MAGAZINE 2026-3

GCE GLOBAL

Professional Accountant Magazine GCE Magazine is an official business publication of GCE Global. Publisher: Alejandro Rios alejandro.rios@gceglobalsolutions.com Editor: Valeria Rodríguez julia.rodriguez@gceglobalsolutions.com Oly Calderon oly.calderon@gceglobalsolutions.com Editorial Team: Oly Calderon oly.calderon@gceglobalsolutions.com Tatiana Torres tatiana.torres@gceglobalsolutions.com Valeria Rodríguez julia.rodriguez@gceglobalsolutions.com Design & Layout: Tatiana Torres tatiana.torres@gceglobalsolutions.com Mariana Elustondo mariana.elustondo@gceglobalsolutions.com Jorge Marin jorge.marin@gceglobalsolutions.com Pink Address: 1061 Esmeralda Street, 2nd Floor, Office 4, Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentine Republic. All strategic oversight, publishing rights and corporate responsibility remain under GCE Global Limited. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of GCE Global Limited. For corporate inquiries: members@gce.global © 2026 GCE Global Limited. All rights reserved.

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Business has no borders. Expertise shouldn’t either. When opportunities cross borders, the right guidance matters. GCE Global pairs you with legal and accounting professionals who bring local knowledge to an international perspective. AUGMENTED INTELLIGENCE

Access the expertise to move forward.

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Table of contents

From Montreal to ELEVATE By Andrés Mauricio Rojas Díaz

Beyond Borders: Winning the International Talent Race

Pag. 6

By María Camila Cárdenas

Pag. 8

Everything You Need to Know About ELEVATE By Oly Calderón

Strategy: Why “Elevate”?

Pag. 10

Pag. 12 Designing the Operational Architecture for Multi-Country Payroll

AI for Human Productivity

Pag. 20

Cross-Border Offboarding

By Daniel Matallana

By Deirdre Jop

Pag. 18

Profitable Client Experience (CX)

Pag. 24

Pag. 28 Payroll Doesn’t Have to Be Scary

What Facing Death Taught Me About CX, AI, and Strategy

By Ian Giles

Pag. 30

By Vicente Ponce

Pag. 32

My Greatest Advantage Was Not Knowing

Maybe Your Company Doesn’t Need More Employees By Nadia Harris

Pag. 34

By Alejandra Figueroa

Pag. 38

GCE Global ranking 2026: The Top 10 Outstanding Firms

By GCE Magazine Editorial Team

Pag. 50

Business Performance Fundamentals: The Building Blocks of Sustainable Success By Álvaro A. Acevedo Jr

Pag. 44

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Borders shouldn’t limit your talent. Found the right candidate abroad? GCE Travel handles visas, documents, and relocation logistics, so your team can focus on the work.

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Make global mobility simpler. Let’s plan the next move.

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FROM MONTREAL TO

ELEVATE

Eight Years of Connection, Transformation and a

Vision Without Borders

EDITORIAL

hen we gathered in Montreal, Canada, in September 2019 for the GCE Global Annual Meeting, we could not have predicted how much the world, or GCE, would change in the years ahead. What began as an opportunity to bring our community together became something much more meaningful: an annual moment to examine where we are, challenge where we are going and prepare ourselves for what comes next. Looking back today, I realize that every gathering has represented a chapter in our evolution. In 2020, the world changed almost overnight: borders closed, offices emptied and international travel stopped. But GCE did not stop connecting. On November 19, we held the GCE Global Summit in Virtual Reality under a message that still defines us today: “Global Connections. Real Relationships.” Technology allowed us to cross borders when physically crossing them was nearly impossible. More importantly, it reminded us that technology becomes truly powerful when it strengthens human relationships.

By Andrés Mauricio Rojas Díaz CEO & President, GCE Global

In 2021, through a hybrid experience between Colombia and Canada, we called ourselves to BE REBORN, it was an invitation to rethink the professional firm of the future, embrace transformation and adapt to new ways of working.

GCE GLOBAL Then, in 2022, in Bogotá, Colombia, we looked inward. Our Internal Summit focused on strengthening GCE: our strategy, ethics, compliance, customer service, business models, international services, technology and, most importantly, our people. That year reinforced an important lesson: Before an organization can scale outward, it must become stronger within.

Then came EQUILIBRIUM 2025 in Windsor, Canada. After years of acceleration, we asked ourselves another necessary question: how do we continue innovating without losing what makes an organization human? EQUILIBRIUM represented balance, between technology and people, performance and well-being, innovation and responsibility, ambition and purpose. And now, in 2026, our journey brings us to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, for ELEVATE. ELEVATE represents the next stage of our global vision: transforming experience, knowledge and relationships into the ability to scale internationally. Foreign market entry, international hiring, augmented Intelligence, global compliance, payroll and client loyalty; these are more than conference topics, they represent some of the fundamental challenges organizations face when moving from local operations to global scale, and they are central to this special ELEVATE edition of GCE Magazine.

ELEVATE also arrives at an especially meaningful moment: GCE is celebrating 25 years. Our story began in Colombia in 2001, as a local professional services organization built around the work of lawyers and accountants serving companies in the Colombian market. Over the years, that vision evolved: accounting, tax, legal, payroll, consulting and business services became part of a broader model designed to support organizations as their needs became more complex. Then, in 2019, GCE entered one of the most important stages in its history: the evolution into GCE Global, an international network connecting accounting, legal, tax and consulting firms across borders., with the international network headquartered in the United Kingdom, what began locally in Colombia evolved into a global platform for professional collaboration. That evolution also changed our perspective. Being global is not simply about opening a company in another jurisdiction or serving a client in another country; it means understanding markets, regulations and cultures; it means managing international talent, payroll and compliance correctly; it means using technology intelligently and combining it with human expertise. That is what we mean by Augmented Intelligence: not technology replacing professionals, but technology expanding what talented people are capable of achieving; and above all, being global means building trust across borders. Perhaps that is why the words we chose in 2020 feel even more relevant today: Global Connections, Real Relationships.

Twenty-five years have changed the scale of GCE. But they have not changed that principle.

Being global means combining technology with human judgment and building trust across borders. The real value of our Summits cannot be measured only by destinations, speakers or presentations. It is found in the relationships created, knowledge shared, decisions made and collaborations that continue long after the Summit ends. Montreal connected us. Virtual Reality proved that borders could not stop us. BE REBORN challenged us to reinvent ourselves. Bogotá strengthened us from within. ELECTRIFY gave us energy. IMPACT gave transformation a purpose. EQUILIBRIUM reminded us to grow without losing our balance. And now, in Santo Domingo, ELEVATE challenges us to go higher. Twenty-five years after our journey began in Colombia, I believe we are once again standing at a starting point.

EDITORIAL

In 2023, we returned to Bogotá for ELECTRIFY. It was time to transform preparation into action. Our community was evolving, our ambitions were growing and a new energy was moving us forward. In 2024, our journey took us to San Salvador, El Salvador, for IMPACT, The Sustainable Firm of the Future, technology and Augmented Intelligence were transforming professional services. IMPACT challenged us to consider not only how quickly organizations could innovate, but how responsibly and sustainably they could do it.

25 YEARS: FROM COLOMBIA TO THE WORLD

The next era of professional services will be more global, more connected and increasingly powered by Augmented Intelligence, it will require organizations capable of combining technology with human judgment, international ambition with local expertise, and speed with responsibility. That is the organization we are committed to building. And that is the community we want to continue building together. Now, it is time to ELEVATE.

Join the mission.

Scale internationally.

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Beyond Borders: Winning the International Talent Race

How leading organizations are building scalable hiring pipelines and leveraging artificial intelligence to compete for the world’s best talent.

From Reactive Recruiting to Proactive Pipelines

By María Cardenas. Junior Recruiter, GCE

The most valuable person for your next critical role may be sitting thousands of miles away and so may the company competing with you to hire them, geography is no longer a barrier to accessing talent, but it is no longer a competitive advantage either. Remote work, digitalization, and globalization have transformed the relationship between organizations and professionals, allowing companies to search across borders while giving candidates access to opportunities in multiple markets. The result is a broader talent pool, but also a more competitive environment in which organizations are competing globally for the same skills and experience.

This transformation is forcing Talent Acquisition to rethink its traditional role. For years, recruiting was primarily designed to respond to immediate business needs: a position became available, a vacancy was published, candidates were sourced and evaluated, and success was often measured by how quickly the role could be filled. That approach is increasingly insufficient. Organizations that want to compete globally need to move from reactive recruiting toward proactive talent strategies, building pipelines before positions become available and developing relationships with professionals before there is a specific opportunity to present. A scalable talent pipeline is more than a large database of resumes. It requires organizations to understand where critical skills are concentrated,

which markets offer access to those capabilities, which sourcing channels generate the strongest candidates, and where talent is being lost throughout the recruitment process. When this information is connected to workforce planning, Talent Acquisition can anticipate future needs rather than simply respond to current vacancies. The question changes from “How do we fill this position?” to “What talent will we need to execute our strategy, and where can we find it?” The Challenge of Global Scalability and Cultural Nuance However, global scalability creates an important challenge: how can organizations maintain consistency without losing the ability to understand people? International hiring requires structured processes, common evaluation criteria, and clear standards to ensure fairness and quality. At the same time, candidates bring different cultural expectations, communication styles, and ways of building trust. The most effective global hiring models recognize that consistency and adaptability are not opposites. They standardize what needs to be consistent while adapting the human interaction to the context. I have experienced this firsthand, I am

GCE GLOBAL from Cartagena, Colombia, a city where warmth and conversation are deeply connected to the way people build relationships. I grew up understanding that starting a conversation, breaking the ice, and creating a sense of connection was a natural way to establish trust.

The future should therefore not be framed as AI versus recruiters, but as AI plus recruiters: technology providing scale and analytical capacity, while people provide judgment, context, empathy, and accountability.

When I began interviewing candidates from different countries, I realized that the same approach did not necessarily create the same experience for everyone: some candidates preferred direct and structured conversations, while others valued more context before discussing an opportunity; even silence could carry different meanings. This taught me that global hiring does not mean treating everyone exactly the same; it means creating consistent processes while remaining sensitive to cultural differences.

