Six lessons from building an offshoring agency for high growth startups

What building Modern Day Talent taught me about culture, coaching, and why hybrid beats fully remote when you scale offshore teams in South Africa.

By George Burgess, Venture Partner at If Capital

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I spent seven years in edtech building Gojimo, which we exited to Telegraph Media Group. Since then, I have built and sold two other venture-backed companies. More recently, I started Modern Day Talent.

At Modern Day Talent, we help companies scale their business operations by building dedicated offshore teams in South Africa. This gives them access to exceptional people at forty to fifty percent lower cost.

Working this closely with founders and operators has given me a clear view of what actually drives team performance. Here are six lessons from supporting our clients and from building Modern Day Talent itself.

1) Define culture before it defines you

Our best clients know exactly what they stand for. They have defined principles, clear expectations, and consistent management rhythms. That makes it far easier to embed offshore talent into their teams.

Others assume culture will just emerge, especially in remote setups. It never does.

We took the same approach internally. Modern Day Talent runs on clearly defined principles. We hire against them, structure interviews around them, and use them as half of every monthly performance review. When your culture is explicit, global teams adopt it faster and perform better.

2) Coaching drives performance, not perks

The clients who get the most out of offshore teams invest time in coaching. They run structured weekly check ins, give clear feedback, and make people feel supported.

Others assume great talent will simply figure it out. That is when performance drifts.

I learned this personally. The more time I spend with our team, the stronger their work becomes. Highlight what is going well and give each person one clear area to improve. Coaching beats perks every time.

3) Hybrid beats remote

Many clients initially believe they want fully remote teams. In practice, hybrid creates stronger cohesion, faster collaboration, and better long term performance.

We shifted the South African team at Modern Day Talent from remote to hybrid, and the impact was immediate. Culture strengthened. Communication sharpened. People felt more connected.

We now encourage clients to use our office in Cape Town so their offshore team benefits from in person collaboration. Some things simply do not translate through a screen.

4) Iterate on your people strategy, not just your product

The fastest growing companies constantly iterate on org design, workflows, and talent processes. They do not assume they will get it right the first time.

Others hire quickly, set and forget, and then wonder why output stalls. At Modern Day Talent we maintain more than one hundred standard operating procedures and we tweak them constantly. Continuous improvement is a core value and it shapes how we operate. You rarely get things perfect the first time, whether product, process, or leadership. The companies that iterate win.

5) Empathy is an operational advantage

Our strongest client relationships come from leaders who treat offshore talent exactly like their onshore team. They share context. They listen. They show empathy.

When someone is struggling, understanding the situation makes it far easier to support them and maintain performance. Empathy builds trust faster than any management framework.

Internally this has become one of our biggest advantages. A little human understanding goes a long way.

6) Most people are not using AI to its full potential

Across clients and our own team, we see the same pattern. Only a minority uses AI tools well. The gap between people who use AI effectively and those who do not is widening fast.

We are introducing AI training internally because the productivity gains are real and immediate. AI is becoming one of the biggest performance differentiators, but only for teams that learn to use it deeply.

Why this matters for If Capital

At If Capital, we back founders who build resilient and scalable companies. The lessons above, from explicit culture to deep AI adoption, are the levers that compound. They help teams move faster, keep standards high, and create value that lasts.

Author note

George Burgess founded Gojimo, which was acquired by Telegraph Media Group, and is a Venture Partner at If Capital.