About Globalization Partners

Globalization Partners simplifies global remote team building by making it fast and easy for companies to hire anyone, anywhere within minutes via our Service as a Solution (SaaS) global Employer of Record (EOR) platform powered by our in-house worldwide HR experts. Companies find the talent, and we enable them to hire that employee without the complexity of setting up costly international branch offices or subsidiaries. The way our platform works is that we put our customers’ talent on our already existing, in-country payroll, which spans 180+ countries. We're legally the employer of record, but the customer gets all the normal benefits of having global team members without setting up international entities, managing global benefits, or figuring out complex global tax matters.

Before launching Globalization Partners in 2012, one thing was clear to the founder, Nicole Sahin: There was an opportunity to innovate in the international expansion space. Global growth was a priority for many companies, but the red tape doing business in foreign countries made it challenging and time-consuming for companies to go global.

Almost ten years later, Globalization Partners has fundamentally shifted the way companies hire talent worldwide. We make it possible to hire team members via our fully compliant global Employer of Record platform, within hours of finding the right talent – easily.

We're proud to be the clear market leader in an industry we led from the outset, and while 2020 ended up being a positive year for us as a company overall, the year as a whole certainly didn't go off without a hitch.

Any startup founder or high-growth company executive knows that building a business from the ground up is full of curveballs. Even after nine years of high-growth madness, 2020 stood out as one for the record books. The initial period of March through June was the most stressful because we were steering a fairly large ship through a storm without a compass or any data to help us chart a new course.

When the lockdown started, we knew we had to react quickly as a company to preserve the foundation we had built and that we also had to reassess our strategic plans. We also knew we needed to take very rapid steps to survive and become stronger and more resilient. The challenge of pivoting quickly, without any data or insight into what might happen, was extraordinary and unprecedented.

What We Expected in 2020

Globalization Partners closed a minority investment round in January 2020, and we planned to grow at full speed before COVID-19 hit. We had recently expanded our revenue team and started hiring in England and Ireland to sell into Europe. We also had plans to hire a GM in Singapore to lead our Asia Pacific sales team expansion.

Before the beginning of the pandemic, we hit at least 20% quarter-over-quarter growth but only sold global expansion services to companies headquartered in North America. Our 2020 plan was to take the business that had found radical success in North America and replicate that in Europe and Asia. We also planned to invest heavily in our technology team, with the theme of “automate everything.” Our business of employing team members worldwide on behalf of other companies is, by nature, a human-centric business. Still, much of what our high-value team members do around the globe can be automated. We intend to build a highly scalable and customer service-centric business by using technology to make repeatable tasks go away, so that team members can focus on supporting our customers and their team members with personable, high-touch service.

To accomplish this, we had planned to double revenue and staff for the year, bringing in 180 internal employees over the course of 2020 to our existing team of 186 people. In the end, we hired almost the same number of internal employees as originally intended, and our revenue grew about 40% for the year to roughly a half-billion annual recurring revenue (USD). We consider ourselves extraordinarily lucky to have grown our revenue line while also executing our plans to build the business's operations and technology side for future growth.

When the pandemic began to make itself known, like all executives, we tried to navigate in a completely unpredictable environment. We charted a course that would enable us to succeed or at least survive based on multiple variables. We were also acutely aware of the lives that depended on us – not only our team members but also our customers and their employees around the globe.

When It Began

When we first started hearing about COVID-19 in early Q1 via our internal employees in China, we weren't yet sure that this would be a global pandemic. The information we were receiving in the US initially wasn't very clear. The evolving situation resulted in us deciding to close our global offices and go completely remote in early March 2020, somewhat ahead of when other US companies started considering the same.

As a company with offices in every corner of the globe, including countries that don't have a normalized work-from-home culture, we were concerned about the impact of closing all our international offices. Did our vital finance team members have Wi-Fi and proper workspaces to work from home? How could we collaborate and keep our team spirits high? Despite the risk to the business, it seemed the right thing to do to get ahead of the pandemic in terms of protecting our team members’ lives. We made the calculated choice to let everyone work from home, even in places that hadn't yet seen the virus.

