The biggest risk in international growth is assuming success in one market automatically translates to another. Liberti Club spoke to Jason Gerlis, Chief Revenue Officer at GoGlobal, about the importance of your operating model in creating value from international expansion.
LC: Why are you seeing more UK firms looking to expand internationally?
JG: Growth in your home market eventually becomes limiting. Investors expect continued expansion, customers are increasingly global and the fastest-growing companies know that new markets can unlock the next stage of growth. International expansion offers access to larger customer bases, new talent, strategic partners and greater resilience; but it also changes the complexity of running the business.
The product may travel. Customer demand may travel. But the way you hire, employ, pay and manage people changes with local customs, regulations and legal requirements. That’s where many businesses get caught out. The companies that create the most value internationally don’t necessarily choose better markets, they build operating models that scale.
LC: What are the most costly and avoidable mistakes?
JG: The most expensive mistakes aren’t commercial, they’re operational. Leadership teams spend months deciding where to expand and only days thinking about how they’ll actually operate once they’re there. Employment, payroll, compliance and legal structures are often treated as administrative details. In reality, they determine how quickly you can hire, how much management time expansion consumes, how much risk you carry and ultimately whether international growth remains profitable.
We regularly see businesses with genuine customer demand struggle because nobody owns the operating model. HR owns recruitment. Finance owns payroll. Legal owns compliance. Local providers own different elements of final-mile delivery. Everyone owns a piece, but nobody owns the end-to-end.
LC: How does GoGlobal enable more profitable international growth?
JG: Profitable international growth comes from removing complexity, not adding it, and building an operating model that can scale efficiently as the business grows. That is where GoGlobal helps. We start by understanding the client’s commercial objectives, whether that’s speed to market, access to talent, cost optimisation or long-term market presence.
Instead of asking leadership teams to coordinate multiple providers across different countries, we provide a single operating model with consistent governance, reporting and visibility, backed by experts who understand the local employment, payroll, compliance and regulatory requirements in each market.
That reduces management overhead, lowers operational risk and helps businesses deploy capital more efficiently. Leadership teams spend less time solving operational problems and more time focused on customers, talent and growth.
The outcome isn’t just compliance. It’s faster execution, better decision making and a more scalable business. That is what ultimately makes international growth profitable.
Every business wants to move quickly. The challenge is doing it without creating complexity that slows you down later.
LC: How important are partner ecosystems in supporting international growth?
The best businesses know they don’t have to be the best at everything. That’s one of the biggest shifts we’ve seen over the last decade. Competitive advantage isn’t about owning every capability. It’s about knowing which capabilities create value inside your business and which are better delivered through trusted specialists.
International expansion touches finance, people, legal, tax, compliance and operations. No organisation should pretend to be world-class at all of those things.
That’s why Liberti Club’s ecosystem is so valuable. It brings together specialists who solve different parts of the same growth challenge. For our clients, that means better decisions, joined-up thinking and fewer gaps between strategy and execution.