As our world becomes ever more interconnected, it’s easier than ever to serve customers wherever they are, unhindered by geography. But as your customer base becomes more international, understanding their needs can become increasingly difficult.
Without having an international perspective internally, tailoring your offering for international buyers feels like taking potshots in the dark. The obvious solution is to ensure your company’s demographics match your customers. There’s a problem, though.
Traditionally, selling to people in other countries has been far more straightforward than hiring them. The latter has been reserved for corporate giants with the muscle and financial resources necessary to set up contact centers or similar operations. However, thanks to the efforts of companies like Multiplier, the barrier to entry for global hiring has come crashing down.
Now, not only is a globally distributed team a possibility—it’s a necessity. Let’s find out why!
Demand goes global
A company with any amount of scale or ambition would be foolish to restrict its activity to just one territory. The topic arose during our recent Debrief with Multiplier’s co-founder and CEO Sagar Khatri, who offered his perspective.
“In today’s world, because demand has gone global, the customer base is global,” Sagar said in the interview. “From day one, it’s important to have talent from global countries to give you input on what people in Sweden use, what people in Australia use, what Indonesians use.”
Sagar credits the distributed nature of the Multiplier team for cultivating as diverse a customer base as the Singapore-founded company has achieved. “We have customers in 60 countries. Could we have developed a product that people in 60 countries can use by only hiring people in Singapore and operating with a purely Singaporean perspective? Absolutely not!”
Practice what you preach
The fact is that diverse companies lead to better business outcomes. And you don’t need to take our word for it. According to McKinsey, companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.
But even more impressively, companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians. Good, right?
Aside from statistics like these, the proof of global employment’s desirability to companies worldwide is in the success of companies who practice it—such as Multiplier. “We started the company in Singapore, and we’ve scaled a lot in three years,” said Sagar. “But if we only had a Singaporean office building and hired exclusively in Singapore, we would have never been as successful.”
A global model was the only choice for the company, as he explained. “A fully distributed setting is the only way I know how to build a business. If we didn’t have Janko from Serbia, Farhad from Mumbai, and Eyra from Singapore, we wouldn’t have been as successful.”
The future is mobile
Just as more and more companies realize the utility of an international team, workers are also waking up to the chance to work for a company based in a different country. Younger generations are leading the charge; according to a 2021 Deloitte study, 59% of Millennials are willing to work abroad—doubly important considering they will comprise 75% of the workforce by 2025.
Different aspects of global employment, including employee relocation, business travel, and hybrid/remote work, are often collected under the header of “global mobility”—and the term is experiencing something of a moment in the sun.
For instance, EY’s 2023 Mobility Reimagined Survey found that 88% of employers believe mobility can help address global talent shortages by evening out supply and demand across the globe.
Build a team as diverse as your customers with Multiplier
It’s simple, really. A global team is the only way to serve a global customer base authentically. And that’s without mentioning the other numerous benefits, from lowered costs to 24-hour operation!
If you’d like to learn more about Multiplier’s mission to bring the benefits of global employment to all, check out our full conversation with Sagar in our latest edition of the Debrief.
Ready to get ahead of the curve and take advantage of the exceptional global talent waiting? With Multiplier, you focus on finding the right person, and we take care of the rest. Stay competitive and onboard new hires wherever they are, pay your global workforce, and manage your international team’s taxes, benefits, insurance, and time off in over 160 countries. So, if you want to hire easily and with total compliance, talk to us today!
