Up to a point, Europe can be served from China. The distributor answers its own customers, emails cross the night, a trip twice a year holds the relationships together. The point where that stops is rarely selling — it is the question that needs an answer during the European afternoon, the installation that goes wrong, the buyer who wants someone in the room. Hiring is the answer to that, and it is worth deciding which part of it you are solving before you meet anybody.
Which country, and why it is not only where the customers are
The instinct is the country of the largest customer, which is a reasonable start and an incomplete one. Three other things weigh as much. Where the market for your product concentrates over the next few years, which is not always where your first order came from. What the employment arrangement costs in that country and how hard it is to end — the social contributions, the notice, the formality of a separation differ substantially across the Union, the detail changes, and it is worth local advice on the specific country rather than a generalisation from its neighbour. And the geography the person will actually cover: someone hired in one country to serve a continent spends their working life in transport, and the countries they visit least will quietly become the ones you have no position in.
Three different jobs that get the same title
« Europe manager » covers at least three jobs with different profiles, different measures and different failure modes. A salesperson is measured on meetings held and orders taken; they are expensive to waste on documentation, and they do not fix a product. An after-sales technician is measured on resolution time and on the questions that stop coming back; this is more often the real gap than companies expect, because a technical product sold at a distance generates a stream of questions that no distributor answers as well as you would. A country manager is measured on the position of the company in a market and has to be able to represent you — in a negotiation, in front of a chain's buyer, in a dispute — which is a different seniority and a different price.
Choosing whichever of the three the business actually lacks is harder than it sounds, because the available candidate is usually a salesperson and the real gap is usually service. A salesperson hired into an after-sales gap sells for a while, finds the support load landing on them, becomes the complaints department of a company that never agreed to that, and leaves. Writing the job around the gap rather than around the candidate is the whole of the decision.
The status, and what each one commits you to
| Arrangement | What it gives you | What it commits you to |
|---|---|---|
| An employee of your own European company | Full control of the work, a presence that is yours, and a person whose loyalty is not shared | An entity, payroll, social contributions, employment law, and the cost and formality of ending the contract |
| A salaried person hosted by a third-party employer | A properly employed person in the country without creating an entity, and a short route to starting | A provider's fee, a contract you do not fully control, and limits on what the arrangement may cover — which vary by country |
| A commercial agent | A self-employed intermediary who sells in your name, paid on results rather than on presence | A protective statute: in Europe the agent's position at the end of the relationship is governed by law, often including an indemnity. Read the national rules before signing |
| An independent contractor | Flexibility, a simple contract, and no payroll | A real risk of being treated as the employer if the relationship looks like employment, and the fact that their customers remain their own |
Reporting to someone who is never in the room
What breaks in a distant reporting line is not communication, it is decision latency. A person who has to wait a night for an answer on a discount, a replacement part or a delivery date learns to stop asking; then they stop proposing; then they start deciding alone without telling anyone, which is the version nobody intended. The remedy is explicit delegation, written down: what they decide alone, what they decide and then report, what genuinely waits. Add one fixed appointment a week that does not move for anything, because an occasional call plus ad-hoc messages produces a person who is formally managed and actually alone.
The language of work is a decision, not an accident. If the internal language stays Chinese, the European hire is cut off from most of what matters and spends their time translating their own job. If it becomes English, part of your own organisation stops participating and the information arrives filtered through whoever is comfortable. Most companies settle on English between the two sides and the local language with customers, and what makes that workable is a named person on the Chinese side whose job explicitly includes being readable: writing plainly, writing things down, and answering during the European day. Without that person, the European hire has a manager in theory and a correspondent in practice.
Keeping one person from becoming the whole market
- The customer relationships live in the company's system. Contacts, history, quotations and complaints recorded where colleagues can read them. This is not surveillance — it is what lets someone answer a customer during a holiday.
- Someone else has a direct line. At least one more person on the Chinese side meets the main customers, visits once a year and is known by name. Two links are not twice the cost of one.
- What is learned gets written down. Why the price is what it is in this country, which competitor holds what, what a particular buyer insists on. If that leaves with the person, you are hiring the learning curve a second time.
- The company signs, never the employee. Distribution agreements, registrations, the domain name, the trade mark filings, the marketplace accounts. This is the item that costs the most when it has been ignored, and the one nobody checks until the separation.
- The measures are visible from China. Not a monthly report written by the person being measured: orders, complaints, response times and the state of the pipeline, read from the same system by both sides.
The real risk of a first hire is not that they fail — it is that they succeed, and that everything the company knows about Europe ends up living in one head and one mailbox. Decide now what you would do if this person resigned in their first year, and build the arrangement so that the answer is not « start again ». The contracts, the registrations, the contacts and the written knowledge belong to the company; what belongs to the person is the thing you actually hired them for, which is being there.