The conversation I keep having This week, AO announced it was shifting UK call centre roles abroad. The company blamed Labour's policies, pointed to a 145% rise in profits, and handed £20m to shareholders. The timing tells you something. So does the framing. I have had versions of this conversation with people running their own thing for years now. The question is always the same: should we move some of this overseas? The answer is never simple. What I have learned is that the decision rarely comes down to cost alone. The businesses that get this right think about it differently from the ones that regret it. The real cost is not the wage bill When someone tells me they want to move operations abroad, I ask them to show me the full cost breakdown. Not just the hourly rate difference. Everything. Here is what usually gets missed: management overhead, quality control time, rework costs, communication lag, cultural translation, and the hidden expense of things taking 30% longer than they should. I worked with a business last year that moved their customer service to Southeast Asia. The hourly rate dropped from £14 to £4. On paper, they were saving £80,000 a year. In practice, they spent an extra 12 hours a week managing the team, fixing mistakes, and handling escalations that would not have happened with local staff. When we calculated the true cost, the saving was closer to £15,000. Not nothing, but not the number that justified the disruption. The question is not whether labour is cheaper elsewhere. It is whether your operation can absorb the friction that comes with distance. What actually works abroad Some things transfer well. Others do not. Tasks that work abroad tend to share characteristics: they are clearly defined, they do not require real-time collaboration, they have objective quality standards, and they do not need cultural context to execute. Data entry. Bookkeeping. Basic design production. Software development with clear specifications. These can work. Tasks that struggle abroad: anything requiring judgement calls about your specific market. Customer service for a UK audience, where tone and expectation matter. Sales. Complex problem-solving where someone needs to understand your business deeply. I have seen people try to offshore sales support and watch their conversion rates drop by 22% in three months. The offshore team was technically competent. They just could not read the subtle cues that UK customers give when they are about to buy. The current UK context matters Right now, the UK job market is softening. People starting new jobs are at the lowest level in five years. Vacancies are falling. Interest rates are holding steady, with the Bank of England cautious about cutting further. This creates an interesting situation. If you are hiring locally, you may have more leverage than you did two years ago. The talent pool is larger. Wage pressure is lower. The people who would have been snapped up by bigger companies are now available. At the same time, costs are real. NHS drug shortages are affecting staff health and absence rates. Transport costs are rising even as food prices slow. Running a UK operation is not getting cheaper. The question becomes: can you find the right people locally at rates that make sense, or has the gap widened enough that moving abroad is worth the friction? How I help people think through this When I sit down with someone at ALIRA. to work through this decision, we start with a simple framework. Not a spreadsheet, not a pro-con list. A set of questions. First: what are you actually trying to solve? If it is cost, how much do you need to save for this to be worth the disruption? Give me a number. If the number is under £30,000 a year, the answer is almost always stay local and optimise. Second: what is the real cost of failure? If the offshore operation does not work, what happens? Can you bring it back? How long would that take? What would you lose in the meantime? Third: do you have the management capacity to run a distributed operation? This is where most people lie to themselves. Running a remote team in a different timezone requires skills that running a local team does not. If you do not have those skills, you will either develop them painfully or fail. The Decision Matrix tool on alira.london is useful here. It forces you to weight these factors against each other rather than letting the wage difference dominate the conversation. The hybrid approach Most of the businesses I work with end up somewhere in the middle. They keep customer-facing work local. They move clearly defined production tasks abroad. They build systems that let the two halves communicate without constant management intervention. This works, but only if you invest in the systems. Documentation. Clear handoff processes. Quality checkpoints. Without these, the hybrid approach becomes the worst of both worlds: the cost of two teams with the output of one. I spent three months with a design agency last year building exactly this kind of system. Their UK team handles client communication and creative direction. Their team in the Philippines handles production. The key was a detailed brief template and a two-stage review process. Their effective capacity increased by 40% without adding UK headcount. What to do this week If you are considering this decision, here is where to start. First, calculate your true current cost. Not just wages. Include management time, rework, training, and turnover. Use actual numbers from the last six months. If you do not have them, that is your first problem. Second, identify one function you could theoretically move. Run through the three questions I mentioned: what are you solving, what is the cost of failure, do you have the management capacity. Write down honest answers. Third, talk to someone who has done it. Not a vendor who will sell you offshore services. Someone who actually moved operations abroad and can tell you what they did not expect. Ask them what they would do differently.