What I Would Do Differently If I Ever Build an Offshore Team Again

I already wrote the happier version of this story — the one where I went to Vietnam, saw the team working hard, ate a dangerous amount of food, and felt proud that the office was real.

This is the less cute version. The version I would put in a postmortem, not a travel recap. Because two years ago, I helped build a small outsourced team in Vietnam for my company. If you know me or my LinkedIn, you know what business this is. I won't go into the details of what we did, but the short version: after roughly 1.5 years, we closed down. Physically, our office actually got into a fire. Yes, literally. The universe has a sense of humor.

But the fire isn't what killed the business. The business was already dying. And as a high-agency person, I'd say it's mostly on me. Bad financial planning, bad execution, and a whole lot of pride getting in the way of clear thinking.

So this blog is about what I would do differently if I ever have a chance to open a BPO again — which, let's be honest, is not exactly trendy in 2025-2026.

1. I Didn't Hire Talents — I Hired Bodies

I keep forgetting the most basic truth in business: the company you build is the people you have at the company. I hired to fill seats, not to find people who would raise the bar.

Two of the employees took advantage and dragged the overall output of the team. I was playing too much of a nice guy rather than confronting it head-on. And when things finally burst — when I finally said something — it was too late to gain the trust back. The damage was already structural.

Lesson: Hire slow, fire fast is a cliche because it's painfully true. Being "nice" isn't kindness when it lets two people drag down eight others.

2. My Financial Planning Was a Joke

I need to be honest: I was too clouded by the excitement of going to Vietnam — my home country — rather than thinking about the actual financial viability from the perspective of the company I work for.

I didn't do thorough financial planning on how much it would actually cost to recoup the investment, what the realistic output would be, or what the timeline to breakeven looked like. I was running on vibes.

Example of bad planning: we were paying extra VAT on everything — payroll, equipment, services — with no way to get it back. That's money bleeding out every single month that I should have caught before we signed a lease. I didn't.

Lesson: Excitement is not a financial model. If you can't write down the breakeven math on a napkin, you're not ready to write a check.

3. Sunk Cost Fallacy Ate Me Alive

After 6 months, I had a hunch — call it intuition — that this was more likely to not work out than to work out. The signs were there. The numbers were there. My gut was screaming.

But my pride swallowed my logical thinking. I had told everyone about this. I had put my name on it. I had moved mountains to make it happen. Walking away felt like admitting I was wrong. So I kept going. And the hole got deeper.

The one thing I'm actually happy about? We finally pulled the plug rather than waiting to waste more. That decision took more heart and courage than any of the decisions that came before it. Shutting something down is harder than starting it.

Lesson: The courage to quit is the most underrated skill in business. Your past investment is already gone. The only question is whether the next dollar is worth spending.

So Why Write This?

Because failure is only wasted if you don't extract the lessons. And because putting it in writing forces you to be honest about what actually happened, not the narrative you've been telling yourself.

This took more hearts and courage to write than any technical blog post I've ever published. But here it is.

Appendix: The Math I Wish I Had Done

I've been studying optimal stopping theory recently — the math behind knowing when to quit. Turns out there's a formal framework for exactly the decision I fumbled. It's called the optimal stopping problem, and it would have saved me about 9 months of denial.

Model the BPO as a venture with monthly operating cost and a stochastic revenue process . At any month , you observe cumulative profit:

where is the initial investment (lease, equipment, hiring, flights). The sunk cost fallacy says you factor into your continue/quit decision. Rational decision theory says you don't. The optimal stopping rule is:

In English: quit the moment the expected future profit — conditioned on everything you know right now — goes negative. The past is irrelevant. is gone. The only question is whether the next dollar is worth spending.

If revenue follows a geometric Brownian motion (generous assumption for a BPO, but bear with me):

then the expected future value of continuing from month to horizon is:

The quit boundary is where , which gives a critical revenue threshold:

If your current monthly revenue drops below , you stop. No emotion, no pride, no "but we already spent so much." Just math.

One caveat: the model only kicks in after a ramp-up period. You can't judge a new team at month 3 — they're still onboarding, still learning the workflows, still figuring out the coffee machine. So I'd add a grace period (say, 6 months) where you're investing in capacity, not expecting returns. The stopping rule becomes:

Before , you're building. After , you're evaluating. The mistake isn't starting — it's continuing past the evaluation window when the numbers are screaming at you.

For my BPO, plugging in rough numbers — $8K/month operating cost, monthly growth (optimistic), month horizon, month ramp-up — the quit threshold at month 7 (first evaluation point) was approximately $6,800/month in revenue. We were doing about $4,200. The math said quit. I said "but we already spent $60K." The math was right.

The model said quit at month 7 — the first evaluation point after ramp-up. I quit at month 18. That's 11 months of /month I burned because I couldn't do basic expected value arithmetic through my own ego.

Total cost of ignoring the math:

Fifty-six thousand dollars. That's what pride costs when you can't do a stopping rule on a napkin.

I learned optimal stopping theory about a year too late. But at least now I know: the next time my gut says quit, I'll run the math first — and if the math agrees, I'll listen to both.