Why do we have people in different locations around the world?

We could simply answer: “Because we can.”

But there’s a wider point that’s worth making.

When I recently mentioned to someone that our latest hire is in Toronto, I was asked whether Toronto/Ontario/Canada is an important market for us. We have a handful of clients there but that’s not the reason for that new hire.

We are global in the search for talent, not markets.
There’s something to be said about the precise difference between being global and being international – or multinational, even.
Most of our clients sell anywhere and sometimes everywhere around the world. Their people are also spread all over, with only sales and on-site personnel needing to be physically close to clients on a regular basis.
They rarely require us to meet face-to-face or even be in the same town or city.

It helps that we specialise in clients within the B2B technology sector. Their products and services have enabled all organisations around the world to work in distributed ways. And of course they practice what they preach – they can’t enable and advocate such a way of working without doing so themselves, and being OK with suppliers like us who also see the benefits.
So being able to be global is on the one hand about working for anyone, anywhere. But arguably the greater benefit is about being to hire anyone, anywhere. This has been the true revolution that makes a business like ours possible.

This has been about the why of a distributed working set-up. Next time I’ll tell you more about how we do it – and the big difference between remote working and distributed working.
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