Fast and Bold Actions to Protect Employees

Once we chose to go fully remote, we realized that some of our teams would struggle more than others to continue working. In the US, working remotely is common, at least a day or two per week. Our teams in India and Mexico, among others, were facing a more drastic transition and lifestyle shift. In many countries, working remotely is not a part of the mainstream business culture, and Internet infrastructure in private homes was often less reliable than workplaces.

While it was anxiety-inducing and required backup plans to make sure the business could still run if many members of our team were unable to effectively work from home, we made the decision that we were better off enabling our team to protect themselves by working from home versus going into the office and risking their health.

Having set the home office shift in motion, we needed to make sure that our teams worldwide had the right infrastructure set up to work from home and had contingency plans in case of widespread illness or Internet failures. To make sure that people were equipped to connect and work without interruption, our executives worked directly with our in-country HR and managerial leads worldwide to smoothen the transition, creating individual plans for each home office, such as buying home office wireless boosters.

Employees appreciated that we put their safety first and doubled down on their commitment to work. There was a sentiment that we were all in it together, and our team members valued that we prioritized their health. We were impressed by the team spirit and everyone's commitment to getting through the pandemic together.

Some offices prepared mobile hotspots for employees to take home, should they have connectivity issues. Many communities – rural and urban alike – were experiencing slow or intermittent wireless Internet connections. This can significantly impede business, so it was worth doubling down on resources early on. Logistically, we were lucky to be set up well before the pandemic, with everything in the cloud and most meetings already being held over video. Globalization Partners was in a unique position to switch gears quickly and effectively.

Realistic Recalculations and Our Biggest Business Challenges

In mid-March, which is usually an extremely high-demand month for Globalization Partners, new business dried up completely. Over 70 new customer agreements expected to close within two weeks suddenly stopped negotiations. Companies everywhere froze operations, especially hiring plans, because nobody knew how their business would be impacted. This sudden halt left executive teams worldwide scrambling to function and create clarity in an environment where there is none. Our well-laid plans suddenly were thrown into “pause” as we ourselves paused hiring while our CEO and CFO scrambled to forecast worst-case, mid-range, and best-case scenarios.

Existing customers also reacted, not knowing what this would mean for their business and working through their own contingency plans. We reached out to every one of our customers to see how we could help them. Some customers did reduce their staff. We helped others navigate salary reductions or other adjustments to keep their team intact and reduce their costs while we rode out the storm together. We also offered additional services at no cost to help customers who were continuing to hire – many of whom were making shifts and hiring in different countries than they might have originally planned.

It was intimidating to see the calculations for our worst-case scenario, but our business needed a plan for every possible outcome. We expected to lose about a third of our recurring revenue customer base, assuming our customers would be terminating people they hired via our Employer of Record solution as they tried to cut costs. Ironically, this loss of revenue would come with a lot of work because if our customers were terminating team members around the globe, we would have to handle those terminations with as much grace as possible for all parties during a nebulous legal and emotional time.

Meanwhile, governments around the world were putting slap-dash regulations in place to stop companies from terminating employees. Keeping up with fast-changing regulations in over 180 countries to protect employees during a pandemic was our core job function. We were obligated to our customers – and their team members who trusted us – to do it well.

Another challenge in March 2020 was that our finance executives estimated that in the worst-case scenario, up to 30% of their team would not be able to work from home at all due to inadequate infrastructure and lack of dependable Internet connections. A significant portion of our billing team is in India and Mexico. At that time, we knew that if our teams in Mexico and India were unable to function, we'd be facing huge roadblocks as a company. Getting money in, out, and around the world is critical to our business, so we were more than prepared to pivot if all hands were needed to stay operational. Our finance and technology teams scrambled to ensure operations would continue no matter what.

