Rewards Of Setting Up Overseas MSP Operations Outweigh The Risks: Gordon Lewis Group CEO

‘Let me tell you why going global is actually the best bad idea that I’ve ever had in my life,’ Luis Armendaris, CEO of MSP Gordon Lewis Group, tells an audience of MSPs at XChange 2025.

Expanding an MSP’s operations to areas outside the U.S. can be a risky business, but the potential rewards make it a strategy more MSPs should consider.

That’s the word from Luis Armendaris, CEO of the Gordon Lewis Group, a Miami-based MSP with operations in Columbia and the Philippines.

In a twist, Armendaris Tuesday first told an audience of MSPs attending this week’s XChange 2025 conference, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company, that going international is actually a bad idea.

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“There are cultural issues,” he said. “There are all kinds of misunderstandings. When you have people from other countries working in your operations, it’s not only language, but we sometimes struggle from state to state. We say we have different sayings that can be misinterpreted and that there can be poor internal communication. And we have clients who, when they hear a foreign accent when getting customer support, are not interested. This can bring a breakdown in communications, not only internally, but with your clients.”

There’s more, Armendaris said.

“You have time zones,” he said. “Some of these countries where you’re hiring people are 12 hours apart, eight hours apart. That makes it really hard to track their time. You’re going to need time-tracking tools and try to set up shifts that maintain their quality of life. Then the regulations. We already have to deal with regulations here. Your clients’ regulations, IT regulations, California making up regulations that everybody else is going to end up doing.”

Then there are the security and currency risks, Armendaris said.

“You are making yourself just a bigger target,” he said. “You’re going to have people working on your devices that are serving your clients overseas. Why would you do that? It doesn’t sound like a good idea. Then you have currency risk. Something that’s worth $200 today might be worth $300 tomorrow. You may be paying for a tech X amount of dollars an hour right now, and then in India or Mexico something happens and suddenly that cost could go up.”

And don’t forget the geopolitical risks, Armendaris said.

“Foreign policy, that’s pretty stable lately?” he said. “Right. You can get caught in the middle of a fight between one or two governments, and sometimes not even the U.S., but two others in which you have a place.”

After telling the audience he was done with the topic, Armendaris then said he hoped it was obvious that he was kidding.

“I wouldn’t say that to this room,” he said. “This room is filled with people that are troubleshooters and problem-solvers. So let me tell you why going global is actually the best bad idea that I’ve ever had in my life.”

Armendaris said he put together two very good teams, one in Medellin, Colombia, and one in Manila in the Philippines led by people from the U.S. office sent there to set the teams up but who ended up never leaving. Those employees are well educated and bring a lot of experience working in IT.

“In the Filipino team, there’s nine people, but there’s probably 150 years of combined experience in the people that had worked directly troubleshooting the hardware from Cisco in their troubleshooting centers and tech centers,” he said. “And they brought a lot of amazing ideas. And all those risks that we looked at, it’s this team of people that allowed me to turn those into the ultimate opportunity that my business had.”

For instance, when it comes to cultural issues, that has become a major strength, Armendaris said.

“People who have worked in a larger company have likely worked with other frameworks that you haven’t,” he said. “When you’re smaller, you probably don’t even know about Six Sigma Black Belt. But someone you bring on board may understand those frameworks or Scrum that you may address in your meetings, your projects, your organization. Culturally, these people have different ways of thinking. They work with different clients, different sizes, different opportunities, and they suddenly have better ways of troubleshooting things.”

Language is an interesting barrier but can also be an opportunity, Armendaris said. For instance, while some customers may hesitate to talk to a technician with an overseas accent other customers may find they identify with technicians with different skills and language capabilities, he said.

“We realize that now we can offer a help desk service we couldn’t before because now we have a bilingual help desk or a tier-two or tier-three support person who speaks English and Spanish, and even in French or Tagalog,” he said.

Time zone differences also now become an asset, Armendaris said. A lot of good, hardcore troubleshooters in the Philippines are lost in jobs that do not pay well.

