Scaling internationally isn’t just about landing customers, it’s about trusting someone else to represent your culture, standards and ambition far from your HQ.
When you’re staring down the barrel of global expansion, a common question often emerges: do you send your own people or hire locally? And if you hire locally, do you go senior or junior?
Last week, in partnership with Humankind, we gathered founders and operators from high-growth New Zealand companies to share their lessons from expanding into the US, Australia and beyond.
The event – Leading Through International Growth – was a workshop-style session designed to surface honest, practical insights from people who have been through it.
What emerged wasn't a playbook with neat answers, but something more valuable: candid accounts of what actually works, what fails spectacularly, and why the safe-looking option often costs you more in the long run.
Many of the conversations came back to the same theme: international growth introduces a new level of leadership complexity, and the people decisions that once felt small quickly become high-stakes.
Split into two parts, we are sharing key takeaways from the sessions. Part 1 focuses on lessons learned from making the first international hires. Part 2 covers operating rhythms across global teams.
The temptation with global expansion can be either to move too fast or wait too long. Go too early, and you can burn cash in a market that isn’t ready for you. Wait too long, and competitors establish relationships and brand recognition that you might struggle to catch up with.
Many operators described finding a middle ground: testing markets before fully committing – whether relocating an existing team member or hiring the first full-time employee in-market.
In practice, this looked like structured sales sprints. Teams would send existing members into a new market for a couple of weeks, then build to six weeks or more, gathering real-time insights from potential customers while collecting softer data on what it would actually take to succeed.
One founder described their team as “quite risk-averse” in this respect – making controlled, deliberate decisions rather than big bets.
This approach also means operational expansion steps can be set up in parallel. By the time the team felt confident in early results, they could move quickly on permanent relocation or a first full-time employee.
Once the decision to hire locally has been made, the next question is how senior to go.
The case for hiring a junior is intuitive: lower cost, high energy, and can evolve with your culture. But several operators found this logic broken in practice. The issue isn't the people – it's the support structure. A junior hire in a new market needs guidance, context, and coaching that a leadership team stretched across time zones often can't provide.
One operator put it plainly: "These people had amazing attitudes, but they needed so much support that we just could not give. It actually really hampered growth because we couldn't drive outbound — we were too busy trying to build their skill set.”
The hidden cost compounds quickly. Delay hiring by three months because you're too busy to do it properly, bring in a revenue person who can't yet deliver independently, and at enterprise valuations, the opportunity cost runs to millions.
Senior hires carry their own risks – recruiter fees sting, and the bar for finding the right person is higher. But for companies at an inflection point that need velocity, the calculation shifts.
A senior hire with market credibility and an existing network can open doors you didn't know existed, and build a team beneath them rather than drawing on yours. There's also a flywheel effect: the right first hire signals to other strong candidates that the company is worth joining.
As one operator summarised: "We're paying more, getting more, and letting them build underneath them.”
Miss that mark, and the opposite can be true – making the calibre of that first hire one of the highest-leverage decisions in your expansion.
Culture doesn’t travel automatically. It travels through people and through the systems leaders put in place.
The lesson that emerged across multiple operators: cultural alignment doesn't transfer automatically. It requires intentional systems. Bringing international hires to New Zealand for onboarding, hosting annual gatherings where everyone comes together, and establishing regular leadership touch points all came up as practices that work.
One company introduced a structured forum where the CEO hears directly from international offices and cascades strategy back out.
The balance between local knowledge and cultural cohesion is genuinely hard to get right. But the companies that got it right had one thing in common: they were deliberate about it from the start, rather than hoping culture would travel on its own. They treated people decisions as part of the growth strategy, not something to solve later.
Companies expanding into the United States face an additional layer of operational complexity that catches many off guard. You can't easily hire on your own at a small scale — you'll need a PEO (Professional Employer Organisation) or EOR (Employer of Record) to manage employment obligations. Benefits expectations are different, too: covering the full healthcare plan and offering a retirement plan are table stakes for attracting strong candidates.
City choice matters as well. New York and Austin emerged as the most common hubs, depending on customer base and industry. And for many operators, navigating US role descriptions and hiring norms was unfamiliar enough that bringing in a local recruiter paid for itself quickly – both in time saved and in the quality of candidates reached.
For founders making their first international hires, the lesson was simple: preparation matters. The companies that invested early in the right people and the right structures found expansion far easier to sustain.
Read Part 2: Operating Rhythms Across Global Teams for lessons on maintaining alignment and performance as your team spans time zones.
Leading Through International Growth was hosted in partnership with Humankind. Together, we've also launched Foundations for Going Global: A Talent Playbook – a practical resource giving exceptional Kiwi founders and teams the tools and frameworks to scale internationally with confidence. Download it here.
Connect with Steph here.