Shifting to a Skills-Based Approach

AI plus Recruiters: A Collaborative Future Technology is now adding another dimension to this transformation, artificial intelligence is enabling Talent Acquisition teams to process large amounts of information, support sourcing, identify potential candidates, and reduce administrative work. According to LinkedIn’s 2025 Future of Recruiting report, 73% of Talent Acquisition professionals surveyed agree that AI will change the way organizations hire. Among professionals already experimenting with or integrating generative AI, the technology is associated with an average 20% reduction in workload. The strategic value of AI, however, goes beyond efficiency, when technology reduces repetitive work, recruiters can dedicate more time to understanding candidate motivations, advising hiring leaders, interpreting information, and building relationships. AI can expand the reach of a search and process information at a scale that would be difficult to achieve manually, but it cannot independently understand every human or cultural factor behind a hiring decision.

The changing nature of work makes this combination increasingly important. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 39% of workers’ existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. Artificial intelligence and big data are among the fastest-growing skills, reinforcing the need for organizations to rethink how they identify potential. Hiring based exclusively on traditional job titles, degrees, or previous positions may increasingly limit access to talent. A skills-based approach allows organizations to consider transferable capabilities and potential instead. LinkedIn reports that 93% of Talent Acquisition professionals believe accurately assessing candidates’ skills is crucial to improving quality of hire, while companies conducting more skills-based searches are 12% more likely to make a quality hire. For global organizations, this can significantly expand the talent pool by shifting the focus from where someone has worked to what they can actually do and how their capabilities can contribute to the organization. The Candidate Experience as a Competitive Advantage Finding talent, however, is only half of the challenge. In a global market, access to candidates does not guarantee the ability to secure them.Highly qualified professionals are evaluating organizations just as organizations are evaluating them, considering compensation, growth opportunities, flexibility, leadership, culture, and the experience they receive throughout the hiring process.

A slow or confusing process can cause an organization to lose a strong candidate even when the opportunity itself is attractive. The candidate experience has therefore become part of the organization’s competitive advantage. This is why talent pipelines should not be measured solely by the number of candidates they generate or how quickly positions are closed. Organizations need to understand the entire journey, from identifying and attracting talent to engaging, assessing, and converting candidates. They also need to measure the quality of the hiring decisions themselves. LinkedIn reports that 89% of Talent Acquisition professionals believe measuring quality of hire will become increasingly important, yet only 25% feel highly confident in their organization’s ability to measure it effectively. The opportunity is clear: talent acquisition must move from measuring activity to demonstrating impact. Building the Organization Best Candidates Choose Ultimately, the organizations that win the international talent race will not necessarily be those with the largest recruiting teams or the most technology, they will be those capable of integrating workforce planning, talent pipelines, data, AI, and human judgment into one coherent strategy. Technology can help organizations identify talent faster, and data can show them where to search. AI can help recruiters operate at a greater scale, but people remain responsible for creating trust, understanding context, and communicating why an organization is worth choosing. Talent can now be found almost anywhere in the world, so the competitive advantage lies not simply in having access to it, but in creating the systems, culture, and experience that make people want to join and stay. The international talent race is no longer about who finds the best candidates first, it is about who builds the organization

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Global Scale-up: Beyond the Horizon

Everything You Need to Know About ELEVATE

By Oly Calderón, Marketing lead, GCE.

2026 has made one thing clear: stability can break overnight. Earthquakes and landslides have paralyzed cities, supply chains, and entire offices this year, and in every case the same thing was exposed how much of a company’s growth depended on structures that many firms had never really stopped to look at directly: regulatory compliance, governance, operational sustainability. In a world that shakes more often than we’d like, compliance is the structure that allows a business to remain relevant after the shock.

For a firm operating beyond its borders, transcendence is no longer measured only in growth, but in the ability to stay standing when something breaks. That premise is what shaped ELEVATE, the gathering that brought together lawyers, accountants, and professional services leaders from over 132 countries in Santo Domingo, for its sixth edition.

The conversation was organized around four pillars that, together, answer a single question: what does a firm actually need in order to scale globally without losing control along the way? Business Fundamentals: growing without losing the base Financial management, strategic planning, profitability, pricing, productivity. It sounds like standard fare, but in the current context it stops being a textbook chapter and becomes the first survival filter: a firm expanding operations across multiple countries without a solid financial base isn’t growing, it’s accumulating risk. Looking into 2027, that risk gains a new layer: sustainability reporting

is moving from voluntary to mandatory in more jurisdictions, and AI is already reshaping how firms forecast, price, and measure productivity. The fundamentals won’t change, but the data behind them will need to hold up to a level of scrutiny that didn’t exist a few years ago.

A firm expanding operations across multiple countries without a solid financial base isn’t growing, it’s accumulating risk

GCE GLOBAL People & Leadership: the discipline that holds the operation together No structure, however well designed, survives without the people running it. Talent development, culture, professional wellbeing, and disciplined collaboration across borders are, in practice, the nervous system of any international expansion. The challenge heading into 2027 isn’t just attracting talent, it’s preparing teams to work alongside AI without losing the judgment and culture that make a firm trustworthy, and building leadership capable of holding a distributed, hybrid workforce to the same compliance standard everywhere it operates. The Human Element: judgment and ethics in the age of AI This pillar touches something automation cannot resolve: professional judgment. In a time of technological change and disruption, the question is no longer

how much artificial intelligence can do, but which decisions still require human criteria and ethical responsibility.

At that point, trust becomes the actual deliverable.

Ian Giles anchored this around a central idea — the back office is no longer just operational support; it’s where a firm redefines its identity and purpose as it moves into the next era of professional service.

These four pillars aren’t separate compartments, they’re the same idea seen from different angles, a firm that wants to transcend, not just grow, needs solid financial fundamentals, people and culture that hold the operation together, human judgment in the face of disruption, and a client relationship that gets rebuilt constantly.

Client Relationships & Service: value that no longer explains itself Client development, value proposition communication, redefining how services get delivered. A law or accounting firm’s client is no longer looking for compliance executed correctly, they’re looking for a partner who understands their business across several jurisdictions at once. By 2027, that expectation will reach further: clients will want proof that a firm’s own use of AI is transparent, and that its sustainability commitments hold up under the same scrutiny it applies to them.

The structure that remains

Compliance and sustainability aren’t a brake on any of this. They’re the reason a business is still standing after the shock. That is what ELEVATE put on the table for lawyers and accountants who no longer operate in a single country, but on a map that keeps shifting: the chance to look the structure in the eye before something puts it to the test.

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Strategy: Why “Elevate”?

A deep dive into the four pillars for international success: Foreign Market Entry, International Hiring, AI Implementation, and Client Loyalty. To elevate is to gain enough altitude to see the whole operation at once, not just the compliance checklist; but the market underneath it, the people running it, the tools reshaping it, and the client sitting at the center of all four. From ground level, each of these looks like a separate department with its own KPIs, its own budget line, its own set of quarterly goals that rarely talk to each other. From altitude, they collapse into the same question asked four times: what does it actually take for a firm to grow across borders and stay standing while it does? Most international growth strategies get built in the wrong order, a business decides to enter a new

market, and the first calls it makes are to a local law firm, a tax advisor, a registration agent, the compliance stack goes up before anyone has confirmed there’s a real opportunity underneath it. That instinct isn’t wrong, exactly; it’s incomplete.

This deep dive walks through the four pillars that actually determine whether an international expansion works: finding the market before finding the paperwork, hiring people for reasons that go beyond the legal minimum, using AI in a way that sharpens the firm instead of blending it into the crowd, and treating client loyalty as something earned continuously rather than assumed by default.

Compliance is the floor a business has to stand on, it was never supposed to be the blueprint for the building itself.

None of the four eliminates compliance, all four explain what compliance was supposed to make possible in the first place. Foreign Market Entry: find the gap before you find the rulebook Compliance is usually treated as

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providers are and where they’re falling short, and recognizing that the same service can succeed in one jurisdiction and fail in the one next door, even when the regulatory environment is nearly identical.

the first gate a business has to clear before entering a new market, it isn’t. Satisfying every financial and regulatory requirement in a country where there’s no real demand for what you offer doesn’t get a business any closer to expansion, it just gets it a very well-documented presence in a market that was never actually waiting for it. The question that needs answering first has nothing to do with regulation: what triggers a purchase decision here, and what need is currently going unmet? That requires a different kind of homework than a legal audit: understanding local buyer behavior, mapping who the existing

Markets don’t fail businesses because of paperwork; they fail because nobody checked whether the offer solved a problem the local client actually had.

Markets don’t fail businesses because of paperwork; they fail because nobody checked whether the offer solved a problem the local client actually had. Picture two businesses entering the same country at the same time. The first arrives fully licensed, registered, and compliant, built entirely around the client behavior it knows from its home market, assuming the same triggers will apply.

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The second spends real time before launch mapping what actually moves a purchase decision locally, even if that means the compliance work starts later. The first business is legal, the second one has an actual reason to be there. Only one of them is positioned to still be there in three years. This is why market entry has to start with identifying a gap (a problem local providers aren’t solving well, or aren’t solving at all) and only then move into the work of complying with the rules that let a business operate there legally. Compliance can be built around a real opportunity once that opportunity is confirmed. A market cannot be manufactured around a license that’s already been secured. Reverse the order, and a business ends up perfectly authorized to serve a market it has no actual foothold in. For a legal or accounting firm specifically, this logic multiplies. It isn’t just the firm’s own entry into a new jurisdiction that matters, it’s every client the firm serves who is also trying to enter markets of their own. A firm advising on international expansion has to run the same gap-first diagnostic on behalf of each client, in each market that client is targeting, before the conversation ever reaches which local filings and registrations apply. The regulatory answer changes almost nothing about whether the underlying opportunity is real; skipping straight to it just means a client learns, expensively, that they were compliant in a market that never needed them. Once a business knows why a market needs it, the next question follows immediately: who is actually going to do the work of serving it? International Hiring: what makes a company attractive, beyond the minimum

Labor obligations: minimum wage, benefits, contract terms, statutory leave; are the floor a company has to meet in any market it hires in. They are not, on their own, what makes that company a place people want to work.

Meeting the legal minimum makes a business compliant as an employer, it doesn’t make it attractive as one, and in a competitive international hiring market, that distinction decides who a business can actually recruit. Meeting the legal minimum makes a business compliant as an employer, it doesn’t make it attractive as one, and in a competitive international hiring market, that distinction decides who a business can actually recruit. What determines whether a business can hire and keep good talent in a new market is the question obligations don’t answer: what motivates a professional once salary stops being the differentiator? Growth path, autonomy, a sense that the work has weight beyond a paycheck, exposure to cross-border projects that wouldn’t exist at a purely domestic company; these are the terms international hiring is actually negotiated on, and they shift depending on where the hiring happens. What retains a senior manager or key talent in one market may not move the needle at all in another; treating international hiring as a single, exportable playbook is the same mistake as treating market entry as one-size-fits-all. It requires the same gap-finding instinct, aimed at people instead of

clients: what is this specific talent pool actually short on, and is the business offering it? The return on getting this right compounds in a very concrete way. A company that invests in an employee’s growth (new skills, more complex projects, a visible path upward) isn’t only retaining one hire. It’s building the internal capability its own international growth depends on, because every client engagement a business can credibly take on is limited by the skill and judgment sitting inside its own team. High turnover in an expansion market doesn’t just cost recruiting fees; it resets institutional knowledge about that market to zero, over and over. An employee who grows is, in practice, the mechanism by which the company grows, there’s no version of sustainable international scale that doesn’t run through the people doing the work on the ground.