Once we had a plan in place and had carefully thought through all contingencies, we pivoted and executed. It took about two and a half weeks to get there, during which the executive team found ourselves suddenly at home and cut off from one another except through video calls, planning through one of the most stressful and unpredictable periods of our careers.

By early April, we had our plan in place. CEO Nicole Sahin led an all-hands call and spoke with our entire team globally about what we expected for the business and the numbers behind the worst-case scenario. We had calculated that we might lose up to a third of our recurring revenue and that the economy (and our revenue) might not recover for up to a year. Beyond that, our survival plan was to hunker down and build the technology underlying the business so that we could come out of the pandemic as an even more dominant market leader in our space. It was important to our leaders to be transparent, and we knew people were worried about the survival of the business and their jobs. We were clear about what we asked of our team: understanding, hard work, and collaboration, with the promise that the worst was behind us. It was going to be a rocky road, but we'd get through it together.

Preparing for the Road Ahead

In the global Employer of Record industry, it took our customer base until about June to figure out how COVID-19 was going to impact their business, what their new financial situation was going to be, and how that would impact their hiring plans – but at the beginning of the pandemic we didn't know how quickly that turnaround would happen. Meanwhile, we came up with our strategic plan, and it was communicated to every employee in early April. Our strategic plan was to hunker down and build.

In January 2020, we received USD 150 million in private equity funding. We knew that if carefully managed, we could use the pandemic period and the economic downturn to continue building the underlying infrastructure of the business, laying a strong foundation for the undoubted success ahead. We wanted to come out of the pandemic stronger and knew we had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take strategic advantage of future opportunities.

Thankfully, our worst fears were not realized. Our global teams set up home offices wherever they could – some even converted closets into cubicles – and were ultimately successful. We didn't have even one employee who was unable to make remote-work work. We suffered relatively few customer terminations and surprisingly few problems with collections. Our costs were lower due to the lack of travel and in-person events, and we paused on our plans for office space expansion while our team continued to work remotely. We got a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan from the government, which helped because we didn't know how hard our customers would retract on payments. Beyond that, we felt fairly comfortable with liquidity because we had planned carefully for this type of event since the company was founded.

Thanks to years of contingency planning and structuring our business for maximum financial stability at the outset, we maintained our firm footing. Also, the timing of our minority investment added to our resiliency.

Supporting Our Customers

Once we'd overcome the initial shock and our teams were once again operating at full speed, we looked to our customers. Everybody was going through a crisis, so we asked ourselves how we could use our resources and pivot to be as helpful as possible in getting through this situation. We have always believed in providing exceptional customer service, and if our customers were going to go through hard times, we wanted to help. Our business philosophy has always been to do right by our customers and our employees, and the business, in turn, will take care of itself. That philosophy proved itself again during the pandemic.

We'd assumed many companies would be laying people off, and we wanted to help save jobs, so the right decision was clear to us: reallocate resources from new product line launches to help our customers by being maximally flexible wherever we could. We also went out and got government grants in every country where we were eligible and, in the spirit of those programs, passed those savings on to our customers as a direct refund of the costs of keeping their team members employed. Specifically, in Australia, we received a boost payment of AUD 100,000 and credited this grant to our customers with Australian employees. We also received government support in Singapore, which we passed on to our customers with Singapore-based team members.

Many of the companies we serve were not directly eligible for government programs, so this grant sharing helped them keep their employees on board. If we got a refund, that went back to our customers. That meant we had a direct impact on their business and helped save jobs all over the world.

Once we were confident that we did right by our customers, we moved to restart marketing efforts. We knew that when the economy stabilized, the market would be booming with demand for the global remote workforce. This is exactly what we could help companies achieve. We were increasingly sure that leaders would come out of the pandemic having learned that they could build a global remote workforce by hiring anyone they wanted anywhere in the world.

With the gift of retrospect, we can say that we read the market right, which led us to maintain and accelerate our market leadership position. Google analysts told us in December 2020 that Globalization Partners’ market presence was significantly greater than that of our competitors in terms of share of voice, and our lead widened significantly during the pandemic. This is likely because most companies in our industry pulled back spending during 2020, whereas we moved, carefully and strategically, full steam ahead on our newly charted course.

