Expanding to Latin America: What to Do in the First 90 Days

Deciding to expand to Latin America is one thing. Knowing what to actually do in the first weeks is another.

Most companies that struggle with their LATAM expansion don't fail because the market was underperforming. They fail because they moved too fast, hired without a clear structure, or underestimated how different building a team in Mexico City, Bogotá, or Buenos Aires is from doing it at home. 

The first 90 days set the tone for everything that follows.

This article is another chapter in our series on global expansion to Latin America. If you haven't read the first piece yet, it covers the strategic case for why LATAM is one of the most compelling expansion destinations for US and European companies right now. 

This guide picks up where that one left off: once you've decided to expand, here's what to do, week by week, in the first 90 days.

This 90-day framework breaks down into three phases:

• Days 1 to 30 are about market exploration and strategy. 
• Days 30 to 60 cover your first hires and operational setup. 
• Days 60 to 90 are where you build the collaboration routines that will determine whether your distributed team actually works. 

Each phase has a different objective, a different set of risks, and a different definition of success.

If you lead People, HR, or Operations at a company that is actively entering the Latin American market, this is your starting point.

Days 1 to 30: Market Exploration and Strategy

The first 30 days are not about hiring. They're not about registering a legal entity or signing office leases. They're about answering one question with enough clarity to commit resources to it: where exactly, and how, does your company enter this market?

That question has more variables than most leadership teams expect. 

Latin America is not a single market. Mexico operates under USMCA, has deep manufacturing and tech ecosystems, and shares a time zone with much of the US. Colombia has become one of the fastest-growing tech talent hubs in the region, with a highly educated workforce and a government actively courting foreign investment. 

Argentina offers some of the strongest technical talent in LATAM, though its macroeconomic volatility requires specific legal and compensation structures to manage effectively. 

Choosing the wrong country for your first entry point doesn't just slow you down, it can make the entire expansion harder to course-correct later.

Before making that decision, there are four things every People and Operations leader should have clarity on by day 30.

1. Validate local demand

If you're expanding to sell, not just to hire, you need evidence that demand exists before you build a team around it. 

That means talking to at least 10 to 15 potential customers or partners in your target market, not through surveys, but through direct conversations. A solid go-to-market analysis at this stage can save months of misaligned effort. The goal isn't a perfect plan, it's enough signal to make a confident decision about where to focus.

2. Map the legal and compliance landscape

Every country in LATAM has different labor laws, tax structures, and employer obligations. 

In Argentina, for example, severance costs are significantly higher than in the US or most of Europe. In Mexico, profit-sharing obligations (PTU) apply to most companies with local employees. 

Understanding these before you hire is not optional. Surprises in this area are expensive.

3. Decide on your entry model

There are three common paths for doing business in Latin America as a foreign company. 

The first is hiring through an Employer of Record (EOR), which lets you bring on local talent without setting up a legal entity. The second is establishing a local subsidiary, which takes longer but gives you more control and credibility. The third is partnering with a local distributor or agency for market entry, which works well for sales-led expansions. 

Each model has different cost structures, timelines, and risk profiles. By day 30, you should have a clear recommendation on which one fits your situation.

4. Identify your first three roles

You don't need a full org chart yet. But you do need to know which roles are critical for the first phase of operations. 

In most LATAM expansions, the first hire is either a Country Manager or a Senior Sales who can operate with significant autonomy. Getting this wrong is one of the most common and costly mistakes companies make in their first 90 days of expanding business to Latin America.

Days 30 to 60: First Hires and Operational Setup

If the first 30 days are about clarity, days 30 to 60 are about commitment. 

This is where the expansion becomes real: you're bringing on people, setting up systems, and establishing the operational foundation that everything else will run on. It's also where most companies make their most expensive mistakes.

Hiring your first team members

The decision of how to hire in Latin America is as important as who you hire. Before posting a single job description, you need to have resolved your entry model from phase one.

 If you're going the EOR route, platforms like Deel, Remote, or Rippling can get you compliant contracts in most LATAM countries within days. If you're setting up a local entity, expect the process to take 4 to 12 weeks depending on the country.

When hiring talent in Latin America, there are a few things that work differently than in the US or Europe:

• Compensation benchmarking requires local data, not global salary tools. What looks like a competitive offer based on US benchmarks can be significantly off in either direction depending on the city and role.
• Notice periods and severance obligations vary significantly by country. In some markets, terminating an employee without cause can cost 3 to 6 months of salary or more.
• Equity is less common and less valued as a compensation component in most LATAM markets. Cash and benefits tend to matter more.
• Referrals carry more weight in LATAM hiring than in most Western markets. Your first hire's network will likely be your best sourcing channel for the next two or three roles.

For a deeper dive into the mechanics of building teams in Latin America, including compensation structures, legal considerations, and sourcing strategies, our full guide on hiring in LATAM covers each of these in detail.