GCE GLOBAL Expanding internationally adds a layer of complexity: operational expertise and industry credentials don’t always automatically travel across borders. A technical specialist or regulatory expert in one country can’t simply show up and operate identically in another, and specific industry certifications often need local recognition before they count for anything on paper.

AI is a force multiplier where it accelerates work... It becomes a liability where the client is actually paying for the human judgment itself.

That makes international hiring partly a strategic exercise in itself, mapping which qualifications transfer, which require local adaptation, and which roles can be filled by someone still completing that process while contributing everything short of the final sign-off. Companies that treat this as a formality to sort out after the offer is made lose candidates to businesses that had the answer ready before the interview. With the right people in place, how they actually do that work is changing faster than almost anything else in the industry. AI Implementation: co-building without becoming one of the crowd New AI tools appear every day, and that pace is exactly what makes this pillar harder than it looks; the challenge isn’t finding a tool, any business can find one by lunchtime; It’s identifying, inside a company’s own process, which parts genuinely get sharper with AI and which parts, if handed over to it, just make the business look and sound like every other competitor using the same tool the same way. That’s the risk worth naming directly: invisible convergence. When every business in a market has access to the same models producing the same kind of firstdraft output, the differentiator was never the access to the tool, it’s the judgment about where to apply it and where to deliberately hold it back.

A useful way to draw that line: AI is a force multiplier where it accelerates work that was always going to reflect the company’s existing expertise: first-pass research, data synthesis, document review at scale. It becomes a liability where the client is actually paying for the human judgment itself. Strategic advice specific to their situation, an ethical call under pressure, a negotiation that depends on reading a room no model has access to. Handing those moments to AI doesn’t just risk a worse outcome; it quietly erases the exact thing a client was paying a premium for. Because access to AI is now universal rather than exclusive, using it responsibly has become part of the trust equation with clients, not a separate technical concern. Data privacy, accuracy, and honest disclosure about where and how AI was used in a deliverable sit right next to the compliance conversation, a business that is transparent about its use of AI is making the same kind of credibility statement as a company that is transparent about its regulatory standing. Co-building with AI is as much a responsibility as it is an opportunity: used well, it sharpens what a business is actually good at and frees up capacity for the judgment calls that matter. Used the same way everyone else uses it, it quietly flattens whatever used to set that company apart. In highly regulated or specialized business sectors specifically, that responsibility carries a liability dimension that cannot be ignored. A first-pass contract review, a financial forecast, or a product analysis that AI helps assemble is still, at the end of the process, signed off under a professional’s name and the company’s brand: the tool doesn’t absorb any of the accountability if the output is wrong; That’s precisely why the

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Retention built this way does more than protect existing revenue. It turns the client’s growth and the company’s growth into the same trajectory, which, for a business built around international expansion, is precisely the outcome every other pillar exists to support.This is where the choice between a loose network of affiliates and an actual crossborder capability shows up most clearly. Handing a client off to a thirdparty vendor every time they cross a new border satisfies the immediate need, but it also hands the relationship to someone else at exactly the moment the client is expanding, the moment loyalty is easiest to lose. A business that can follow its client across jurisdictions itself, even imperfectly, keeps the trust that took years to build instead of resetting it in someone else’s hands. line between where AI accelerates and where it substitutes has to be drawn deliberately rather than left to whatever the tool defaults to: the companies getting this right are the ones that can explain, client by client, exactly which parts of the deliverable a person reviewed and why. None of this (the market found, the talent kept, the tool used well) means anything if the client at the center of it all doesn’t stay. Client Loyalty: the loyalty was never to the brand A client isn’t loyal to a company. A client is loyal to whichever solution solves their problem most effectively, and today, that solution happens to carry your company’s name. It’s worth sitting with that distinction, because it changes where the smartest investment actually goes. If loyalty attaches to outcomes rather than to a logo, then the relationship only survives as long as the business keeps being the most effective answer to the client’s problem, and a competitor offering a marginally better answer is a real threat regardless of how long the relationship has lasted.

That reality reshapes where growth effort should go. Winning a new client from scratch means starting the trust-building process at zero: proving competence, proving reliability, proving cultural and regulatory fluency across whatever borders that client operates in, all before a single dollar of deepened revenue shows up. Deepening a relationship with a client the business already serves starts from a position of proven trust. It is, structurally, the more efficient place to put energy, and strategically the sharper one: the company already understands that client’s business, its risk tolerance, and its blind spots better than any competitor could on day one. That’s the logic behind up-selling and cross-selling done well,, not as a sales tactic bolted onto the relationship after the fact, but as the natural extension of actually solving more of a client’s problem over time. A client expanding into a third country doesn’t need a new provider for that market; they need the partner that already understands their business to extend into it alongside them.

The floor, not the destination None of these four pillars is, technically, about compliance. That’s the point. Compliance was never meant to be the destination, it’s the minimum altitude a business needs to reach before it can rise at all. A company can be perfectly compliant and licensed in every market it touches and still fail, because compliance was never the thing that made a market worth entering, a hire worth keeping, an AI tool worth using well, or a client worth keeping close. The gap found in a new market, the talent kept beyond the legal minimum, the tool applied with judgment instead of by default, the client kept instead of endlessly replaced: that’s what elevation actually looks like, once a business is finally high enough above the compliance checklist to see it. Elevate isn’t a name for the floor, it’s a name for what becomes visible once a company has already secured it.

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Better matches begin with better understanding. At GCE Human, we look beyond the vacancy to understand the people, culture, and needs behind it. We help organizations identify talent that can truly contribute and grow with them.

Find the right people for what’s next. 4

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Designing the Operational Architecture for Multi-Country Payroll

Bridging that gap is a governance issue before it’s a technology one. Consistent control frameworks applied across complex operating environments are what define effective global payroll governance. Decentralized local execution often introduces process variance, increasing the risk of missed deadlines and erroneous payments. Drawing from operational models highlighted by Safeguard Global, structural control requires: • • •

By Deirdre Job,

Payroll Specialist, GCE.

ulti-country payroll rarely fails because of a missing tax table, so why does it fail? It fails because no one owns the decision when three systems disagree about a number. As organizations scale across jurisdictions, payroll stops being a back-office task and becomes an operational architecture problem: one where governance, not technology, is the load-bearing wall. According to Deloitte’s latest survey, 63% of organizations say their current global payroll model lacks standardization and visibility, this gap isn’t an ornament. Fragmented payroll doesn’t just create administrative drag, it erodes employee and customer trust, and exposes the company to fines, legal risk, and even stop-work orders in key markets. There is a paradox at the center of the global payroll scheme: employers and employees don’t experience payroll the same way. Employees experience payroll locally, in their currency, their language, under their statutory benefits; while leaders need to trust it globally, as one coherent, auditable system.

Multi-country payroll rarely fails because of a missing tax table. It fails because no one owns the decision when systems disagree about a number. When governance is built into the system itself, payroll stops being a source of risk and becomes a source of confidence.

Global compliance calendars Standardized approval chains Pre- and post-payroll audits

A core challenge in multicountry payroll is data fragmentation. We must know where the source of truth is, because getting this wrong means every downstream process: approvals, reconciliation, reporting; inherits the ambiguity. Running payroll across varied local engines without centralized architecture forces payroll and finance teams to rely on manual spreadsheets, introducing security vulnerabilities and data corruption. Spreadsheets can support analysis, but they’re a weak foundation for enterprise payroll governance when they become the place where approvals, calculations, or employee changes happen; that’s what drives uncertainty, fragmented access, and makes control difficult. The issue isn’t a better spreadsheet template, it’s a different architectural layer altogether. An integration layer can centralize employee records, workflow approvals, calculation inputs, payroll results, reporting, and audit history.

GCE GLOBAL Cross-Border Compliance & Tax Exposure Operating payroll across international jurisdictions introduces complex statutory liabilities that extend beyond simple salary disbursements. As noted in Ramco Systems research on workforce mobility and global expansion, rapid international scale creates critical compliance exposure: • Accidental permanent establishment: managing cross-border remote employees without tracking role scope can inadvertently create corporate tax residency, exposing the parent organization to local corporate income taxation. • Cross-border mobility & tax withholdings: managing remote workers and business travelers across regions requires continuous monitoring of day counts, double-taxation treaties, and local social security contributions. • Data privacy: transferring personally identifiable information across borders to regional payroll processors demands strict data residency architecture, encryption, and compliance with global privacy regulations.

This ownership needs to be a property of the system itself: who can change what, at which stage, with what sign-off, encoded in workflow logic, not tribal knowledge. Data architecture isn’t just an efficiency play, it’s increasingly a trust and transparency mandate. The clearest signal of whether the architecture is working isn’t whether people got paid on time, it’s whether leadership can compare labor cost across markets without a manual reconciliation project. If each country reports labor cost differently, the business loses the ability to compare, budget, and make timely decisions. Multi-Country Payroll Delivery Architecture If the technology architecture answers “where does the data come from?”, the delivery architecture answers “who does the work, and where?” This is a structural choice, and it shapes almost everything downstream, cost, risk exposure, and speed of expansion. There are three delivery models that dominate this architecture: •

Centralized: All payroll is managed from a single platform using standardized processes.

•

Decentralized: In-country teams handle payroll for their own region, providing a high degree of local expertise, but this fragmented approach can create compliance blind spots and tends not to scale well. Local knowledge is real, but it’s the model most prone to the exact standardization gap Deloitte’s survey identified. Hybrid: Blending both models means centralized governance paired with local execution.

Ultimately, the architecture behind multi-country payroll is never a technical decision, it’s a trust decision made visible through process. When governance is built into the system itself, rather than layered on after something breaks, payroll stops being a source of risk and becomes a source of confidence: for employees who need to trust they’ll be paid correctly, and for leaders who need to trust what the numbers are telling them across every market. Taking operations to whichever country you choose doesn’t have to feel like walking into a fire of local laws, taxes, compliance, and government requirements. With a well-designed operational architecture, you can take your operations beyond borders.

