Are Expat Managers Better than Locals

Before being involved in the bus hire industry in Australia I was involved in direct sales management, managing sales offices in a number of countries around the world, especially in Asia.

Historically, sales managers are brought to Asia from England, the US or Australia to run sales rooms. Local managers were never considered to be any good AND hotels wanted expat managers because the industry held "European" mangers in high esteem (most GMs are traditionally from Europe). This suited everyone just fine. Hotels provided accommodation and it was easy to train someone on your home soil and export them.

However, this all came at a tremendous cost. Issues included:

- repatriation for holidays
- visa issues (in most foreign managers operated and still operate illegally on tourist visas)
- expat salaries
- acommodation when the hotel did not provide it
- homesickness and loved ones back home pulling at the heartstrings
- when they failed, they had to be sent home to the other side of the earth (that happened often)
- sickness (not being used to the local food etc)
- fraud (expats had no idea what sales people were saying)
- intimidation (sales consultants could fool expat managers into just about anything, but mainly higher wages)
- etc

Given these problems however, we had little alternative but to find local talent. We could not afford for all our managers to be expats. It was uncompetitive.

We had a mix of expats (who we had worked with previously) and locals. Fortunately the locals performed much better and with the locals we were able to avoid all the abovementioned costs and problems. The expats therefore weren't able to prove their worth and we parted company.

When companies struggle to find local managers that can perform to the required standards we may be tempted to think of the glory days when we had expat managers. Anyone thinking in this way however has forgotten the enormous failure rate of expat managers. Good sales mangers are hard to find and there is always a huge failure rate regardless of whether they are locals or expats. In fact, given the list above, the failure rate and cost of expats is much higher.

I now see that my experience with this (all before being in bus hire) has been replicated in other industries. Local managers are in charge and they are doing very well. When I fly to Asia the pilots are often Asian. In the past they were all European. General Managers of hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions are usually locals.

bus hire
bus hire