Another decision made in Q2 was to accelerate our technology investments. Automating expansion was already on our technology roadmap, and the remote reality we found ourselves in made these technology advancements more pressing. Our engineers accelerated this evolution to help companies hire internationally, facilitate remote onboarding, and continue their expansion plans, pandemic or not.

Accelerating into the Region Best Positioned to Bounce Back

As a result of our team moving to remote working, regional divides melted away as we all switched to digitally communicating with our colleagues. Besides, that shift made hiring in a new country no longer as daunting as it was pre-2020 for many companies.

Asia Pacific and Europe were already major components of our expansion plans. While other companies scaled down, we accelerated hiring in Asia Pacific by onboarding our General Manager for Asia ahead of schedule. This was a somewhat risky bet but calculated, because we saw governments there handling the pandemic so much better than the rest of the world. We expected a faster economic recovery in Asia Pacific, and we chose Singapore as our hub to enter the wider APAC region from a revenue perspective.

We saw the stock market bounce back around the world in Q3 and knowledge-based companies like ours recovered a semblance of “business as usual,” albeit from our living rooms and kitchens. Globalization Partners’ team in Asia Pacific overachieved on targets in 2020, as did our team in Europe. We targeted the latter region from our innovation center in Ireland – another product of the lockdown that we have been able to grow, training every new hire remotely.

We are very fortunate that the pandemic's impact on our liquidity wasn't as drastic as expected. We had sufficient cash to fuel the company's expansion in Asia and Europe. However, we still decided to reallocate resources through 2020 toward longer-term revenue, operations, and technology efficiency, because we didn't know how long the economic slowdown would last.

Our Employees Came Through for Us

From a human perspective, there were many challenges that we could not foresee, but that brought us closer as a company. Our executive team worked hard to be incredibly supportive and proactive with our employees and acknowledged that we were all having challenges, both personally and professionally.

We encouraged our teams to use Zoom for talking to family and staying in touch with friends and ensured all our teams had Wi-Fi and home workspaces, even if whole families were working from home.

At the start of 2020, we had hired a Global Community and Culture Lead with a focus on growing and maintaining our employees’ well-being – something that we doubled down on when the world went into lockdown – and we had the infrastructure in place to continue this support. Like many companies, we set up online social events focusing on storytelling and employee recognition – both to keep our group unified across the globe and to acknowledge the wins amidst a tough year. We partnered with a global organization called Water for People, where we helped fund clean water solutions in Malawi. We hosted our first annual Rockstar Awards – an internal global celebration where we gave out awards to employees nominated by their peers. We also continued to have consistent companywide staff meetings, enhanced our internal communications, and started hosting weekly mindfulness sessions and workshops on resilience and vulnerable leadership. The team has been great about letting us know what they need, and then we partner together to find solutions.

One of our team's suggestions to respond to the lockdown was to set up a COVID-19 task force and make sure our website had up-to-date information about each country we have a presence in. Thanks to this initiative, we instantly pivoted our marketing to be less about “hire this person and expand your business” and more about giving people the most up-to-date resources and cutting through the noise.

Our executives called on their networks for useful data. We are looped in on policies worldwide, so as governments changed legislation regarding terminating employees, COVID-19 relief packages were rolled out. Expert HR recommendations were also disclosed, and our team leaped into motion, sharing information with all our customers.

We reached out to every single customer to ask how we could help them, and we temporarily offered additional HR services for free. Some teams came up with policies to help our customers handle their international employees with IT support. Meanwhile, others coached our customer companies to reduce salaries to avoid layoffs, and our marketing team created content to guide companies on managing their workforces remotely.

Fortunately, our people were able to work from home well. We did our best to support employees, but what's commendable is that our employees came through for us. A large part of our employee population is based in the US, so besides the pandemic, we were also living through civil unrest, which had a major impact on many team members, making an already difficult year even more challenging.