Data Orchestration As an organization scales, the complexity isn’t more countries, it’s the increase of compliance load, reconciliation overhead, and cross-border data orchestration, this is where most architectures actually break, companies need clear ownership for data changes, payroll review, variance checks, approvals, and final release; most importantly when multiple departments contribute inputs like overtime, bonuses, retroactive payments, expenses, allowances, and commissions.

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AI for Human Productivity

How to deploy artificial intelligence as a practical tool to automate daily tasks, save time, and maximize your global team’s performance.

GCE GLOBAL Think about your week: How many hours go into things that aren’t really your job? or reformatting a spreadsheet, drafting a first version of a report, prepping talking points for a meeting, translating a message for a colleague in another country? None of that requires your judgment, it just requires your time. That’s exactly the gap AI is built to fill. The biggest jump in productivity doesn’t come from a smarter tool. It comes from asking a different question.

instead of starting from a blank page; editing is faster than creating, and it’s a much better use of your attention. 3. Repetitive Research Comparing regulations across countries, summarizing long documents, pulling numbers together into something readable, tasks that are simple but slow are exactly where AI saves the most time, especially in a business where every market has its own rules.

From Commands to Delegation Most people’s first instinct is to give AI a command: “write a paragraph about X.” That works, but it caps how useful the tool can be, the shift that actually changes your week is learning to delegate an outcome instead of dictating a task.

By Oly Calderón,

Marketing lead, GCE.

et’s be honest: most of us didn’t fall in love with AI. We started using it because someone told us to, or because we got tired of writing the same email for the fifth time. Maybe you’ve asked ChatGPT to fix your grammar, or Claude to summarize a document. That’s a start. But for most people, it’s also where things stop. And that’s the real opportunity here, AI isn’t a single tool for a single task; it behaves more like a new team member who never sleeps, never gets bored, and is happy to help with almost anything you hand over: you just have to learn how to actually delegate. You’re Probably Using 10% of What’s Available If your relationship with AI so far has been “write this for me” or “translate this,” you’re not wrong, you’re just early. Those are genuinely useful entry points, but the real productivity gains show up when you stop treating AI like a search engine and start treating it like an assistant you brief.

Instead of asking “can AI do this one thing for me?”, start asking “what would I hand to a capable assistant if I had one sitting next to me?” That reframes AI from a one-off favor into an ongoing part of how you work. In practice, this means giving context, not just instructions. Who is this for? What’s the goal? What’s off-limits? What does “good” look like here? The more of that you provide up front, the less editing you’ll need to do afterward, and the closer the first draft gets to something you’d actually send. Four Everyday Places to Start You don’t need a transformation plan to see results. A few places to look first: 1.Meetings and Follow-Up Instead of taking notes yourself, have AI summarize the recording and pull out action items and owners. You stay present in the conversation instead of halflistening while you type, and nothing falls through the cracks afterward. 2. First Drafts Whether it’s an email, a proposal, or a policy summary, let AI produce a rough version so you’re editing

4. Cross-Border Communication For global teams, AI is a genuinely useful bridge for tone and translation, so nothing gets lost between a message written in Spanish and a colleague reading it in English, or the other way around. For Teams Working Across Borders This matters even more when your team is spread across countries, time zones, and languages, which, if you’re part of a global organization, is probably every day. AI can help standardize how work gets done regardless of where someone sits: the same quality of first draft, the same tone in communications, the same speed of turnaround, whether your teammate is down the hall or twelve time zones away.

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That consistency is worth more than it sounds. It means less time spent re-explaining context to a new market, and more time spent actually moving projects forward together. A well-briefed AI can carry a house style or a compliance checklist from one region to the next far more consistently than a rotating cast of people relearning it each time. A Day, Two Ways Picture a Tuesday: a project lead in one country needs a compliance summary before a call with a client in another.

•

The old way: block an hour, dig through the latest regulatory updates, translate the notes for a colleague who’ll present them in a different language, then rewrite the whole thing again when the client asks a followup question by email that afternoon. The AI-assisted way: ask for a first-pass summary of what changed and why it matters, get a structured draft back in minutes, spend the saved time actually checking it against the source and sharpening the parts that need a human read on nuance. The follow-up email later that day takes two minutes instead of twenty, because the context from the morning is already sitting there to be reused, not rebuilt from scratch.

Nothing about the second version cuts corners, it just moves the hour of work from typing to thinking; which is where it should have been all along. A Quick-Start Checklist If you want to move past the “one task” stage this month, these five moves will get you there faster than reading another explainer:

•

Pick one recurring task you already dislike doing and make it the pilot. Boring and repetitive beats important and complex for a first try. Write a short brief before you prompt: who it’s for, what “good” looks like, and anything that’s off-limits. Save the prompts that work. A short library of “briefs that got a good result” is worth more than any single output. Review before you send, always, not because AI is unreliable, but because the final check is still your job. Share what works with your team. The fastest way to raise everyone’s baseline is to pass along the one prompt that saved you an hour.

What Usually Gets in the Way Three concerns come up again and again, and all three are worth addressing directly rather than brushing aside. “It’s going to replace me.” In practice, the roles that change are the repetitive parts of a job, not the judgment, relationships, or strategy that make the role valuable in the first place. AI takes the first draft off your plate; it doesn’t decide what “good” looks like. “I can’t trust the output.” That’s a fair instinct, and it means the review step stays human. Treat every AI output as a draft from a fast, tireless junior colleague, useful, but always worth a second read before it goes out the door. “It gave me something generic.” That’s almost always a signal about the input, not the tool. Vague prompts produce vague drafts. Specific context (audience, goal, constraints, examples of the tone you want) produces something much closer to what you’d write yourself.

How to Know It’s Actually Working Skip the vanity metrics. The real test is simple: are the same tasks taking you less time than they did a month ago? Are you sending the first draft AI gave you with light edits, or rewriting it from scratch? Is your team spending meetings discussing decisions instead of reciting updates that could have been summarized in advance? If the answer is yes even for one recurring task, that’s not a small win, it’s the beginning of a habit that compounds. Multiply that across a team, and across a week, and the hours add up fast. Start This Week You don’t need to overhaul how you work overnight. Pick one task this week that you do on autopilot (something repetitive, not particularly strategic) and hand it to AI instead. See what comes back, adjust your instructions, try it again. That’s really all productivity with AI is: small, deliberate habits that compound over time. The people getting the most out of these tools aren’t necessarily the most technical, they’re the ones willing to experiment past the first use case, and to keep going once they find one that works.

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Profitable Client Experience (CX)

The art of standardizing your global CX to turn client loyalty into scalable revenue and secure organic corporate referrals.

GCE GLOBAL A survey measures a moment. A system designs one on purpose, every time, in every market.

By Oly Calderón,

Marketing lead, GCE.

sk most teams what they’re doing about client experience, and you’ll usually get one answer: “we send a satisfaction survey after the project closes.” That’s it’s just incomplete, a survey measures a moment, it doesn’t design one. CX isn’t a form clients fill out at the end, it’s every interaction that happens between the first email and the tenth renewal, and for a company operating across multiple countries, it’s whether all of that feels like one company, no matter which office picks up the phone. You’re Probably Managing 10% of the Experience If your CX efforts so far have lived in a single touchpoint (a welcome email, a closing survey, a thankyou note) you’re not wrong to have one, you’re just early. The real commercial upside shows up when you stop treating CX as a nice gesture at the edges of the relationship and start treating it as a system that runs underneath the whole thing. Think about a client relationship that spans a year, three service lines, and two regional offices. How many of those handoffs are actually consistent? How many depend entirely on which account manager happens to answer that week? That inconsistency is invisible internally and very visible to the client, and it’s exactly where loyalty quietly leaks out.

From Reactive to Designed Most CX effort is reactive: a client complains, someone smooths it over, everyone moves on; that’s damage control, not experience design. The shift that actually moves revenue is building the good experience in on purpose, before there’s anything to fix. Instead of asking “how do we handle it when a client is unhappy?”, start asking “what would make it nearly impossible for a client to be surprised, confused, or left waiting, at any point in this relationship?” That’s a design question, not a customer-service question, and it’s the one that turns a satisfied client into a referring one. In practice, this means mapping the relationship end to end (onboarding, delivery, renewal, escalation) and deciding, deliberately, what “good” looks like at each stage, instead of letting it vary by office, by account manager, or by mood. Four Places to Standardize First You don’t need to redesign the whole client journey overnight. Four places make the biggest difference fastest: 1. Onboarding The first thirty days set the tone for the whole relationship. A standardized welcome sequence (same checklist, same intro call structure, same first-deliverable timeline) makes a client in one market feel exactly as taken care of as a client in another. 2. Communication Cadence Waiting for a client to ask “what’s the status?” is a design failure. A standard cadence of proactive updates: weekly, monthly, whatever fits the service, removes the anxiety that quietly erodes trust, and it costs almost nothing to run once it’s built. 3. Handoffs Every time a client moves between a service line, a department, or a country office, there’s a risk that

context gets lost and the client has to re-explain themselves. A short handoff protocol, what gets passed along, and who confirms the client landed safely on the other side, closes that gap. 4. Feedback Loops Collecting feedback isn’t the hard part; closing the loop is. A standard process for what happens after a client raises something (who owns it, how fast it gets acknowledged, how the fix gets communicated back) is what turns feedback into trust instead of into a form that disappears into a folder. For Teams Working Across Borders This matters most in a multicountry operation, where “consistent CX” actually means something concrete: the same response-time standard, the same tone in written communication, the same escalation path, regardless of which office is closest to the client. A client with entities in three countries shouldn’t experience three different companies. When the experience is standardized, expansion into a new market doesn’t mean rebuilding trust from zero, it means extending a relationship that already works, which is exactly what turns an existing client into a source of new ones. What Usually Gets in the Way Three objections come up in almost every conversation about standardizing CX, and each is worth answering directly. •

“Our services are too different across regions to standardize.”

The service can vary (tax rules, labor law, local practice) while the experience around it stays constant: how fast you respond, how clearly you communicate, how a handoff feels. Standardize the frame, not the content. •

“Clients don’t complain, so they must be happy.”

Silence is not a metric, most unhappy clients don’t complain,

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they just don’t renew, and they don’t refer. The absence of complaints tells you nothing about the presence of loyalty.

all three, the clearest sign that the experience, not just the service, had become something worth recommending.

•

How to Know It’s Actually Working Skip the satisfaction score as the only signal: it’s useful, but it’s lagging; watch what happens next: is your renewal rate holding steady across offices, or dropping wherever the experience is weakest? Are referrals coming from every market, or clustered in the one place that happens to do onboarding well? Is time-to-resolution on a client issue shrinking, or does it still depend on who happens to pick up the request?

