129: Expand your Business Globally with Nicole Sahin of Globalization Partners

Background on Nicole Sahin of Globalization Partners:

Nicole Sahin is the CEO and Founder of Globalization Partners. Nicole Sahin’s mission is to eliminate barriers to doing business internationally and building global teams. As founder and CEO of Globalization Partners, she is recognized for having created their innovative Global Expansion Platform, which empowers companies to hire anyone, anywhere within a few business days – expanding their global footprint without the need to set up in country branch offices or subsidiaries.

Nicole’s vision has led to her being named Gamechanger of the Year in 2019 and Entrepreneur of the Year in New England. Globalization Partners has also earned the ranking of No. 6 on the 2016 Inc. 500 list, and the company has won numerous awards for breaking the traditional corporate mold by building a nationally-recognized company culture. She credits the success to an exceptional team with global expansion in their DNA, and to her philosophy of the Triple Bottom Line – what’s good for the clients and the employees is good for the shareholders. From day one, Nicole has built Globalization Partners to scale, with a mindset towards meeting the needs of Fortune 1000 companies, which require the highest compliance standards in the world.

Prior to launching Globalization Partners, Nicole was a Senior Director at High Street Partners, a firm that provided international HR, tax, legal, and compliance services to CFOs, HR Directors, and General Counsel of fast-growing technology companies establishing subsidiaries and hiring in dozens of countries. Her experience advising companies ranging from Tesla to HID Global on their international expansions, was a catalyst for founding Globalization Partners in 2012.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[0:40] Nicole Sahin is the founder of Globalization Partners. Her company offers services for other companies that want to expand internationally.
[1:49] Nicole gives a specific example of why a company would want their services when expanding abroad.
[4:44] One source of inspiration for Nicole is to help companies hire anyone anywhere. Also, she did not envision that her company would grow this big.
[6:02] Being well-traveled at such a young age fueled her passion for being an internationalist. Nicole wanted to be an anthropologist but had a change of heart and decided to try out being an entrepreneur.
[11:55] After she finished her MBA program, Nicole was hired by a consulting firm called High Street Partners, which helps companies hire people from other countries.
[16:19] She left High Street Partners because she thought she had a better business model.
[19:46] The real challenge of starting her company was in the execution part. She and her team also has deep background in international tax and employment, which makes it easier for them to start the business.
[21:22] It is very important for Nicole to make her clients happy. She reports that 93 percent of their clients are very happy with their services.
[24:55] Hiring her first employee was nerve-wracking for Nicole.
[28:14] She describes the first three years of her entrepreneurial journey, which is common for most entrepreneurs.
[33:51] The sudden jump from 6 employees to 30 employees was quite challenging for Nicole.
[35:58] Nicole gives some insights about important tools and software that can be used in a company with 6 or more employees.
[40:15] They made some critical decisions that allowed them to find more clients and increase their growth rapidly.
[44:31] According to Nicole, Saudi Arabia is the hardest country to deal with when it comes to hiring people. She mentions other countries that are also difficult and complicated to deal with.
[49:46] Nicole tells a very interesting story about hiring a person in France that turns out to be disastrous.
[57:34] Nicole gives her last words of wisdom for new entrepreneurs.

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Fabulous 4 Questions:

📖 📚 Favorite Book(s)? The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s a poignant coming to age novel set in the 1950s, told by the wife and four daughters of American Missionary Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo. What I love about the book is the clash of cultures and ideas, and how the missionary thinks he’s right (from his cultural lense) but because his kids grow up in another culture, they can see both cultures more accurately. The kids grow into their own awareness as adults and the father goes a little mad as he loses strict control over his family. I love that book because of the beautiful imagery of late 1950s East Africa, and because one can only fathom the reality of that situation. Barbara Kingsolver is an extraordinary writer.
🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? This is a tough one, you can buy anything on Amazon! I still love my kindle – the idea that I can travel the globe with my entire library in my pocket is a gift previous generations only dreamed off. Besides that, I’d go with “The Everything Store,” which is a book about how Bezos lead Amazon from it’s early days. The company is absolutely brilliant and Bezos is an extraordinary CEO. It’s always good to soak up as much as you can from someone like that.
🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? I always believed in investing in world-class software from the outset and am grateful for those choices. If I had to pick one, I’d say ZOOM for video conferencing. Because we are a global company with employees in 20 countries, I mandate that all employees use videos for all calls, all the time. It’s the only way we can retain our amazing company culture across so many languages, time zones and borders. Because 53% of communication is non-verbal, capturing ALL of our colleagues communication by using video is incredibly important to our company. It’s also integral to our core mission, which is breaking down barriers to global business.
💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? Globalization Partners helps companies employ teams around the globe quickly and easily by putting whatever team members our clients want to employ on our locally-compliant payroll in 150 countries around the globe. This helps companies expand globally without the red tape of figuring out international legal, tax and HR matters. Our biggest challenge is that it’s hard to explain and that no one realizes that they can start hiring global employees TODAY, and that we make it incredibly easy. That’s our biggest problem as a business.

Key Point from the Interview:

“I wanted to build a scalable, long-lasting business that our clients would appreciate and enjoy working with. I’m happy to say we’ve achieved that.”

Resources Mentioned:

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