All around the world, our people were dealing with stress, and yet our team was willing to work hard through the storm. They delivered in a way that will always inspire us.

Uptick Thanks to New Business Models

We had expected Q2 to be the first quarter in which company revenue would contract due to the pandemic, but we actually stayed flat – a very unexpected and welcome blessing. By June 2020, companies had cemented their shift to remote work, and this new model led to an uptick in our global hiring business in Q3. Our flatlined revenue numbers started to modestly increase in Q3.

By September, companies knew what the impact of the pandemic would be on their business. They had started to realize that working from home was positive for business, and some began thinking about hiring in new jurisdictions. To provide perspective: by the end of 2020, we had 300 internal employees with annual recurring revenue of USD 500 million. As we look ahead to 2021, we plan to more than double our internal employees to 650 and have an expected USD 750 million in annual recurring revenue. Our revenue mix in 2020 consisted of 90% coming from North America, with 5% from Europe and another 5% from Asia. In 2021 that is changing to 75% from North America, 15% from Europe, and 10% from Asia. Whether this increase in companies’ hiring practices was to test out market demand or access the best talent worldwide, they were coming to us to help them do so.

Technology and software companies that power virtual communication and online learning saw significant growth, and many organizations began expanding development teams, customer support, and sales teams. With many visa restrictions in the US, we also saw companies seek to retain talent in their home countries due to their inability to relocate to the US during the pandemic. Our business makes the potential of a global remote workforce easy, and we were extraordinarily well positioned to help companies take advantage of the new trend toward global remote work.

Internally, we continue to hire around the world and interview remotely. We've hired hundreds of people who have worked with us for months but have not met any of their team members in person. For a global company, that happens periodically every time you hire the first person in a new market, but the levels to which we hired to great success in 2020 were astounding. We attribute a lot of our success in this area to having an effective onboarding program and wonderful company culture. We've also doubled down on our training and internal technology. Though many of us have never met in person, our teams always say they feel like they know everyone so well. This is because we had already built the baseline systems and processes well before remote work became the norm.

Some key elements of our onboarding program include:

• First-week plan: key conversations with new co-workers to help the new hire get to know their team.
• Internal pulse checks: each team member fills out weekly check-ins using software called 15Five, which gives their manager and leadership a view into their focus areas and growth objectives.
• 30-, 60-, 90-day checkpoints: documented expectations and a 90-day check-in with the manager to ensure their first three months were effective.

There's a lot of fear around hiring people you've never met. But once you take the leap, it can be as easy as or even easier than in-person recruiting. What is interesting is the change in how people looked at Globalization Partners and why they were coming to us. Traditionally, we had been all about sales expansion, but now we help clients hire people around the world who may not be able to expatriate for a visa or for COVID-19-related reason. Our solution has facilitated employers to grow teams quickly and allow their employees to work from wherever they live, in full compliance with laws and regulations.

Transparency, Even About Uncertainty

The total absence of data and predictability as we watched the pandemic unfold was extremely stressful and frustrating for leaders. Yet we needed to provide direction for our teams. As a leader or CEO, it's your responsibility to project confidence and develop a plan.

In the interests of providing stability to our employees even while leadership was still trying to find its footing, in March 2020 we communicated to employees that we would not require people to come back to the office until the end of the year. We continued to monitor the situation and readjusted our predictions in Q2. At that time, we made sure our teams knew that they would be working from home until April 2021 at the earliest.

Of course, we loved being in the office, united and inspiring each other. But to get to the office in many cities, you have to take public transportation. Our ongoing outreach signaled that our people felt uncomfortable about getting on commuter buses and trains, and our priority was protecting our employees’ physical and mental health. Being transparent about this allowed everyone to plan for the coming months.

