How a UK Enterprise Scaled a 60-Person India Team Without an Entity

60: India hires on EOR
9 months: To full strength
2,000+: India employees Wisemonk manages

The challenge

Scaling to Sixty India Hires Without Setting Up a Subsidiary

This UK enterprise needed about sixty people in India, and it needed them soon, spread across engineering, support and operations to keep pace with a customer base growing faster than its headcount. The textbook move, open a subsidiary and build the payroll and HR to run it, was a months-long project on its own, and leadership was not ready to commit to a permanent entity before the India operation had earned it.

There was also the quieter cost. Standing up sixty employees in a new country usually pulls senior people into compliance and HR work for a quarter or more. The company wanted the team hired and paid properly from week one without any of its own leaders turning into part-time India administrators.

In short, it wanted enterprise scale without the enterprise setup, and the freedom to formalise later rather than up front.

The solution

Recruiting and Employing the Whole Team Through One EOR Partner

Wisemonk recruited across the open roles and employed all sixty people as Employer of Record, so sourcing, hiring and compliant employment sat with one partner instead of a string of vendors. Full strength came at nine months.

Everyone joined on a proper Indian contract, with provident fund, professional tax, TDS, gratuity and health benefits from the first cycle, and pay benchmarked to the local market so a well-known enterprise name still competed for senior talent. Payroll, onboarding, equipment and day-to-day HR for the whole group ran in one place.

Because it all ran on EOR, the company reached sixty people without an entity, and kept the door open to graduate onto its own entity later if the India operation justified it.

The results

A Compliant 60-Person India Team in Nine Months

The company built a compliant 60-person India team in nine months, at a scale most would assume needs a subsidiary, with none of the fixed cost or lead time one brings.

All sixty are hired, paid and kept compliant through a single partner, part of the 2,000-plus India employees Wisemonk manages for global companies, which left the company's own leaders free to spend their time on customers.

With the team proven, the entity question is one the company answers on its own schedule, not a box it had to tick before the first hire.

We had to build a sixty-person India team quickly, and we were not ready to commit to a subsidiary. Wisemonk recruited and ran the whole team on EOR, so we scaled fast and kept the option to set up our own entity later.

— Chief Operating Officer, UK enterprise SaaS company