Which roles to prioritize

Not every company enters LATAM with the same objective. But most expansions in the first 60 days benefit from hiring in this sequence:

• A senior local lead who can operate autonomously, manage relationships, and represent the company without constant oversight from HQ
• A sales or business development hire if the expansion is revenue-driven, or an operations hire if it's talent-driven
• A part-time or fractional finance or legal advisor with local expertise, not a full-time hire yet, but someone who can flag issues before they become problems

Resist the temptation to hire a large team early. Most successful LATAM expansions start with 2 to 4 people in the first 60 days and scale from there based on validated results.

Setting up your operational infrastructure

Hiring is only half of this phase. The other half is making sure the people you bring on have the systems, tools, and context they need to be effective from day one. That means:

• Defining which tools the LATAM team will use and how they connect to HQ systems
• Setting up payroll, benefits, and expense management processes locally
• Creating an onboarding experience that gives new hires context about the company, not just their role
• Establishing communication norms early: which channels are synchronous, which are async, and what the expected response times are

This last point matters more than most companies realize. The communication infrastructure you set up in days 30 to 60 will either support or undermine the collaboration routines you build in the next phase.

Days 60 to 90: Team Collaboration and Early Growth

By day 60, you have a team on the ground. The question shifts from how to build it to how to make it work. 

This phase is where many expansions quietly stall: the hiring went well, the legal setup is in place, but the team doesn't feel connected to HQ, decisions take too long, and the local lead starts operating in isolation. 

Avoiding that outcome requires intentional design of how your distributed team collaborates.

Building collaboration routines

Remote team collaboration between a LATAM team and a US or European headquarters doesn't happen organically. It needs structure. 

The companies that get this right in the first 90 days tend to do three things consistently:

• They establish a weekly rhythm with one synchronous touchpoint between the LATAM lead and their HQ counterpart. Not a status update, a working session with a clear agenda and decisions to be made.
• They over-communicate context in the early weeks. The LATAM team doesn't have years of institutional knowledge. They need more background, not less, on why decisions are made the way they are.
• They default to async for everything that doesn't require real-time interaction: progress updates, feedback on deliverables, documentation of decisions.

For a comprehensive overview of the tools that support these routines, this guide on collaboration tools for remote teams covers the most effective options by use case.

Early metrics that actually matter

By day 90, you should be measuring outcomes, not just activity. The metrics that matter most at this stage depend on your expansion objective, but across most LATAM expansions the following tend to be the most useful early indicators:

• Revenue or pipeline generated if the expansion is sales-driven
• Time to hire and quality of hire if the primary goal is talent acquisition
• Team engagement and retention signals iwhich are the strongest early predictor of whether your local team will stick around long enough to generate real value
• Speed of decision-making between HQ and the local team, which reveals whether your collaboration infrastructure is working or creating bottlenecks

If engagement signals are weak at day 90, that's not a people problem. It's a systems and culture problem, and it's much easier to fix at day 90 than at day 180. Building strong employee retention habits from the start is significantly cheaper than replacing a key hire six months into the expansion.

The Role of Physical Space in Your LATAM Expansion

One of the most underestimated challenges of the first 90 days isn't legal, it isn't hiring, and it isn't time zones. It's a simpler, more practical question: where does your team actually work?

For distributed teams in Latin America, the default answer is often "from home." That works for some roles and some people. But for a newly formed local team that's still building trust, establishing routines, and representing your company in a new market, working from home full-time has real costs. 

Isolation sets in faster than expected. The informal interactions that build team cohesion don't happen. And the team's ability to host clients, partners, or visiting HQ colleagues becomes a logistical problem with no clean solution.

The companies that handle this well in the first 90 days don't commit to a long-term office lease before they know exactly what they need. Instead, they give their local team access to professional workspaces on a flexible basis, coworking spaces, private offices, and meeting rooms that can be booked as needed, in the cities where their team actually is.

That's exactly what Pluria is built for. 

Pluria is a platform that gives distributed teams access to a network of more than 1,000 workspaces across Latin America and Europe, from coworking spaces in Bogotá and Mexico City to private offices in Buenos Aires, with no fixed lease commitments. 

For companies in the first 90 days of expanding business to Latin America, this removes one of the most common early friction points without adding the overhead of a permanent office. 

Ready to give your LATAM team a place to work? Explore how Pluria has helped other companies manage their expansion and see the full network of available workspaces across the region. Browse Pluria's success stories to see how teams like yours have made it work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

The first 90 days of expanding to Latin America will not be perfect. 

There will be decisions made with incomplete information, hires that take longer than expected, and collaboration challenges that no framework fully anticipates. That's not a sign that the expansion is failing. It's what early-stage global expansion actually looks like.

What separates companies that build something lasting in LATAM from those that retreat after a difficult first year isn't the absence of problems. It's how quickly they identify them and how well they've built the foundation to course-correct. 

Latin America has genuine strategic value for US and European companies, whether the goal is entering a high-growth market, accessing top-tier technical talent, or building distributed teams that extend your operational capacity across time zones. But that value only materializes if the first 90 days are treated with the same rigor and intentionality as any other critical business decision.

Start focused. Hire carefully. Build the collaboration infrastructure before you need it. 

And remember that doing business in Latin America is not just a market expansion. It's a long-term organizational commitment that starts on day one.