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# Labor Arbitrage in Latin America: Brian Samson on Nearshoring
- URL: https://www.bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com/labor-arbitrage-in-latin-america-brian-samson-on-nearshoring/
- Published: 2026-07-24T16:15:46.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-24T16:15:45.000Z
- Description: Discover why Plugg Technologies founder Brian Samson believes nearshoring to Latin America beats traditional Asian offshoring for real-time collaboration, flat team dynamics, and scalable business growth.
- Author: Staff Report
- Tags: News, #articles

Originally featured on [Big Talk About Small Business](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjs1mbMExDM&ref=bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com) with Mark Zweig | Guest: Brian Samson, Founder of Plugg Technologies

## **"What the Hell Is That?"**

Mark Zweig opened his conversation with Brian Samson with the same reaction most business owners have the first time they hear the word nearshoring. "I honestly, I'd never heard that term until they said, 'Hey, we've got this guy named Brian Samson is going to be on our show, he's got a nearshoring company.' I'm like, 'What the hell is that?'," Zweig said, and Samson spent the next hour giving one of the most detailed, unfiltered breakdowns of how the model actually works that he's given on any podcast.

It's a fair place to start, because Samson's answer wasn't a pitch. It was a decade of hard-won operating detail: bureaucratic standoffs in Buenos Aires, a recruiting company that hit $4 million on the back of a recurring revenue model most people don't associate with staffing, and the specific reasons offshoring to Asia has become what Samson calls a race to the bottom on price while nearshoring to Latin America has not. 

Samson has spent 11 years in this world, made more than 500 placements through Plugg Technologies, and built three separate companies to $4 million in revenue, including one he grew to 80 engineers in Argentina before selling his stake. He now runs Plugg from Hawaii, and the story of how he got there is unusually specific for a business podcast.

## **The Bureaucrat, the Power of Attorney, and Why Argentina Isn't for the Faint of Heart**

Samson didn't sugarcoat what it took to actually set up shop in Argentina. He described sitting in a government building that looked, in his words, like a regular DMV, watching nervous people in suits wait for their number to be called, alongside his bilingual lawyer, Mariano, who carried a binder of paperwork and warned Samson that approval depended on, as Samson put it, the grace of God and whichever bureaucrat happened to be assigned to their case. 

When their number was finally called, months after the appointment was first scheduled, the official flagged a missing power of attorney form, even though Samson was sitting right there in person and could sign anything required on the spot.

The story wasn't just color. It illustrated something Samson kept returning to throughout the conversation: doing business in a country like Argentina requires accepting real friction, from unpredictable bureaucracy to a currency environment so unstable that many restaurants print menus in chalk so prices can be updated mid-day. 

Samson also described a stretch early on when he had to travel to Uruguay every few weeks just to withdraw U.S. dollars in cash, since accessing them inside Argentina was either restricted or prohibitively expensive. None of it was a dealbreaker for him, but he was clear with Zweig that anyone considering nearshoring should walk in with realistic expectations about the operating environment, not just the cost savings.

## **Why Offshoring Became a Commodity and Nearshoring Didn't**

One of the sharper distinctions Samson drew was between offshoring, which he described as a mature, commoditized market driven almost entirely by price, and nearshoring, which he argued has retained real differentiation. 

Zweig pushed on this by sharing his own experience working with Philippines-based teams for outbound sales and India-based teams for IT and accounting, prompting Samson to explain one of the structural problems with offshoring to parts of Asia: hierarchy. In many Indian outsourcing arrangements, Samson said, a U.S. client rarely talks directly to the person actually doing the work. Requests trickle down through several layers of management and feedback trickles back up the same way, which slows everything down and strips out the kind of direct, unfiltered pushback a company actually needs from technical staff.

Zweig connected this to his own experience in the accounting world, noting that even competent people in a rigid hierarchy often aren't the ones a client ends up dealing with. Samson said Latin America operates differently. Teams are flatter, and professionals are culturally comfortable disagreeing with a client's approach and explaining why, a dynamic Samson said is essential for anything as iterative as software development, but applies equally to marketing plans, operations workflows, or call center scripts.

