Expanding abroad, with people on the ground

When IDVerse (then OCR Labs) first looked at expanding overseas, it hit the problem every fast-growing company hits: how do you keep the growth going in a market you don't know yet? We've watched this play out across the portfolio, and the ones that get it right almost always have the same thing in common. Someone on the ground who actually knows the place.

Expansion isn't really about opening an office. It's the stuff nobody warns you about: how banking works, who signs what, what a local director is on the hook for, which regulations will quietly eat a quarter if you miss them. Get a person in who understands both your home market and the new one, and most of that friction disappears.

Build for the world early, not late

For Australian companies especially, global isn't a nice-to-have. The home market is big enough to build a real business and small enough that serious scale means going offshore. The founders who do it well set up for it from the start: structures, processes and go-to-market that don't need a rebuild the moment they cross a border. One of our fashion brands spent years building distribution relationships abroad before it opened a single overseas storefront. By the time it expanded, the hard part was already done.

Send someone who already gets it

The best move we've seen is sending a trusted person from HQ to stand up the new office, rather than hiring a stranger to build it from scratch. Culture, context and institutional knowledge travel with them. Pair that with a real travel budget so people are in the same room now and then, and problems surface early instead of festering.

We've done this ourselves, from Dubai to Hong Kong, where we run a portfolio company's local entity today. The lesson keeps repeating: the headline tax incentive is rarely the point. If the admin, the compliance and the cost outweigh what you'll get from a market over the next year or two, we don't force it. We wait until it's worth doing properly.

Having our own people across APAC, the UK and the US is what lets us give that kind of read. Expansion is a given for ambitious companies now, not a later-stage luxury. Build with that in mind from day one, and find partners who have actually done it, so you're not learning every lesson the expensive way.