“It’s a soft skill, we can’t measure it.”

Response time, renewal rate, and referral rate are all measurable, and all downstream of experience. You don’t need to quantify “warmth” to prove that CX is working; you need to watch the numbers it drives. One Playbook, Three Markets Consider a professional services group operating in three Latin American markets, each with its own office, its own account managers, and (without anyone intending it) its own version of client experience. Onboarding took two weeks in one market and five in another. One office sent proactive monthly updates; the others waited to be asked. When a client expanded into a second country, they had to re-explain their whole account from scratch, because nothing about their first office’s context traveled with them. The pattern showed up clearly in the numbers before anyone named it a CX problem: referrals were concentrated almost entirely in the market with the fastest onboarding, and churn was highest wherever a client had recently been handed off between offices or service lines. The fix wasn’t a new tool, it was a single playbook: one onboarding checklist, translated into each local language but identical in structure and timeline, one standard for proactive updates, regardless of office, one handoff protocol requiring a warm introduction and a shared context document any time a client moved between teams or countries. None of it required lowering the bar anywhere, it required raising it to match the best-performing office, everywhere. Within two quarters, onboarding time in the slowest market matched the fastest. Referral activity, previously concentrated in one country, began showing up evenly across

If referrals start showing up in markets where they used to be rare, that’s not a coincidence, it’s the clearest signal that consistency, not just goodwill, is what’s driving growth. A Quick-Start Checklist If you want to move from a single survey to a real system this quarter, start here: •

Map the full client journey (onboarding through renewal) before touching any single touchpoint.

•

Pick the one stage with the widest gap between your best and worst office, and standardize that first. Write down what “good” looks like at each stage, in specific terms: timelines, tone, who owns what. Build a simple handoff protocol for any moment a client moves between people, teams, or countries. Track referral and renewal rate by office, not just companywide, the gaps will tell you where to focus next.

Start This Quarter You don’t need a full CX department to start seeing results. Pick the one touchpoint where your offices differ most, onboarding is usually the biggest offender, and standardize just that. Write down what “good” looks like, roll it out everywhere, and watch what happens to referrals from that segment over the next two quarters. That’s the real art of profitable CX: not a grand gesture, but the discipline of making the good experience the default one, everywhere, every time. Until clients stop noticing the service and start recommending it.

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Cross-Border Offboarding: Executing Global Terminations Without Local Lawsuits expanding globally via an Employer of Record (EOR) model, the promise of agility frequently collides with the rigid reality of local labor laws.

By Daniel Matallana, Legal Manager, GCE.

While international clients look for the flexibility they’re used to under frameworks like the US “Employment At-Will,” highly protective local labor laws are designed to penalize quick firings with mandatory reinstatements, reputational damage, and steep financial penalties. How do we bridge the gap between a client’s need for immediate flexibility and the strict compliance global markets demand? The answer isn’t fighting local laws, it’s mastering them through a strategic, standardized approach.

Hiring global talent is easier than ever, but letting international employees go remains one of the most dangerous compliance minefields in today’s business landscape. For companies

This article explores how EORs and international clients can navigate these turbulent waters by leveraging the Global Termination Triage Matrix: a system designed to assess risk, align expectations,

and execute seamless, zero-lawsuit separations. 1. The Expectations Clash in Global Offboarding The root cause of most crossborder offboarding disasters isn’t poor legal execution; it’s a fundamental clash of expectations. Many international clients operate with an “At-Will” mindset, mistakenly assuming they’re in a traditional “co-employment” setup similar to a US PEO model. They think they can simply send an email saying, “Let this employee go today.” But in an EOR model, the EOR is the sole legal employer. When a client demands a sudden termination in a highly unionized or employeecentric jurisdiction (like many in Latin America or Europe), the EOR absorbs 100% of the legal liability. To neutralize this risk, we have to reeducate the client without causing

GCE GLOBAL commercial friction. We must clearly separate the operational decision (the client no longer needs the worker) from the legal execution (how the EOR safely removes the worker from payroll). By proactively addressing this expectation clash, we shift the conversation from a confrontational “You can’t do that” to a strategic “Here is the safest, most costeffective way to get this done.” 2. Deploying the “Global Termination Triage Matrix” To effectively communicate these risks and choose the right path, we need to step away from dense legal jargon and use a framework that business leaders intuitively understand. Enter the Global Termination Triage Matrix. This matrix is a visual traffic-light risk system designed to help EORs and clients quickly assess, classify, and figure out the safest exit route in any jurisdiction. GREEN LIGHT (Low Risk - Procedural Exit): These are scenarios where the law heavily favors the employer or where natural off-ramps exist. •

•

Triggers: Terminations during a statutory probationary period, or the natural expiration of a fixed-term contract. Action: Immediate execution with standard notice. Litigation risk is minimal, and the client’s need for speed is easily met.

YELLOW LIGHT (Medium Risk - Documented Cause): These situations require careful maneuvering. The client wants to terminate for underperformance or misconduct, but local laws demand hard proof. • •

Triggers: Performance issues, repeated policy violations, or role redundancies. Action: Implement a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) or gather undeniable disciplinary evidence. If the client can’t provide the necessary documentation, the strategy must immediately

pivot to the Red Light protocol to avoid wrongful termination claims. RED LIGHT (High Risk - Mutual Agreement Required): This is the danger zone. The client wants an immediate, without-cause separation in a highly protective jurisdiction (like Brazil, France, or Colombia). Unilateral dismissals here almost always lead to disastrous lawsuits and forced reinstatements. • •

Triggers: “At-Will” style requests without legal cause or sufficient documentation. Action: The EOR blocks the unilateral dismissal and pivots to negotiating a Mutual Termination Agreement (Settlement). While this involves paying a financial premium (severance plus a bonus), it effectively buys the EOR’s peace of mind and secures a release of future claims.

3. Zero-Lawsuit Cross-Border Execution Understanding the matrix is only half the battle; the real value is in the execution. A “Zero-Lawsuit” execution requires definitive tactics to shield the EOR from contingent liabilities while keeping the experience seamless for the international client. To pull this off, EOR legal and operations teams must stick to three core pillars: A. The Shield of Settlement Agreements In over 80% of high-risk international dismissals, a mutual settlement is the only foolproof way to avoid litigation. The execution phase must focus on drafting watertight settlement agreements that include comprehensive waivers of future claims, tailored to the mandatory requirements of that specific local jurisdiction.

B. Controlled Communication Protocols Lawsuits often stem not from the dismissal itself, but from how the employee was treated. We have to control the narrative. Clients should never communicate a termination directly to the employee without the EOR’s legal guidance. EOR representatives must lead the offboarding meeting, ensuring the tone remains professional, objective, and strictly aligned with local legal standards. C. Financial Predictability Clients hate hidden costs. Before pulling the trigger on a termination, the EOR must provide a transparent, all-inclusive financial breakdown. If a mutual agreement is the way to go, the client needs to know the exact cost of the severance package upfront. When clients realize that paying a controlled premium today prevents a massive, unpredictable lawsuit tomorrow, they gladly greenlight the strategy. Conclusion Firing an employee across borders doesn’t have to mean taking a blind leap into a legal abyss. By dismantling the “At-Will” illusion, standardizing risk assessment through the Global Termination Triage Matrix, and strictly sticking to controlled execution tactics, EORs can turn a compliance nightmare into a streamlined operational strength. At the GCE ELEVATE 2026 Summit, we’ll dive deeper into this matrix, equipping you with the exact strategies to manage client expectations and execute global terminations seamlessly. Because in the world of global employment, the best lawsuit is the one that never happens.

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Payroll Doesn’t

Have to Be Scary Why better processes, smarter technology and a little preparation can take the fear out of payday.

Global Payroll Strategist and Advisor.

Around that sit tax obligations, benefits, retirement contributions, reporting, record-keeping and compliance requirements.

Payroll has an image problem. There, I said it.

That sounds straightforward on paper (and it was meant to).

For many small businesses, growing organisations and people new to payroll, the word itself can trigger a fairly predictable reaction: taxes, deadlines, compliance, employee queries, missing hours, incorrect deductions; Payments that absolutely have to arrive when expected.

The complexity comes from the number of moving parts, gross pay needs to be right, deductions need to be right, tax treatment needs to be right, hours need to be right, employee classifications need to be right and, of course, the money needs to arrive on time: every time. A mistake in almost any other back-office process can usually wait until tomorrow, not for payroll.

By Ian Giles

There is plenty that can go wrong... But that does not mean payroll itself needs to be frightening. Most payroll stress comes from uncertainty, poor processes, weak data and last-minute decisionmaking, get the foundations right and payroll becomes far more predictable, it becomes a controlled business process rather than a monthly, biweekly or weekly scramble. The starting point is understanding what payroll is actually there to do. At its simplest (and that’s still not simple), payroll takes an employee’s earnings, applies the appropriate deductions and contributions, and ensures the correct net amount reaches that employee.

A payroll mistake tends to become personal and loud very quickly. I’d like to caveat here, that while I use the term ‘payroll mistake’, they seldomly are. Payroll sits at the very end of a long line of upstream information and data. Paying employees correctly is a shared responsibility among the business.

Technology should remove work, not create more of it One of the simplest ways to reduce payroll risk is to stop relying on manual calculation and fragmented processes. We’re almost in 2027, not 1827! This is the AI Revolution, not the Industrial Revolution.

Payroll software can automate calculations, apply tax rules, maintain records and support direct deposit. For smaller businesses in particular, that can remove a significant amount of repetitive administration. The important point I’m making here is that, however, is that technology should make the process easier to control. A payroll system is most valuable when it helps reduce manual intervention, improves consistency and gives you confidence in the data moving through the process. Software can help with compliance too, but it is not a substitute for good governance. A system can calculate what you tell it to calculate, it cannot always tell you whether the underlying decision was correct.

Compliance becomes manageable when it becomes routine Compliance often feels like the intimidating part of payroll because the consequences of getting it wrong can be significant. Minimum wage requirements, overtime rules, worker classifications, tax reporting and payment deadlines all create obligations that organisations need to understand and manage.

GCE GLOBAL In a rapidly changing world, the best defence is consistency. Make sure employees and contractors are classified correctly, use reliable time and attendance records, and keep on top of tax changes. Submit payroll taxes and reports according to the required schedule. Most compliance failures do not appear from nowhere, they usually grow from small gaps that remain unnoticed for too long. That is why payroll should never depend on one person remembering everything.

