Why the question keeps coming up
The fully-loaded cost of a UK hire — salary plus employer National Insurance, pension, holiday, equipment and recruitment — pushes a £30,000 role to around £40,000 a year. For administrative, finance and back-office work that is essential but not strategic, that is a heavy cost. Building a team abroad, where local salaries and overheads are lower, has become the obvious alternative for the work that does not require a UK presence.
The three ways to build a team abroad
There are broadly three routes. Freelance marketplaces (Upwork, Fiverr) are cheapest per hour and good for one-off tasks, but the people are shared across many clients, turnover is high, and consistency suffers — a poor fit for an ongoing team. Hiring directly abroad gives you control but means navigating foreign employment law, payroll and compliance yourself — heavy for a small number of hires. A managed dedicated provider employs the people on your behalf, handles all the compliance and infrastructure, and gives you dedicated, full-time team members for one monthly fee — the simplest route for most SMEs.
What it actually costs
Through a managed provider, a dedicated full-time offshore professional starts from around £950 a month, all-inclusive — roughly £11,400 a year, against £40,000 for a comparable UK hire. The provider handles recruitment, the office, equipment, HR and ongoing support. You interview and approve your hire, then direct their work day to day as you would any team member.
How to do it well
The businesses that succeed treat an offshore team like any other: a clear brief, proper onboarding, documented processes, and regular communication. They start with one person, prove the model, then scale. They choose a provider on the quality of its vetting and the security of its setup, not on the lowest price. And they keep the work that genuinely needs UK presence local. Done this way, building a team abroad is one of the most effective ways for a UK business to grow capacity affordably.