Three mistakes I made moving a consulting practice abroad
I do process consulting for mid-size manufacturers, mostly remote since 2021. I moved the base out of Bucharest two years ago and I got three things wrong that I would warn anyone about.
I underestimated the time zone. Not the hours themselves, the erosion. Six hours ahead of my main clients means every call lands in my evening, and after four months I noticed I had stopped doing anything after seven because there was always one more call.
I assumed invoicing would follow me. It did not. Two clients had procurement rules about the country of the supplier that nobody had mentioned while I was sitting in the same country as them.
I signed a twelve-month lease on the first place I liked. Everyone says not to and everyone does it anyway. Three months would have told me the area was wrong for me and cost me almost nothing.
None of these were about the country. They were about assuming the parts of the business that worked would keep working unchanged, which is the assumption I get paid to talk clients out of.
Somebody asked me offline what I actually looked at before choosing. Nothing clever: https://thailand-real.estate/ open in one tab, a spreadsheet in the other, and the date each place appeared and the date it went. Two months of that told me more than any relocation guide.