We also overcommunicated at every opportunity. We spoke directly to the entire company every couple of weeks about what was going on during the pandemic's early stages. Our executive team listened carefully to the teams, which was as important as our upfront communication. Plenty of companies talk about promoting that type of empathy and transparency, but periods of uncertainty are when it's time to put those traits into action.

What's Ahead?

Not everyone wants to work in the office every day, and the pandemic forced us to reevaluate this social norm. Employers are now on an accelerated path to adapt to global remote work.

Globalization Partners was ahead of the curve because of our company's nature – we knew that being global and partially remote was a competitive advantage. We, like our customers, questioned hires near our offices in Boston, thinking carefully about each job: Does this role need to be here anymore?” Many positions no longer need to be filled within driving distance of our headquarters. Without the pandemic, would we have gotten to the point where, as a culture, it was normal to not meet employees or go to meetings in person?

Mass remote work has accelerated global hiring and work trends by 10 to 15 years – companies no longer hire simply based on proximity. This new business model is dominating knowledge-based industries because it's more strategic to build around talent hubs, not just where your product is sold. Now, leaders are thinking strategically and targeting great tech talent hubs. For example, they're targeting South America to stay in line with North American time zones, and hiring in Eastern Europe to be close to Berlin and London time zones but in lower-cost jurisdictions. These areas have great talent pools that companies now realize they can access.

As well as the trend toward hiring internationally, leaders are now looking to an asset-light approach: hiring employees worldwide to explore market demand before setting up infrastructure. Companies want to have people in local markets but don't want to invest time and resources into setting up a local entity to do so. A whole host of companies are looking for a solution to unburden their HR teams when hiring where they lack presence because they can now have both remote employees and lighter administration overhead.

Having navigated a global pandemic and seeing our team's resilience, we have every confidence that we will remain the market leader into 2021 and beyond. Also, we positioned the whole industry for growth through consistent communications, which increased demand for services that only an Employer of Record can offer. Today, companies that might never have considered hiring abroad are accessing the best talent for their open positions simply by looking further afield.

The Future of the Industry and Global Business

We believe the next pandemic is highly likely to happen again during our lifetimes. It will become part of basic contingency planning for companies to think about building their businesses to avoid being caught off guard when the next global lockdown hits.

We learned many lessons in 2020 that are important for businesses when preparing for the future:

1. Build for the worst-case scenario from day one.

   From a financial perspective, we had always built the company with a potential recession in mind, having worked through 2008 and seen how quickly that decimated much of Silicon Valley. Cash is king and always has been. Our business by nature is high risk from a cash perspective because we take on the liabilities of global employment for our customers. Specifically, we have to pay the team members our customers employ through us, whether or not the customers pay us.

   From day one, we always secured deposits against the risk of having to pay long notice periods if our customers went bankrupt and collecting accrued liabilities related to employment terms as we go. Some of our competitors reduced their requirements to be more competitive, but we stuck to our plan. This paid off in dividends for us as well as our customers – they already had incurred the full cost of their global employees and didn't have to come up with unexpected cash, and we were secured against the possibility of customer bankruptcies.

   From a team-building perspective, avoid giving yourself an easy way to cut costs when you need to by building responsibly the first time around. Globalization Partners was spared the need to conduct massive layoffs in 2020 because we were operating in a fiscally responsible way and hiring people in emerging market jurisdictions while still building a highly talented team. We also always future-proofed our business by hiring in cost-appropriate jurisdictions for the talent we needed. This allowed us to emerge from the recession faster and did not give any investor the opportunity to suggest that we “restructure” our team later.

   For example, our highly talented business development team for North America is based in a jurisdiction where compensation dollars go much further than hiring in San Francisco or Boston. There's a time to hire high-value talent in high-cost jurisdictions, but finding easy ways to hire remote workers at the outset saves you the pain of laying off team members when they most need their jobs.

2. Secure cash reserves or a line of emergency credit – before you need it.

   One of the reasons our company weathered the storm was that we had cash. We were fortunate enough to have run the company with significant cash deposits and not to have played games with our cash reserves, even during an unbelievable bull market with no end in sight. Having an emergency line of credit is critical. As soon as the pandemic hit, new loans dried up at banks. It is impossible to secure a line of credit when you most need it, even with cash in the bank. Don't wait until that moment.