Your payroll calendar may be one of your most useful controls A well-managed payroll calendar sounds basic, it is also one of the easiest ways to prevent avoidable problems. Your calendar should show pay periods, payroll cut-off dates, submission deadlines, tax filing dates, year-end activity and any known disruption caused by weekends or public holidays. That visibility matters. Payroll teams need enough time to validate inputs, finance teams may need to fund payroll, managers may need to approve changes, providers may have cut-off times of their own. When these activities sit inside a clear calendar, fewer things become urgent. When they live in someone’s head, payroll quickly becomes more fragile.

Good payroll depends on good records Accurate payroll records are another area that often receives attention only when something goes wrong, and that is too late. They also provide valuable information about how the organisation is operating. Overtime trends, changing workforce patterns, recurring

corrections and unusual deductions can all tell you something, payroll data is not simply a record of what employees were paid. It can also highlight weaknesses elsewhere in the business. Modern payroll platforms will retain much of this information, but organizations still need clear policies around access, security, retention and backup.

Outsourcing is not an admission of defeat There comes a point for some businesses when managing payroll internally no longer makes sense, the organization may be growing, so: the workforce may be becoming more complex, regulatory requirements may be increasing and the internal team may simply have too many competing priorities. That is where outsourcing can help, payroll service providers and professional employer organisations can reduce administrative workload, provide access to specialist knowledge and support businesses as they scale. But outsourcing does not remove accountability, you still need to understand what is being delivered, what data you are providing, which controls remain internal and how performance will be measured. A provider can run payroll for you, but they cannot own every business decision behind it.

Employees have a role to play too Payroll works better when employees understand the basics. They should know how to read their payslip, understand common deductions and know where to go when something looks wrong. That does not mean turning every employee into a payroll expert, it means reducing confusion and creating a clear route for questions. A workforce that understands its payroll information is more likely to identify discrepancies early,

which gives the payroll team an opportunity to resolve issues before they become larger problems. It can also reduce repetitive queries around deductions, taxes, pay dates and documentation.

Review the process before the process reviews you Even a stable payroll process needs regular attention. Payroll teams should periodically review how the process is performing, where errors occur and whether controls still work as intended: look at overtime patterns, review employee classifications, check tax withholding discrepancies, track corrections and off-cycle payments and identify repeated employee queries; those signals can reveal where the process needs attention. A payroll process that worked perfectly for a company of 50 employees may struggle at 500. A process designed around one location may no longer work across several. A manual approval that once took five minutes may become a bottleneck as the organisation grows. Payroll needs to evolve with the business.

Payroll should be predictable Payroll will probably never become the most glamorous business function, and that’s fine. Its real value comes from being accurate, controlled, compliant and dependable. Understand the basics: use technology where it removes unnecessary work, build compliance into the process, maintain a clear payroll calendar, keep good records, educate employees, review performance regularly and bring in external expertise when the complexity demands it. Do those things consistently and payroll becomes far less intimidating, it becomes what employees expect it to be: something that simply works.

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What Facing Death Taught Me About CX, AI, and Strategy By Vicente Ponce,

Corporate Communications Specialist, GCE.

How do you provide better service when facing grief? I faced this working at a Chilean cemetery group with over 140,000 clients and five Parks. You cannot ease the pain, but making people feel supported matters. This value is universal: when clients know they can count on you, you become their first choice.

You cannot ease the pain, but making people feel supported matters. When clients know they can count on you, you become their first choice. Beyond Technical Expertise: The Power of Empathy In other industries, clients may not be grieving, but they navigate high-stress scenarios. The principle remains: beyond technical expertise, empathy builds trust. The objective is to reduce uncertainty during the process and remind them they can count on you afterward. Once the service is completed and paid, how soon do you follow up to check in? During the process, did the client chase you, or did you anticipate doubts to provide security? Routine strips our empathy, making us forget the customer’s pain.

Redefining Client Satisfaction at a Funeral

automation. Today, we have AIpowered processes.

Customer service room: branding flawless, script reviewed with the executive. A man in his sixties enters alongside his mother, over eighty years old. The executive speaks up: “How can we assist you?” “We are here to bury my brother.” His mother stares quietly into the void. My skin turns cold, and a sharp pain hits my chest.

Scaling Empathy Through Automation and AI

The project was deeply moving, built around a seamless process. An app created a dedicated profile for each loved one, collecting photos to project during the memorial service, automatically generating a tribute video, and sending personalized condolence messages to everyone who registered. Music played and photos rolled, it was the sample video shown as the last touchpoint before setting up the profile; it wasn’t a smile, but expression returned to her face. The mother simply said, “I want the video for my son.” Later, the representative mentioned feeling relief after offering something to comfort their grief. Back then, the key was

This initiative boosted satisfaction metrics and instilled pride across the team. But the real challenge was organizational: managing

GCE GLOBAL a Customer Service team of over 80 people, operating Monday through Sunday across five different cities, handling an average of 20 daily burials, 365 days a year.

Routine strips our empathy, making us forget the customer’s pain.

The approach balanced personalization with efficiency. Once a few fields were completed to build the profile, all workflows ran automatically, even display schedules in the memorial room. Customer Service was reserved strictly for exceptional cases. As a result, the program was executed by adding only six minutes of work to the overall process, keeping team capacity intact.

But today AI reshape possibilities, with enough order in your information system and some connections, the right platforms can boost your communication to fidelize your clients. What should I write? When is the best time to contact them? May I forget it? These tasks can be done by an IA Agent. The Customer Journey: Where Strategy Begins An AI agent executes tasks, but it only works well with a strategy built on human judgment and expert criteria. Technology cannot create direction or empathy on its own. Regardless of your industry and the problem you solve for the client, the first step is defining every touchpoint across the entire process.

The mechanism changes depending on the context: it could be an app to honor a life, a simple email updating process status, or a text message confirming that everything went well. Human Strategy Defines the Outcome Technology and AI provide the tools, but human empathy and clear strategy define the outcome. That is why at GCE Global Solutions, we work alongside our clients to build strategies that strengthen loyalty and drive profitability through targeted remarketing and recommendation programs, always grounded in the core principle of supporting your customers every step of the way.

An AI agent executes tasks, but it only works well with a strategy built on human judgment and expert criteria. This is the Customer Journey, it maps the stages from when a client first learns about you, makes a decision, and completes the purchase, to when they use the service and receive post-sale support. From there, it extends into loyalty, remarketing, and recommendation. Why does organizing this matter? Only when you know the path your client takes and their needs at each stage can you establish the right action plan to support them.

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Maybe Your Company

Doesn’t Need More Employees What if growing your business didn’t automatically mean hiring more employees? The future of scaling may be about a strong core team, talented external talent, better relationships and AI used where it actually makes sense.

GCE GLOBAL A department is overwhelmed, we increase the department. And sometimes that is absolutely the right answer. But hiring another permanent employee should be one possible answer to a business need, not the default answer. So, in my eyes we now need to move from headcount planning to capability planning.

By Nadia Harris

or years, increasing headcount was almost automatically seen as a sign of growth. I saw it in startup statistics, venture capital, company valuations - if the business was growing, the team was expected to grow with it. And then, obviously, came the layoffs. Having restructured multiple companies around the world, I sadly have to say that many of the roles I came across should probably never have been hired in the first place. Not because the people weren’t good, but because companies hired based on growth that wasn’t sustainable, added people instead of fixing inefficient processes and made promises they ultimately couldn’t keep. Of course, people paid the price for it. We’ve seen a massive shake in the employment market and, with it, a massive shake in trust. Today, we can do this differently. And spoiler... this article is not about replacing people with AI.

Instead of asking “Who do we need to hire?”, start by asking “What are we actually trying to achieve?” Maybe you need another full-time employee. But... maybe you need a brilliant specialist for six months. Maybe you need ten hours a week from someone with expertise your internal team doesn’t have. Maybe the capability already exists somewhere else in the organization. Maybe a repetitive part of the work can be automated while the more complex part stays human. Or maybe the process itself is so unnecessarily complicated that adding another person would simply add another human being to the complication. I’d like to recommend running a simple capability check before opening another position: • •

• •

Your future hire won’t be an employee There is an almost automated response inside organizations when more work appears: “We need to hire someone full-time.” But do we really need to do that? For decades, we have built workforce planning around headcount. There is a gap, we create a position. There is more work, we add another person.

• •

What problem are we actually trying to solve? Is this capability permanently needed, or are we responding to a temporary increase in work? Does this knowledge need to sit inside the company? Could an independent specialist or fractional expert do this better than a permanent generalist? Which parts genuinely require human judgment, creativity or relationships? Which parts could be simplified, eliminated or automated?

Only after answering those questions should we ask: “Do we actually need another fulltime employee?”

The company of the future has a core, not an empire I don’t think the future company will have no employees. Actually, I think having the right core team will matter more than ever. These are the people who carry the business - they know it in & out, hold the key competencies and knowledge, build the most important relationships and are genuinely connected to where the company is going. They are the heart and soul of the organization, and there are very good reasons why you want them there permanently. But at the same time, not everyone needs to be part of that core. Around it, you can build an amazings network of remote specialists, freelancers, fractional leaders, consultants and partners who bring in exactly the expertise you need at a particular moment. And this is where I think we need to change how we look at growth. Growing from 500 to 5,000 employees is not automatically a bigger success story. If another company can achieve the same or more with 500 great people, access to brilliant external talent and processes that actually work, I would argue that this is much smarter scaling. Well, and such an approach also forces companies to become much more intentional about what they actually want to keep inside. Which knowledge is critical? Which relationships need continuity? Where do you need people who live and breathe the business every day, and where would you actually benefit from someone coming in with a completely different perspective? The point is not to make the core team as small as possible. It is to make sure that every role inside it has a real reason to be there. Talent no longer has to belong to you The way people want to work is changing. The gig economy and independent workforce have grown enormously, and there is a

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whole group of highly experienced people who simply don’t want one employer to define their entire professional life. They work with several companies, move between projects, build very specific expertise and increasingly value the freedom to decide where, how and with whom they work. Yet many companies still treat freelancers, independent specialists or fractional leaders as a temporary alternative to the “real” hire. I think that thinking is becoming seriously outdated. In fact, some of the most interesting people I work with are so good precisely because they don’t work for just one organization. They have seen the same problem in five different companies, industries or countries. They know what worked somewhere else, what failed completely and what your internal team may simply not see because they have been looking at the same business from the inside for years. That kind of exposure creates an incredible amount of knowledge, and bringing it into the organization at the right moment can be much more valuable than hiring another permanent generalist simply because there is work to be done. Remote work makes this even more powerful because access to talent is no longer limited by geography either. Your core team can be distributed across several countries while a fractional leader works with you from another one, freelancers join for specific projects and external specialists come in when you need expertise that makes absolutely no sense to employ permanently. For me, this is one of the biggest shifts in how we should think about the future workforce: companies don’t need to own every piece of talent they benefit from. They need to become much better at finding great people, building strong relationships with them and bringing the right expertise into the business when it actually makes sense.

