Everything I'd Want to Know If I Were on Your Side of the Table
The questions worth asking before you decide how
Most conversations I have with practice owners in the UK and US start in roughly the same place. Someone has been carrying too much for too long, hiring locally has not worked, and a colleague at a conference mentioned they have people in India and it has gone rather well.
So the question arrives as: should we do this?
It is almost never the useful question. The useful one is what are we actually trying to solve - because there are mainly three quite different routes available, they suit three quite different situations, and choosing the wrong one is the most common reason these arrangements disappoint.
What follows is what I usually end up saying. Not a recommendation. A way of thinking about it.
The questions firms ask first
There is a remarkably consistent list, and it is worth saying plainly that these are all reasonable questions.
What will it cost, and what will we save? Always first. Almost never the thing that determines whether it works.
Who is accountable if something goes out wrong? You are. That does not change under any of the three models, and any conversation that implies otherwise should worry you.
Do we have to tell our clients? Usually yes, and more importantly, you should want to.
How do we know the quality is there? By reviewing early work properly, and by accepting that the first month will not look like the sixth.
What about data protection? A real question with real answers, and one that needs your own legal and regulatory advice rather than a service provider's reassurance.
What happens when they leave? The question that separates the three models more sharply than any other.
How will our own people take it? The question fewest firms ask out loud, and the one that most often decides the outcome.
The questions underneath
The stated questions are about mechanics. The real hesitation is rarely mechanical.
In almost every conversation, somewhere around the twenty-minute mark, the actual concern surfaces. It is usually some version of this: these clients have trusted me personally for fifteen years, and I do not want to be the person who quietly changed that without telling them.
That is not an objection to be handled. It is the correct instinct, and it should shape the design of whatever you build.
The second unspoken concern is about your own team. A practice owner who has spent a decade building a small, loyal group of people does not want to walk into the office on Monday and be the person who is understood to have exported their colleagues' futures. That fear is usually unfounded - in practice, capacity beyond borders tends to absorb the work nobody in the office wanted anyway - but it is not unfounded until you have said so, clearly, to the people it concerns.
The third is subtler. Nobody wants to become dependent on an arrangement they cannot unwind.
Hold on to that one. It is the single most useful lens for choosing between the three routes.
The three routes
1. Outsourcing - buying output
You send work out. It comes back done. You pay per job, per client, or per hour.
It suits you when: the work is standardised and documented, the volume is seasonal or unpredictable, you want to test the idea cheaply, or your total need is under about one full-time person. Self-assessment season and year-end compliance spikes are the classic fit.
The honest limitations: you have no continuity of person. Whoever is free does your work. That is fine for a VAT/ GST return and quietly costly for a client with fifteen years of accumulated peculiarities, because the knowledge never lodges anywhere. You are also one client among many, which shows most on the days you need something moved.
Reversibility: high. You can stop next month.
2. A dedicated extended team through a partner - renting capability
Named people, assigned to you, working to your standards and your processes, in someone else's office and on someone else's payroll. You direct the work; they carry recruitment, employment, infrastructure, and replacement.
It suits you when: the work needs judgment and client-specific knowledge, you want the same person to still be there in three years, your need is somewhere between one and roughly fifteen people, and you want to build capability without building a company.
The honest limitations: this is a management commitment, not a purchase. You will train, induct, correct, and invest attention - particularly in the first ninety days. Firms that treat it as a purchase get a purchase's results. You also inherit your partner's people practices, so how they retain and develop staff matters more than their rate card.
Reversibility: moderate. You can exit, but you will lose accumulated knowledge, which by year two is worth more than you expect.
3. Your own entity - owning everything
You incorporate, lease, recruit, employ, and manage. Your brand, your culture, your people.
It suits you when: you have sustained, growing volume - realistically twenty-plus people - a genuine growth thesis rather than a cost problem, and the appetite to run a second business in a country you do not live in.
The honest limitations: this is the route most often chosen for the wrong reason, which is the belief that it is cheaper. Per head, at scale, it is. But the fixed costs are not the rent - they are statutory compliance, payroll and employment law, transfer pricing, local leadership, and above all your own attention. Recruitment and attrition become your problem in a labour market whose signals you cannot read. Six to twelve months to real productivity is normal. And unwinding it is slow, expensive, and involves making people redundant, which is a different kind of decision entirely.
The failure point is almost never the accounting. It is leadership on the ground. Firms that succeed here have someone senior who genuinely owns it - often a partner who travels, sometimes someone who relocates. Firms that fail have a good plan and nobody whose job it is.
Reversibility: low.