3. Don't underestimate the value of a strong company culture.

   Team spirit set us apart in 2020. We have always taken the perspective that investing in a work hard/play hard company spirit with a positive company culture would pay off in dividends, and it did. It took unbelievable grit and perseverance for our team members worldwide to work hard every day despite heartache and school kids suddenly being home, but they did it. We wouldn't have made it without the dedication and brains of our team members.

   Among other things, we value communication, leadership, and fun. We make it a point to celebrate employees’ wins inside and outside the workplace. Globalization Partners has created several programs that aim to unite its employees and recognize their contributions to the company. These include the Rock Star Awards, for which employees nominate a coworker who goes above and beyond and deserves special recognition. There were winners in every department and every region; winners were given a monetary bonus, and the entire company was given an extra day off to use any time during the summer. Globalization Partners also maintains an internal newsfeed for employees to share their personal wins, life achievements, and happy moments to keep international and remote teammates connected across the world.

   As a company with such a widespread and remote workforce, it is vital to get creative and think outside the box. We host many programs and initiatives that encourage employee innovation, creativity, and togetherness. We use technology to enhance the human experience – whether it's sharing photos of a global charity drive, tapping into an internal team and their background and resources to learn from each other, or employees sharing book recommendations and photos of their pets and children. We also have a video-first policy when using Zoom.

   To encourage connectivity and collaboration, Globalization Partners implemented Slack as the organization's primary employee collaboration tool, which is helping to connect teams around the world. As part of this, we have also implemented a tool called Donut, an initiative to improve engagement and introduce people virtually who don't know each other.

4. Great technology is worth the investment.

   Being online and in the cloud as much as possible is critical to weathering a storm like COVID-19, and it's harder to go digital in the middle of a crisis. For example, if people are equipped to work from home long-term, that will help in the event of a future pandemic. We are also happy with the number of people we helped take new positions at our customer companies, many of whom had been stuck in their country throughout 2020 and were unable to accept jobs that required relocation. Since companies used our solution across the globe to employ great professionals, we helped many people secure job opportunities that might not have been available to them before remote work became commonplace.

COVID-19 gave global remote team building a booster shot, and, in response, we gave our customers access to fantastic employees around the world. We are certain that international remote teams will become part of every company's platform in the future. Coming out of the global recession of 2020, we have learned many lessons and have much to be grateful for, not least of which is the strong foundation we established during our “hunker down and build” strategy we undertook during the pandemic. We are confident we are now well ahead of our competitors and will remain the market leader, due in no small part to our ability to weather the storm as a team.

About the Contributors

Nicole Sahin's mission is to eliminate barriers to doing business internationally and building global teams. As founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Globalization Partners, she is recognized for having created an innovative solution that enables companies to hire great talent anywhere in the world, without the complexity of setting up international branch offices or subsidiaries. Businesses are able to bypass the legal, HR, and tax complexities of hiring in another country, while getting all the benefits of a global team.

Nicole holds an MBA in international management from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. She splits her time between Boston and San Diego, loves to travel, and is inspired by the belief that making it easy for people to expand internationally and work seamlessly across borders ultimately makes the world a more exciting and open-minded place.

Debbie Millin is Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Globalization Partners and a founding member of the executive team. With over 20 years of operational, project management, and client relationship experience, Debbie specializes in supporting companies that are experiencing rapid growth to scale their systems and processes.

By 2020, Debbie's leadership led Globalization Partners to be recognized by the Financial Times as one of the fastest-growing companies in America. Debbie serves on the Advisory Board for both Special Olympics of Massachusetts and the Commonwealth Institute and has been a member of multiple nonprofit and private boards throughout her career. She is a frequent speaker on topics including women's leadership, entrepreneurship, rapid-growth companies, and global expansion.