Relationships become more important when structures become looser There is something that worries me about this model, though. The more distributed and flexible the workforce becomes, the easier it is to make work completely transactional. Employee number 472, freelancer number 19, vendor number 8. Someone joins a project, delivers something, disappears and another person takes their place. Technically, that may be incredibly efficient. Humanly, it can become pretty terrible. And I don’t believe you can build a great business in the long run if people constantly feel interchangeable, regardless of what kind of contract they have with you. Actually, I think the opposite needs to happen. The less we can rely on traditional structures, the more we need to invest in relationships, trust and community. Someone doesn’t need to have the same employment contract, live in the same country or appear on the same organizational chart to feel genuinely connected to the people they work with. I have worked with external partners for years who understand businesses better than employees who have just joined them. I have seen remote teams build incredibly close relationships despite rarely meeting in person.

What creates that connection is not the legal form of the relationship. It is being treated as someone whose opinion matters, being included in the right conversations, having a shared understanding of what you are trying to achieve and, quite simply, enjoying working with each other.

This is also why I think our obsession with “culture fit” will need to evolve. If the future workforce is made up of employees, freelancers, fractional experts, partners and people working across different countries and cultures, the goal can’t be to make everyone behave like they belong to one perfectly polished corporate identity. You actually want different perspectives and experiences coming into the business. The challenge is to create relationships strong enough that very different people can trust each other and do exceptional work together. In a much more flexible future of work, belonging may have much less to do with where someone sits on the organizational chart and much more to do with the quality of the relationship you build with them. AI should help scale output, not organizational nonsense Well, we need to talk about AI. But I am much less interested in the endless discussion about how many employees AI will replace. The question I find much more interesting is what AI and automation allow us to stop building in the first place. For years, companies responded to increasing complexity by adding people. More administration meant another administrator. More reporting meant another reporting role. More people meant more managers, more coordination and more meetings. Today, we have technology that gives us an opportunity to question that cycle rather than simply making it run faster. This is where AI can make scaling much more sensible. Before opening another position, look at the work itself. What are people spending hours searching for, copying between systems, summarizing, coordinating, checking or reporting? What could be automated completely? Where could AI make someone significantly faster without

GCE GLOBAL taking away the human judgment that actually matters? And which processes are so unnecessary that they shouldn’t be automated at all, but simply removed? Putting AI on top of a terrible process doesn’t make it a good process. Sometimes it just helps you produce the same organizational nonsense faster. Here’s a mini surprise from me - a quick AI and automation check before adding more headcount: • • • • • •

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What work is actually creating the need for another person? Which parts are repetitive, administrative or highly standardized? Can we eliminate or simplify any of that work before automating it? Where could AI increase the capacity of the people we already have? Which decisions still require human judgment, accountability or relationships? Do we have the right data protection, governance and oversight before putting AI into this process? And after all of that - do we still need another employee?

For me, this is really what the entire conversation comes down to. The future company isn’t about replacing employees with freelancers or replacing freelancers with AI. It is about becoming much more intentional about how we build organizations in the first place - keeping an incredible core team around the capabilities that genuinely belong inside the business, accessing brilliant external talent when it brings something different to the table, investing much more seriously in the relationships holding that ecosystem together, and using AI to remove unnecessary work rather than unnecessary humans. That is what sensible business growth should start looking like.

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My Greatest Advantage

Was Not Knowing

By Alejandra Figueroa Founder of FIGARRE Cacao & Chocolate, Guatemala.

was 41 years old the first time I saw a cacao pod. What makes that even more remarkable is that, until then, I had never really stopped to think about where chocolate came from. Today, I am a cacao producer and chocolate maker, and I have had the opportunity to introduce a Guatemalan product to different international markets. Yet none of this was ever part of my plan. I did not grow up surrounded by cacao plantations, nor did I study agronomy or have any connection to the cacao industry. My life was completely different. I hold a degree in Marketing, had already completed an MBA, and was close to finishing a master’s degree in Finance. I worked in family businesses, but for many years, approximately 70% of my time was devoted to being a mother. My schedule revolved around my children: school, sports practices, competitions, and everything that comes with being present as two children grow up. I never considered those years a pause in my professional life.

They were simply the stage of life I had chosen to live. What I did not know was that, at 41, I was about to begin an entirely different one. My father is a retired anesthesiologist who, at some point, decided to purchase a farm located approximately seven hours from Guatemala City. The property had previously been used for cattle, and someone suggested that he plant cacao because the crop was particularly well suited to the conditions in that region. My father knew absolutely nothing about agronomy, but he had a rather particular theory that still makes me smile today: “Biology is biology.” So he decided to give it a try. I first visited the farm approximately two years after he purchased it. I went there with my children, and my first impression was far from romantic. It was extremely hot, incredibly humid, and there were far too many insects. I did not like it.

GCE GLOBAL There was no life-changing revelation beneath a cacao tree, nor did I imagine that one day this place would become part of my future. Quite the opposite.

That was when I discovered something that has stayed with me ever since: the more I learned, the more aware I became of how much I still had to learn.

In 2022, after divorce, my father handed the farm over to me to manage and operate. I did not receive it thinking that an extraordinary opportunity had just landed in my hands. My reaction was much simpler: What was I supposed to do with a farm? I knew nothing about agriculture, nothing about trees, and even less about cacao. My background was in business and management, and I still did not like insects. Yet I had a responsibility in front of me, and I could either focus on everything I did not know or begin learning.

After several months, that limited knowledge began to produce results—quite literally. Cacao pods began to appear. Seeing them only fueled my curiosity, and I decided to spend an entire week on a farm, immersed in intensive training with one of Guatemala’s most knowledgeable cacao experts.

I chose to learn. I began reading, researching, asking questions and, most importantly, seeking out people who knew far more than I did. I was fortunate to find extraordinary mentors. I received my first guidance in cacao production and, from there, met growers, technicians and specialists who introduced me to a world that, until then, had been completely unfamiliar to me. Over time, some of them became not only mentors and teachers, but also business partners.

Perhaps that was when something changed. I discovered that behind this fruit, which I had only recently encountered for the first time, existed an extraordinary universe of cultivation, genetics, harvesting, fermentation, drying, aromas, flavors, transformation and, above all, people. I could not tell you exactly when I fell in love with cacao. There was no particular day or extraordinary moment. It simply happened.

The farm was still exactly seven hours away from my home. The distance had not changed; I had.

The woman who had once thought the place was far too hot, humid and full of insects began driving those seven hours every two or three weeks because she wanted to return. The journey itself became part of the experience: music, podcasts, thoughts, ideas, landscapes and many hours alone with myself. There was also an emotionally difficult side to it. For years, I had structured my life around being present for my children, and every time I left for the farm, I felt as though I were leaving a piece of my heart behind in the city. I had to understand that discovering a new side of myself did not mean abandoning the person I had been. I could continue being a mother while also beginning to build something of my own. I was not leaving behind who I had been; I was discovering who else I could become. After approximately a year and a half of working on the farm, we finally succeeded in growing, harvesting and fermenting our own cacao. That led to a much less romantic, but absolutely necessary, question: What was I going to do with it? A farm has to be sustainable. There are employees, salaries, maintenance, transportation and investment. Passion is wonderful, but passion alone does not make payroll. I needed to find a way to add value to what we were producing.

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Someone with extensive knowledge of cacao tasted our product and asked me a simple question: “Why don’t you make chocolate?” It sounded like an excellent idea, except for one small detail: I did not know how to make chocolate. I did not even know how the beans in front of me could eventually become a chocolate bar. By then, however, I had discovered something far more important: I did not know how to make chocolate, but I knew how to learn. So I repeated the process that had brought me that far. I asked questions, sought out people who knew more than I did, experimented, made mistakes and tried again. In October 2023, we made our first chocolates. Then came percentages, flavors, feedback, changes, packaging, colors and, eventually, an identity. That is how FIGARRE was born. The name comes from my two family names, Figueroa and Arreaga, and represents my gratitude to my parents: for who I am, for everything they have given me, and for the support I have received from them throughout my life. I remember the first time I held a finished chocolate bar bearing our logo. I felt an enormous sense of pride, but also disbelief. I looked at it and thought, “Did I really create this?” The brand continued to evolve. We refined the packaging, found our style and built an identity of our own. Even today, I sometimes look at a FIGARRE bar and find it difficult to believe that something that did not exist only a few years ago was born from the very farm I initially had no desire to manage. Creating good chocolate and building a brand, however, turned out to be only the beginning. Then came a much greater challenge: taking our product beyond Guatemala. And once again, I found myself not knowing.

A Good Product Does Not Guarantee a Market One of the first lessons I learned when I began exploring international markets was that being proud of my product did not mean the rest of the world was waiting to buy it. We can have exceptional raw materials, carefully manage our processes, develop a high-quality product and build an attractive brand. Even then, when we enter another country, no one is obligated to know who we are. The buyer sitting across from us may know nothing about our company, our story or our farm and, in many cases, may not even be familiar with the potential of Guatemalan cacao. A good product may open a door, but it cannot build a market on its own. For me, going out into the world meant becoming a beginner again.

I had to understand that internationalizing a business is not simply a matter of manufacturing a product, translating a label, setting a price and shipping it to another country. Before trying to sell, there is something far more important we must do: understand who is in front of us. Every market defines value differently. Tastes change. Packaging preferences change. Sizes, price sensitivity, consumption habits, negotiation styles and decision-making timelines all vary. Something that may be highly attractive to one consumer may be completely irrelevant to another. Over time, therefore, I stopped entering a new market asking only, “How can I sell my chocolate here?” Instead, I began asking a different question: “What do I need to understand about this market before I try to sell to it?” It may seem like a subtle difference, but it completely changes the way we

GCE GLOBAL approach business. Before They Are Markets, They Are Cultures Participating in trade shows, business missions and international meetings has given me the opportunity to introduce FIGARRE to people from cultures very different from my own. Those experiences have taught me that a negotiation begins long before anyone sits down to discuss quantities, prices or commercial terms. It begins with observing, listening and asking questions. Not every market defines value in the same way. For some buyers, price quickly becomes the center of the conversation. For others, origin, story, traceability, quality, presentation or product consistency are far more important. Some want to understand the technical characteristics first; others need to understand the story behind what they are buying. The way relationships are built also changes significantly. In Latin America, we tend to establish personal connections relatively quickly. We talk, share stories and build rapport quite naturally. In other cultures, trust may require more time, greater formality and, above all, a consistent demonstration of reliability. Neither approach is necessarily better than the other. They are simply different. Understanding this has helped me avoid one of the easiest mistakes to make when trying to internationalize a business: interpreting another culture solely through the lens of our own. We cannot enter a new market assuming that people will buy the way we buy, negotiate the way we negotiate or value exactly the same things we value. We must learn to observe first. Adapting Without Losing Who You Are Exploring other markets also raises a difficult question: How much should we change in order to

adapt? There is a strong temptation to modify a product immediately when an international buyer tells us they need something different. Some adaptations are necessary and can even open extraordinary opportunities. At the same time, there is a risk in trying so hard to appeal to every market that we lose what made our product special in the first place.