“If you’re smart enough, you can go and poach really good talent and bring them on to your team,” he said. “They used to be on the graveyard shift for hours. Suddenly they’re on the day shift, doing my maintenance, looking at my alerts at night, and doing all kinds of cleanup work that none of my guys really wanted to do and handling a lot of the on-call stuff. Suddenly my team is now falling in love with these people coming from overseas. My tier ones never took a phone call again, never had to fill out tickets again, because I was able to bring them in that support. They can now focus on being tier-twos growing into tier-three. We had time to train them as a small industry. We never had the time to do that. So they became really grateful.”

When it comes to regulatory issues and security risks, people from the overseas office are able to bring in different experiences and fresh viewpoints, Armendaris said.

“Once you figure it out for one customer, you figure it out for others, and that actually gives you an opportunity to now offer this to your clients and expand your offerings,” he said. “The currency risks and security risk are the same things you have to deal with for your clients, but this actually makes you be a little bit more nimble.”

When it comes to geopolitical risks, Armendaris said he actually feels a lot more comfortable now that if something gets too complicated in the U.S. or in the Philippines or in Colombia or in Mexico, he can just shift his operations.

“Larger companies have this ability to shift business units,” he said. My units are just tiny, but I can do the same thing. So if things are too expensive in the U.S. or too complicated or too well regulated, I can actually move them around and ship them to my different teams.”

When asked by CRN about the geopolitical risks from impacts from the current Trump administration with tariffs and regulation changes, Armendaris replied that what’s happening in Washington, D.C., is an incredibly challenging situation.

“But I think the fact that you are international and that you are global, not only in one or two but maybe three or four places, actually gives you flexibility,” he said. “You’re not tied only to the U.S., or to the U.S. and let’s say Colombia. If you have two or three locations, you can shift your operations and adapt. The larger companies are able to do it. They have global footprints that allow them to shift based on what’s going on. And I think smaller companies like us can also do it.”

One thing that the CEOs in many smaller MSPs lack is an executive assistant, Armendaris said.

“If you have more than five people in your MSP, in my opinion, and you’re a leader, one of the owners, you’re a crazy person if you don’t have an executive assistant, end of story,” he said. “It means you’re wasting a lot of time doing very menial tasks, and AI does not replace it. You have never had a proper executive assistant if you think AI is going to do what an executive assistant does. An executive assistant with AI, that’s what you really want.”

Armendaris said the cost to bring on executive assistants overseas is much lower than in the U.S., and that it’s possible to find top-notch candidates to bring on full-time and make an integral part of the team.

It’s important to build a trust relationship with those executive assistants because they will have access to the MSP owner’s calendars, emails and so on, Armendaris said.

“I believe that the best problem-solving you can do in a company, the best way to run a company, is through culture, is to build those relationships of trust,” he said. “There is no tool that I can put in to do that, but if the people fall in love with my company and the people on the team, that’s the best security feature I can have. That’s the reality.”

As a result, finding executive assistants eventually became the most bang Armendaris said he ever received for his buck in his life.

“My first assistant is now the company accountant,” he said. “We put her through accounting training. We got her QuickBooks-certified. My second one does the procurement for all my companies and all our clients. He’s a straight-up procurement guy. The last one is actually director of business operations of the company I just sold. She runs all the back end. She learned it from me. She spent 5,000 million hours with me in every single meeting. And she was a smart girl. She picked everything up, and she can run the company. She runs the company, all the back end, all the nontechnical stuff. She got everybody Scrum-certified. She runs projects and makes sure everybody runs on time. She did this in three years. She’s 26 years old. A really smart woman with two master’s degrees. I picked her up at 1,500 bucks a month. She just moved to California, and she’s running our operation in California.”

Going global brought another significant benefit, Armendaris said.

“My retention rate is ridiculous,” he said. “It’s actually 100 percent. I’ve never had anybody leave that I didn’t want to leave the company. We have only around 50 people. But nobody ever left. At a certain size, it becomes an issue. But I think for retention of talent, culture is the biggest thing that you’re going to have. Of course, the salaries have to be there. But it’s always the company culture that’s hard to maintain for retention. People need to feel part of the team in the U.S. And that was really hard. It was a battle. They feel like they’re different. They might feel like subcontracted employees. And if they feel that, then yes, they’re gone.”