Market entry support for a US SaaS company launching in Australia

The company had signed its first handful of Australian customers off the back of US-based sales but had no local support coverage, no local operational staff and no Australian entity yet. Support tickets from new Australian customers were being handled out of the US night shift, with response times customers found unacceptable given the price point. The company wanted local capability running in weeks, not the months a from-scratch local hiring process would take, while its own lawyers and accountants worked through incorporation.

The initial team was deliberately small: two customer support agents and one back office administrator handling billing and order processing, plus a Sydney-based account manager. As the client's ANZ customer base grew over the following year, the support team scaled to eight agents across two shifts, and a second back office role was added to handle GST-related invoicing volume. For the small number of local hires the client wanted directly on its own payroll, an account manager and a sales lead, Corpshore Talent, the group's recruitment and staffing division, ran the search and placement process, while Corpshore Australia ran day-to-day customer support and back office administration.

Onshore delivery from Sydney, combining Corpshore Australia's support and back office operation with Corpshore Talent's local staffing placements.

Corpshore does not provide legal, tax or immigration advice. Incorporation, ABN and company registration were handled entirely by the client's own advisers, running in parallel with Corpshore standing up staffing and support. Because delivery was entirely onshore, the Australian customer data being handled did not raise a cross-border disclosure question under Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) APP 8, a point the client's own general counsel flagged as important given it had not yet established a local entity. The local hires placed through Corpshore Talent were engaged under Fair Work Act obligations, including National Employment Standards entitlements and the relevant Modern Award coverage for support and account management roles. On the commercial side, Corpshore noted the general GST treatment of cross-border B2B services to the client's finance team, while being explicit that this was general information, not tax advice, and that the client should confirm treatment with its own accountant.

Building an equivalent onshore Australian team directly, including recruitment time, payroll setup and management overhead, would have cost the client an estimated 50 percent more over the first six months than the Corpshore arrangement. Average first-response time on Australian support tickets fell from roughly 14 hours, when routed through the US night shift, to under 90 minutes once the Sydney team was live. Support ticket backlog from the pre-engagement period was cleared within six weeks.

Staffing and support stood up in parallel with, not after, the client's own incorporation process, which is what let the company look like a local operation from week three rather than waiting for the entity to exist first.