The staged recommended route
Start with a dedicated team, with an explicit option to take it in-house later - the arrangement transfers, the people transfer, and you convert once the scale justifies it.
This is often the right answer for firms that suspect they will eventually want their own entity but cannot yet justify one. It buys you the learning without the commitment. It also means the entity you eventually build is populated by people who already know your work, which is a materially different proposition from starting with an empty office.
What actually determines the choice
Six things, in roughly this order of importance.
What problem you are solving. A cost problem, a capacity problem, and a scarcity problem look identical from the inside and point to different answers. "I cannot find a qualified bookkeeper who wants to live here" is a scarcity problem and needs continuity of person. "I have three hundred hours of routine production work I would rather not do" is a capacity problem and may need nothing more than outsourcing. "I want to double in five years" is a growth thesis and eventually points somewhere else entirely.
Volume and its predictability. Steady, growing volume rewards ownership. Spiky volume punishes it, because fixed costs do not observe your seasons.
How documented your work is. This is the most underrated variable. If your processes live in your senior people's heads, outsourcing will fail and a dedicated team will take twice as long to become useful. The exercise of documenting how you actually work is valuable whether or not you ever look beyond your borders - and if you are not willing to do it, that is a real answer about which route to take.
Whether you want to manage people. An honest question, and one worth sitting with. Some principals want capability. Some want output and no additional team to lead. Both are legitimate. Only one of them is compatible with routes two and three.
How reversible it needs to be. If the answer is "very", you have narrowed to route one, and that is a perfectly good place to be.
Your regulatory and contractual position. Which brings us to the part that deserves its own section.
Client consent, confidentiality, and data
I am not giving you legal advice here, and anyone who does without knowing your practice should be treated with suspicion. But these are the areas to take proper advice on, and knowing they exist puts you ahead of most of the conversations happening on this topic.
If you are a US firm, the disclosure of tax return information to a third-party preparer - including one outside the United States - is governed by Internal Revenue Code section 7216 and the associated procedures, which contemplate specific written client consent obtained in a prescribed form and manner, with particular restrictions where the recipient is outside the US. Separately, the AICPA's ethics framework addresses the use of third-party service providers and the obligation to inform clients before confidential information is disclosed. Get both properly advised on before you begin, not after.
If you are a UK firm, your obligations sit across the ICAEW or ACCA code on confidentiality, UK GDPR, and your engagement letters. Transferring personal data to India requires a valid transfer mechanism, appropriate contractual protections with the processor, and honest treatment in your privacy notice. India's own data protection regime has also moved considerably in recent years, which affects your partner's obligations as well as yours.
In both cases, check your professional indemnity position. Insurers generally want to know, and generally do not mind being told.
And on the practical question of whether to tell clients: in fifteen years I have not once seen a client object to being told in advance. I have seen clients react badly to finding out. The disclosure is not the risk. The discovery is.
What I see go wrong
Not in order of frequency, but close.
Firms compare hourly rates rather than the total cost of capacity - which includes your supervision time, rework, and the cost of starting again if the person leaves.
Firms over-buy. Someone asks for three people when one, properly integrated, would have proved or disproved the whole idea within a quarter.
Firms under-invest in the first ninety days and then conclude from a bad first month that the model does not work. It is the same first month you would have with a local hire; the difference is that you would not have drawn a conclusion from it.
Firms send their messiest files first, on the reasonable theory that those are the ones they most want rid of. It is the one decision that most reliably poisons the start.
Firms skip the conversation with their own team, and then spend a year managing a resentment they created in an afternoon.
And firms choose their own entity because the arithmetic looked good at scale, without pricing the thing that actually gets consumed, which is partner attention.
Almost nobody regrets starting small. A fair number regret starting big.
Where this leaves you
If you are reading this hoping for a recommendation, I have deliberately not given you one, because the honest answer depends on things I do not know about your practice - the shape of your work, how documented it is, what you are actually short of, and how much appetite you have for managing something new.
What I would say is that the decision is more reversible than it feels while you are making it, provided you start at a size where reversing is not a catastrophe. Almost everyone who has done this well started with less than they thought they needed.
I run an extended-team practice myself, so I am not a neutral party and would rather say so than pretend otherwise. But a good part of these conversations end with me suggesting someone does not need what I offer - that the honest answer is a local hire, or better documentation before anything else, or a seasonal arrangement rather than a permanent team. That is a more useful conversation than the alternative, and I am happy to have it with anyone weighing this up.
If you are somewhere in this decision and want to think it through with someone who has seen it go both ways, I am easy to find.
Dohit Muranjan is a Chartered Accountant and co-founder of Asaya Partners, which builds extended finance teams for Chartered and CPA practices in the UK and US.