For me, internationalizing FIGARRE has meant learning to find a balance between adaptation and identity.

FIGARRE is rooted in Guatemalan cacao, our farm, our process and a story deeply connected to where we come from. That identity is not something we should hide in order to enter another market. On the contrary, it is part of our value. What we can adapt is the way we communicate that value. A particular market may require a different size, different packaging, additional information, another pricing strategy or an entirely different way of telling our story. Listening to those signals does not mean abandoning our essence. It means learning how to communicate with someone who sees the world from a different perspective. I have learned that not every piece of feedback means we need to change our product, but every piece of feedback can teach us something about the market in front of us.

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Trust Also Crosses Borders Over time, I came to understand that there is something even more important than convincing someone to taste our chocolate: earning their trust. When a relatively young company enters an international market, it does not necessarily have decades of reputation behind it. Trust has to be built from the ground up, and it cannot be achieved through an impressive presentation or a compelling sales pitch alone. It is built by responding, delivering on our promises, remaining consistent, knowing our product inside and out, and honestly acknowledging what we do not yet know. A buyer may initially be attracted to a chocolate bar because of its flavor, presentation or story. A sustainable business relationship, however, depends on much more.

Behind every product there is a company, but above all, there are people and a promise. That is why one of the greatest lessons international markets have taught me is that, even when we talk about exports, logistics, certifications, pricing and commercial strategies, business is still fundamentally about relationships between people. In the end, someone is making a decision that contains one very simple question: “Can I trust you?” The answer is not built in a single meeting. It is built over time. From Seeking Sales to Building Relationships At first, I thought constantly about finding buyers. How do I close a

sale? How do I secure an order? How do I get someone to say yes? Today, I think much more about building relationships. A sale may happen once. A strong relationship can open doors we did not even know existed. A conversation at a trade show may become an opportunity months later. Someone who has no interest in buying from us may introduce us to someone who does. A market that initially seemed perfect may show us that we are not yet ready, while another we had never considered may surprise us. I have learned not to measure every opportunity solely by its immediate outcome. International expansion requires patience, follow-up and the ability to maintain relationships even when business does not happen after the first meeting. It also requires accepting that not every market will be right for us and that a “no” can sometimes contain just as much valuable information as a “yes.”

Throughout this process, every country has taught me something and, in some way, every market has forced me to understand my own company better. My Greatest Advantage Was Not Knowing Curiously, taking FIGARRE into the world brought me back to exactly where I had started when I stood in front of that first cacao pod: “I don’t know.” I did not know how to grow cacao, so I learned. I did not know how to ferment it, so I learned. I did not know how to make chocolate, so I learned. I did not know how to build a chocolate brand, so I learned. When the time came to introduce that brand to other countries, I discovered that I did not know how all those different cultures and markets worked either. So I went back to doing exactly what I had done from the beginning: asking, listening, observing and learning.

GCE GLOBAL Perhaps that is why I now believe that my greatest advantage was not knowing. Not knowing forced me to seek out people with more experience than I had. It taught me to listen and not to assume that my way of doing things was necessarily the only way. It allowed me to make mistakes, correct them and try again. Every time I thought I finally knew enough, a new world appeared and forced me to become a beginner again. Today, I understand that entering a new market requires a combination that may seem contradictory: a strong sense of who you are and tremendous humility about everything you still do not know. My story is not the story of a woman who dreamed of owning a chocolate company since childhood. That dream did not exist. I built it as I went. Perhaps that is one of the parts of my story I value most, because it taught me that we do not necessarily have to know at 20, 30 or 40 exactly who we are going to be for the rest of our lives. We can change direction, discover new abilities, begin something we never imagined and allow ourselves to become beginners again. I was 41 when I first saw a cacao pod. I did not know how to grow cacao, ferment it or make chocolate, much less how to take a brand born in Guatemala into international markets.

strangely enough, that no longer worries me as much. Taking a product into another country is not simply about getting it across a border. It also requires us to cross that border ourselves: to question our assumptions, discover other cultures, understand new ways of doing business and accept that there will always be something new to learn.

Because sometimes our greatest advantage does not lie in everything we already know, but in having the courage to say: “I don’t know how to do it yet, but I can learn.”

My journey began in front of a fruit I did not know, on a farm I did not want, at a moment in my life when I could never have imagined that I was beginning an entirely new story. And perhaps that is why, if I had to summarize what these years have taught me in a single thought, it would be this:

You do not need to have all the answers before you begin. You need to know who you are, understand the value you can offer, and have enough humility to learn from everything you do not yet know.

But I knew something that ultimately proved far more important: I knew how to learn. That same ability is what I now consider essential when we think about internationalizing a business. We must know our product and our origins deeply, but we must also be willing to listen before we sell, respect cultural differences, adapt without losing our identity, and build relationships rather than simply pursue transactions. Today, I still do not have all the answers and,

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Business Performance Fundamentals: The Building Blocks of Sustainable Success

The Sixth Question: Are You Keeping What You Earn?

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Are we using our resources efficiently?

Are we building a business that can perform even better in the future?

By Álvaro A. Acevedo Jr, Esq., CPA, LL.M. (Tax), CFF, EA

usiness performance is the measure of how effectively an organization converts strategy, people, capital, and opportunity into durable value. It is not the same thing as rising revenue or a profitable quarter. A high-performing business is financially sound, operationally efficient, strategically focused, responsive to its customers, disciplined in how it deploys capital, and able to adapt when conditions change. Managers, owners, investors, and advisers generally test performance with five familiar questions:

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Are we growing?

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Are we profitable?

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Are we generating cash?

For a business that operates across borders, those five questions are necessary but not sufficient. Revenue, accounting profit, cash flow, and return on investment describe performance only up to the point where taxes, withholding, compliance costs, legal structure, and cross-border friction begin to take their share. A company can post strong growth and still surrender a meaningful part of what it produces to avoidable tax leakage, inefficient withholding, weak or missing documentation, inaccurate filings, poorly designed intercompany arrangements, unmanaged state, local, foreign, or shareholder-level exposure, or a structure that no longer reflects how the business actually operates. Tax should never become the sole measure of performance. But tax, legal structure, and compliance belong inside the operating model, not in a year-end folder or on a checklist pulled out the week before a transaction. That is why an international business should add a sixth question:

Are we keeping what we earn— legally, efficiently, and defensibly—in every jurisdiction where we operate? The sixth question does not replace the first five. It completes them. 1. Strategy and Objectives Strong performance begins with a clear strategy. The organization must know what it is trying to achieve, which customers it intends to serve, how it will compete, and what sets it apart. Broad ambitions such as “grow the business” or “lead the industry” are not objectives. Effective objectives are specific, measurable, time-bound, and owned by an accountable leader: increase annual revenue by 15 percent; improve operating margin by three points; raise customer retention to 90 percent; shorten the cashconversion cycle; enter two new geographic markets; cut days sales outstanding; improve return on invested capital; eliminate compliance failures and taxrelated cash leakage. Objectives of that kind align the organization.

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Employees make better decisions when they can see how their work contributes to a defined result. For a cross-border business, strategy must be matched by structure. Before entering a new country or market, management should consider ownership, operating entities, customer and supplier contracts, intellectual property, financing, employment arrangements, and the plan for distributing profits—together, not one at a time. The cost of designing a workable structure before expansion is almost always far lower than the cost of repairing one after revenue, assets, employees, contracts, and tax obligations have accumulated around it. A business should not wait for an audit, a sale, a financing, a dispute, or a tax notice to find out whether its structure fits its operations. 2. Revenue Growth and Profitability Revenue is the most visible sign of activity, and the least complete. Management should understand what is driving it: which products, customers, regions, and channels are growing; whether revenue is recurring, project-based, or concentrated in a few relationships; whether growth comes from price, volume, new customers, acquisitions, or deeper penetration

of existing accounts; and whether the growth carries sustainable margins with it. Context matters. A company growing at 5 percent may look healthy until management learns that its market is growing at 15 percent. Growth should be measured against budget, prior periods, competitors, industry conditions, and the company’s own strategic objectives. Revenue must also translate into margin. The following measures each answer a different question:

Measure

What

Gross margin

The economics of the product or service before general operating expenses

Operating margin

Profitability after the ordinary costs of running the business

EBITDA margin

Operating performance before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, subject to appropriate adjustments

Net margin

What remains after all expenses, including financing costs and income taxes at the entity level

After-tax-cash yield to owners

What owners can actually receive or reinvest after entity-level tax, withholding, repatriation cost, and shareholder-level tax

A company that grows sales while costs grow faster is expanding without getting stronger. A company with a healthy net margin may still be worth less than it appears if a large share of that profit cannot be retained, reinvested, or distributed efficiently.

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That last row is where the sixth question enters. Two businesses can report identical operating margins and deliver very different returns to their owners because of differences in: •

Federal, state, local, and foreign income taxes.

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Employer payroll and employment-tax obligations.

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Value-added, sales, or goods-and-services taxes, to the extent they are non-recoverable, uncollected, or not reflected in pricing.

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Customs duties and other import costs.

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Withholding tax on interest, royalties, dividends, management fees, and service payments.

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Transfer-pricing outcomes.

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The tax treatment of distributions, repatriation, and exit transactions.

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Shareholder-level taxes.

Sustainable profitability is not the profit shown on the financial statements. It is profit that can be retained, reinvested, distributed, financed against, or realized in a sale. 3. Cash Flow and Cost Management Profit and cash are related, but they are not the same. A company recognizes revenue when it invoices a customer and may wait weeks or months to be paid; in the meantime, it must pay employees, suppliers, landlords, lenders, insurers, and governments. A profitable business can fail if it cannot meet its obligations when they come due. Management should understand three categories of cash flow: