Hi everyone, Johan here.
I just got back from Vietnam and you are not going to believe this, but over the past year I helped my company open a physical office there :D
Like, an actual office. Real people. Real desks. Real payroll. Real meetings where I am sitting there trying to understand Vietnamese business words and pretending my brain is not buffering.
How This Even Started
Everything started in mid 2024. At the time, we were using a third party team and, to be honest, we were not super happy with how things were going. The quality was inconsistent, communication was painful, and every fix felt like it needed three more fixes.
So eventually we said the very dangerous sentence:
F*ck it. Let's do it ourselves.
Which is how many great business ideas start. Also how many financial mistakes start. Sometimes both at the same time, just to keep life spicy.
The Smooth Beginning
The beginning was actually pretty smooth. Suspiciously smooth. Like when a horror movie starts with birds chirping.
We hired a headhunter company to help us find a GM. We did some small hiring. We started building the operating rhythm. There were spreadsheets, interviews, compensation discussions, onboarding docs, all the very serious adult things that make you feel like maybe you know what you are doing.
Our GM is a very smart guy. I trust him a lot. He has the kind of calm energy that makes you feel like things are under control even when the spreadsheet is screaming in twelve different colors. I have a lot of respect for him because he had to translate our messy North American expectations into something the Vietnam team could actually execute.
The office itself is in a coworking space, which honestly makes sense for the stage we are at. Flexible, clean, professional, and I do not have to pretend I know how to negotiate a commercial lease in Vietnam. Big win.
Two Timezones, One Brain Cell
The hard part was the timezone. I was basically working two timezones at once. Canada day, Vietnam night. Vietnam morning, Canada evening. Somewhere in the middle, my sleep schedule filed a formal complaint.
It sounds cool when you say "global team." It sounds less cool when you are taking calls at weird hours, rereading a message three times, and realizing you just explained the same process in a way that made sense to nobody except the version of you that was running on coffee.
And of course, this was the calm before the storm.
The Translation Problem
The real difficulty was not hiring. It was not the office. It was not even the timezone.
The real difficulty was translating what we wanted.
There is a very big difference between "do this task" and "understand the business reason behind this task." We had a lot of moments where the team was working hard, but the output was still not quite what we wanted. Not because people were lazy. Actually the opposite. People were trying. But the context was not landing.
This is something I underestimated. When you build a team in another country, you are not just moving tasks. You are moving context. And context is heavy. It does not fit neatly into a Loom video or an SOP.
After a while, we started having second thoughts. Not dramatic "burn it all down" thoughts, but enough doubt where I was like:
Okay, let me go there and see where this is going wrong.
The Trip
So I went.
And honestly, the trip was very needed. I was hella stressed before going. I had all these questions in my head. Are we hiring the wrong people? Are we explaining things badly? Is the structure wrong? Are we expecting too much too early? Am I just coping because I put money and ego into this?
Then I got there and saw the team working in person.
That changed a lot. I could see people were working darn hard. They were focused. They cared. They asked questions. They wanted to do well. The problem was not effort. The problem was alignment.
Which is both comforting and annoying. Comforting because you realize you have good people. Annoying because it means the bottleneck is probably you and your system.
Becoming a Vietnamese Boss Is Weird
One of the funniest parts of the trip was realizing how weird it feels to become a "boss" of your own people.
I am Vietnamese, but I am not fluent in Vietnamese business language. Casual Vietnamese? Sure. Ordering food? Elite level. Explaining operational KPIs, escalation paths, quality control, and managerial expectations in Vietnamese? My soul left my body.
There were moments where I knew exactly what I wanted to say in English, but in Vietnamese I sounded like a guy explaining business using words he learned from family dinner and YouTube comments.
But honestly, it made the trip more meaningful. It reminded me that building in Vietnam is not just an arbitrage play. It is emotional. It is cultural. It is personal. You are not just creating capacity for a company. You are creating jobs for people who look like your family. That hits different.
Food, Obviously
Also, we ate a lot.
Like a lot a lot. Every time I thought we were done eating, Vietnam was like "cute assumption" and placed another plate on the table.
Food with the team was probably more important than half the meetings. You learn a lot about people when the laptop is closed and everyone is arguing over what to order next. The team felt more real to me after those meals. Less like a remote org chart. More like actual humans I am responsible to.
What I Learned
The biggest lesson is that offshore operations are not magic. You do not just hire cheaper labor and suddenly unlock infinite productivity. That is the fantasy version.
The real version is slower and more human:
- You need leadership on the ground.
- You need trust before speed.
- You need to translate context, not just tasks.
- You need to visit in person earlier than you think.
- You need to accept that your SOP is probably not as clear as you think it is.
I came back tired, but weirdly happy. Still stressed, obviously. I am still me. But happy.
Because I saw the team. I saw the office. I saw the GM carrying a lot of responsibility with a steady hand. I saw people trying. And I saw that this thing can work if we keep tightening the system.
So yeah. Somehow I opened an office in Vietnam. Life is getting very strange in a good way.
Appendix: The Cross-Timezone Context Loss Function
Since every life update apparently needs a tiny cursed algorithm now, here is the math for why remote operations are hard.
Let be the original intent in your head. Every time that intent passes through a layer — timezone delay, language translation, SOP ambiguity, manager interpretation, employee execution — it loses a little bit of information.
Model the received intent as:
where is the context loss at layer . If each layer only loses 8% of the intent and you have 5 layers:
Congrats. One-third of the meaning disappeared and nobody did anything wrong.
This is why "they did not understand" is usually the wrong conclusion. A better conclusion is:
The system leaked context faster than the team could recover it.
The fix is to reduce : clearer SOPs, better examples, faster feedback loops, in-person calibration, and a GM you actually trust.
Basically: context is the real currency. Payroll is just the receipt.