Alex is Sprintlaw’s co-founder and principal lawyer. Alex previously worked at a top-tier firm as a lawyer specialising in technology and media contracts, and founded a digital agency which he sold in 2015.
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When most people think about offshore staffing, they think about geography. Work moves to another country, costs come down, and businesses gain access to a broader talent pool.
But for the team behind My Offshore Staff, the more interesting question was what happened after the work moved offshore.
As they spent more time around offshore staffing models, they noticed a recurring pattern. Businesses could access skilled talent, reduce costs, and scale faster than hiring locally. On paper, everything made sense.
In practice, things were often more complicated.
Communication could become fragmented. Teams sometimes operated in parallel rather than together. Expectations shifted depending on who was interpreting them. And over time, what looked efficient from a distance didn't always feel connected inside the business itself.
For Chief Operating Officer Amar Yasir, the issue was never about capability.
“Clients do not just need numbers; they need clarity, consistency, and someone they can trust with the most sensitive parts of their business,” he says.
That gap between work being delivered and work being genuinely integrated would eventually become the starting point for My Offshore Staff.
Building something from what wasn't working
My Offshore Staff was founded in 2022 by CEO Waheed Gondal alongside a group of professionals he had worked with in accounting and finance since 2008.
For Gondal, who holds master's degrees in Finance and Accounting and is CPA Australia-qualified, the lessons came from years spent helping clients navigate financial management, compliance, and business growth. Again and again, he saw that clients rarely struggled because they lacked information. More often, they struggled because they lacked confidence in the systems and people delivering it.
At the same time, Yasir was bringing a different perspective. Having spent more than two decades managing large-scale projects across infrastructure, mining, oil and gas, telecommunications, and business process outsourcing, he had seen how quickly good strategies could fail when processes, accountability, and communication weren't aligned.
“You can have the right strategy, but without clear processes and an aligned team, execution will let you down,” he says.
Together, those experiences shaped the early direction of the business.
Rather than building another outsourcing provider focused primarily on cost savings, the founders became interested in a different idea: what if offshore teams could operate as a genuine extension of the businesses they supported?
Rethinking distance
The founders weren't convinced that geography itself was the problem.
What seemed to matter more was how teams were structured and how they communicated.
The businesses that achieved the strongest outcomes, they noticed, were often the ones that made a deliberate effort to integrate offshore staff into the wider organisation. Offshore team members weren't operating on the sidelines; they were involved in meetings, reporting structures, internal systems, and everyday communication.
“The businesses that get the most out of offshore staffing are the ones that treat their offshore team as a genuine extension of their onshore operation, not a separate vendor,” Yasir says.
Over time, that thinking evolved into a simple phrase that the team kept coming back to: remote, not distant.
For them, the distinction mattered. Remote described location. Distant described relationships.
“Our mantra at MOS is building remote, not distant teams,” Yasir says. “And that works best when the client is equally invested in making the offshore team feel like part of their business. If you approach it that way, the results follow.”
Building the right foundations
Like many growing businesses, My Offshore Staff quickly discovered that having an idea was one thing; building a sustainable business around it was another.
One of the earliest decisions the founders made was to focus on compliance and quality before pursuing rapid growth.
Offshore staffing can carry a mixed reputation, often because businesses prioritise scale before establishing clear processes, accountability measures, or regulatory safeguards. The founders wanted to avoid that trap.
From Gondal's perspective, ensuring financial work was overseen by CPA-qualified professionals and aligned with Australian standards was essential. From Yasir's side, it meant creating clear operating procedures, performance frameworks, and accountability structures before expanding.
The business even introduced a 30-day cooling-off period for clients from the outset.
“It was a commercial risk,” Yasir says. “But it was the right signal to send. It tells clients we're confident enough in our delivery to let them walk away if we don't perform.”
Looking back, the founders see many of these decisions as foundational rather than strategic. They were about building trust before building scale.
Why legal foundations mattered from day one
As the business grew, another challenge emerged.
Operating across jurisdictions meant navigating questions that many early-stage businesses don't encounter straight away. Issues around confidentiality, intellectual property, contractor relationships, client obligations, and data handling became increasingly important as the company took on more responsibility for clients' financial, HR, and operational functions.
These weren't abstract legal questions. They were practical business questions.
Who was responsible for what? How would expectations be documented? How could the business ensure consistency and accountability as it scaled?
“When you're managing sensitive financial, HR, and operational data for Australian clients across borders, proper legal foundations are not optional,” says Yasir.
Rather than leaving those questions for later, the founders decided to formalise the business's legal framework early.
To support that growth, My Offshore Staff worked with Sprintlaw to trademark its business name in Australia and put in place client service agreements and contractor agreements that reflected the realities of operating a cross-border business.
Looking back, the founders say the value wasn't simply having legal documents drafted. It was having clarity.
“We needed documentation that was clear, enforceable, and compliant with Australian law,” they explain. “Getting that right from the start meant we could grow with confidence, without having to revisit the foundations later.”
The experience also reinforced an important lesson: legal work is often most valuable when it happens before problems arise, rather than after.
More than an outsourcing business
Today, My Offshore Staff works with Australian SMEs and mid-market businesses across a range of industries, including healthcare, NDIS services, property, and professional services.
While the business has grown considerably since launching in 2022, the founders say the central idea hasn't changed.
The challenge was never finding talented people. It was finding a way to keep teams connected across borders, time zones, and different ways of working.
Along the way, they learned that achieving that goal requires more than good intentions. It requires clear systems, strong leadership, defined expectations, and legal foundations that can support growth.
For My Offshore Staff, the phrase “remote, not distant” has become more than a slogan. It's a reflection of the problem they set out to solve - and the business they built in response.
If you would like help with your small business legals, you can reach us at 1800 730 617 or team@sprintlaw.com.au for a free, no-obligations chat.
Alex SoloCo-Founder
