Sitting down to write this article I start by facing the blank page, not quite sure how to fill it. The blankness is intimidating, and it gives no guidance on what should be there—which is totally appropriate for the topic.

When we look at the blank spaces on our team rosters, we are often just as rudderless, just as apprehensive. Demand for our CPA and advisory services is crushing you and your team as much as ever. But the talent pipeline is reduced to a trickle. And those blanks are not filling themselves.

(By the way, it’s not lost on me that using physical paper, just like back when I took the CPA Exam, is maybe excessively old school.)

Back to the topic at hand, fewer experienced professionals are coming from fewer staff staying in the profession, backing all the way up to fewer students going into the accounting major. There’s even generational narrowing, making fewer young people available from the very start! Every profession, industry and job classification are going to continue to vie for the same talent. And guess what, we have sort of a reputational problem—somehow the public we serve thinks we are all overworked and unfun! True or not, it’s a hard sell for a young person mapping their career.

So how do we fill in those blanks on that org chart of yours? Do you leave these spaces unfilled? Or is your face looking a little blank too?

The world is an unknown, the unknown is risky and we all know how we CPAs feel about risk. Let's reduce some of this risk by turning the unknown into known. We have known that the big CPA firms have been using staffing around the world since long before there were just four of them. They did it sometimes to access new markets and sometimes to access new labor pools.

These early adopters paved the way, investing capital—both human and monetary—and created areas of the world that had tons of well-trained staff and whole ecosystems around their global offices. This absolutely improved the economies of where they invested. Though right along with excellent training and experience, the profession exported its nose to the grindstone, production-oriented work ethic (who said CPAs aren’t a good time?).

Where do you look? Some of the top contenders are India, Philippines, Mexico and South Africa, though there are many places that are up and coming. Some of the commonalities are high levels of education for portions of the population, large English-speaking populations, and direct experience with accounting. Time zones differ and the relative cost differs. But whether the resource is a thousand miles away or 12,000, smaller firms often do not have the resources to set up their own entities with employees (or a JV with a foreign firm). Since this capability is often cost and resource prohibitive for small firms, they are exploring options in different structures such as-through finding individual contractors, hiring through employers of record (like an international PEO) and outsourcing.

Each method has its own plusses and minuses, and the right mix will likely be different for each firm.

Individual contractors are not always available. For example, they are common in Philippines but less common in India. They can be hard to find since you're looking for a single individual who wants to devote their time to your firm. Managing one or a few people can be difficult if you have no boots on the ground locally where they are and because of that, it can be hard to scale up this as necessary. If you do happen to find the right person or two, it can be an immediate shot in the arm however, as you will have a resource that you can integrate into your team at a lower price point.

Right alongside individual contractors is the possibility of hiring through Employers of Record (EOR) where the employees truly become part of the firm's team but are employed by a professional employment organization, a third party, in that foreign country. This allows for a bit more control without having to learn foreign employment law or most other compliance. However, this worry-free option isn't free, and you will get charged hundreds or thousands of dollars per employee per month for this service. It also doesn't obviate the need to find staff members in the country in the first place (you have to do that), nor does it help manage for performance, etc. Using EORs can be a solution if you have small numbers of highly qualified (i.e., harder to find) staff in a number of foreign jurisdictions.

The last structure, and the one near and dear to my heart, is outsourcing. This solution puts all the hiring, management and training of staff onto someone else. Very often you're able to get a breadth of skill sets instead of the skill set confined to one person. But you pay for what you get since you have to then pay that vendor's profit margin on the staff. You probably have already been approached by multitudinous would-be vendors hawking their miracle solution to your staffing problems. They can make the issues vanish with the flick of a wire transfer button. Annoying, isn't it? I hate being sold to and I'm sure you do too. But at the same time, we small firms need to explore ways to get the work done!

So how to find out more about these options? Do some research yes, but you should not need to become the expert on global labor. Ask questions, get referrals. Be clear about what parts of your processes need to be filled, what blank spaces on your org chart are missing. From there find out whether the various offerings meet your needs and budget. Like with any business deal, it comes down to what you have to give up compared to what you receive. The more specific your ask, the more likely you are to find a successful global staffing solution. The chart below will help give you a framework for navigating what each solution provides.

Hopefully, this has shed a little light on a subject largely kept in the shadows. But I don't expect this article to fill you with courage all by itself. In the next installment we will tackle some of the common concerns around using global labor—some are real, some are phantoms, and all can be put to rest.