Lisa: Great. Well, we're super excited about the partnership. I don't know if we have time for a few questions from the audience. If there are any, I'll just ask. I think you would put them in on the app. No? Okay. All right.

Vernon: Awesome.

Lisa: Well, with that, thank you so much, Vernon.

Vernon: Thank you so much.

Lisa: It was great.

Vernon: Really appreciate it.