By: Eva Keller
Starting a company is hard. Starting one in a country where you don’t speak the language, don’t understand the culture, and have no professional network is a different category of difficulty entirely. It’s also, it turns out, one of the better ways to learn what actually matters when building a business.
Eric Tabone, founder and managing director of Nearshore Business Solutions, did exactly that. A U.S.-born entrepreneur who arrived in Bogotá, Colombia, in his mid-twenties with no Spanish and no established foothold, he is now on his third company, one that has placed over 200 professionals across Latin America and saved clients millions in annual recurring hiring costs.
The first and most expensive lesson was about customer clarity. “One of the biggest mistakes people make when starting out, they think everybody wants to buy their product,” Eric says. “That’s not the case.” It sounds simple. It isn’t. When you’re early and hungry, the temptation is to say yes to anyone who will engage, to stretch the product to fit whoever shows up, to avoid the discipline of saying this is who we serve and this is who we don’t. That flexibility feels like opportunity. More often, it’s drift, and drift is expensive to unwind.
By the time Eric started Nearshore Business Solutions, he came in with a defined customer already in mind: U.S. growth-stage and mid-market companies that needed to hire quickly, couldn’t find the right people domestically, and wanted access to Latin American talent without handling the complexity alone. That clarity shaped every decision that followed, who to talk to, what to offer, how to position the firm, and just as importantly, who to walk away from.
The second lesson was about self-awareness, specifically, knowing which parts of the business you should be running and which parts you should be handing off as fast as possible. “Figure out what you’re good at and make sure you focus on that, and get resources or a team to help you where you fall short,” Eric says. For him, the strength was relationships. Client conversations, building trust, the human side of business development. The operational infrastructure that keeps a growing company functional was where he knew he’d struggle. So he hired a head of operations early. “It’s just made the world of difference.”
Most founders resist this longer than they should. There’s a belief, especially early on, that you need to be across everything, that delegating before you can afford to is a risk. Eric’s experience points the other direction. Bringing in someone to cover your gaps early isn’t a cost, it’s what allows everything else to move faster.
The third lesson is about remote culture, and it’s one Eric lives rather than just preaches. His entire team at Nearshore Business Solutions is distributed across Latin America. He runs a 10-minute standup every morning, weekly one-on-ones, and uses Slack as the operational backbone of the business. He doesn’t monitor screens or track hours. “I don’t care where you work. Just get the job done.” That philosophy isn’t a management preference. It’s a system built on clear roles, clear deliverables, and clear communication channels. Without those three things, flexibility becomes chaos. With them, it works reliably.
For founders still waiting for the conditions to align before starting, Eric is direct: “Just do it. Don’t wait for the perfect moment.” His reasoning isn’t motivational. It’s practical. The people who wait tend to keep waiting. The conditions never feel right from the inside. The only real way to find out what works is to start stress-testing it against reality.
He’ll be the first to tell you he made nearly every mistake available to him along the way. He’ll also tell you that’s the part that made the third company possible.