## **From Staffing to Recurring Revenue: The RPO Business Most People Miss**

Before Plugg Technologies, Samson built and still owns a recruitment process outsourcing company, a business model he said most people misunderstand entirely. Most people think of recruiting the way they think of a real estate transaction, a single placement followed by the need to immediately find the next deal. Samson structured his RPO business around monthly recurring contracts instead, leasing entire recruiting teams to venture-funded tech companies that needed to scale hiring quickly. At its peak during the 2021 hiring boom, the company had roughly 55 recruiters, almost all based in Latin America, working with around 60 VC-funded clients including well-known names like Credit Karma and Superhuman.

The model worked because the recruiters spoke fluent, natural English and could source, screen, and manage offers at the pace U.S. tech companies needed, without the communication friction that often comes with offshore outsourcing. Samson said the business still exists today, smaller than its 2021 peak like most recruiting firms after the market cooled, but still active and profitable.

## **What It Actually Takes to Run a Distributed Nearshore Team**

Samson gave Zweig an unusually candid look at the operational mechanics of running Plugg Technologies, which now places around 85 mostly senior software developers across Latin America. One detail that surprised even a seasoned business owner like Zweig was hardware logistics. Getting laptops and equipment into and out of certain Latin American countries isn't simple, Samson explained, due to import protections and tariffs that can triple the cost of something like a MacBook Air once it crosses the border. Plugg handles that logistics directly, along with onboarding, compliance, and country-specific employment nuances, work Samson said comes from firsthand experience rather than secondhand research.

On the employment law question, one that trips up a lot of first-time nearshorers, Samson said the risk is lower than most people assume. Senior Latin American professionals increasingly prefer contractor arrangements over traditional employee benefits, largely because many have already used one-time benefits like Mexico's favorable first-time homebuyer mortgage terms earlier in their careers and would now rather maximize cash pay. Over a decade of operating in the region, Samson told Zweig he's dealt with fewer than five serious bad-actor situations, a track record he attributes directly to disciplined hiring rather than luck.

## **The Cash Flow Reality of Staffing, and Why Samson Avoided Factoring**

Zweig, drawing on his own decades running a staffing-adjacent business, asked Samson directly about one of the least glamorous parts of this industry: working capital. 

Because Plugg bills clients on a net-30 basis while covering payroll upfront, the company effectively floats its own cash flow every month. Samson said Plugg has self-funded that gap using cash reserves built from his earlier businesses, and explained why he passed on factoring as a financing option even though it initially sounded reasonable at roughly one percent a month. 

Once he ran the math, he realized the compounding cost meant he'd effectively be paying 12% annually by month twelve and 18% by month 18, just to borrow against his own receivables. Zweig, who has seen the same trap in his own career, agreed that factoring tends to be a last resort rather than a real financing strategy.

## **What to Do Next**

For business owners considering their own version of what Samson has built, a few concrete steps stood out from the conversation:

1. **Go into a country like Argentina with realistic expectations about bureaucracy.** Budget extra time for licensing, banking, and legal processes, and work with a local lawyer who has navigated the system before.
2. **Evaluate whether your offshore or nearshore partner gives you direct access to the people doing the work.** Layered hierarchies slow communication and strip out the honest technical feedback you actually need.
3. **Structure staffing relationships around recurring revenue where possible.** Samson's RPO business proved that recruiting and staffing don't have to be one-off transactions.
4. **Before considering factoring, calculate the real annualized cost.** What looks like a small monthly fee compounds quickly and is often worse than a traditional line of credit.

## **The Takeaway**

The through-line of Samson's conversation with Zweig is that nearshoring rewards operators willing to learn the unglamorous details, currency logistics, hardware import rules, contractor preferences, rather than those chasing the lowest possible hourly rate. Samson's own path, from a chaotic government office in Buenos Aires to a recurring-revenue recruiting business to Plugg Technologies today, is a case study in how much operational knowledge actually separates a good nearshore partner from a risky one.

**Listen to the full episode:**[ Brian Samson on Big Talk About Small Business](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjs1mbMExDM&ref=bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com) 🔗 **Learn more about nearshore hiring:**[ plugg.tech](https://plugg.tech/?ref=bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com)   
**The Nearshore Cafe Podcast:** [https://open.spotify.com/show/1pm8NbZY7qYkTblEVTxTSd](https://open.spotify.com/show/1pm8NbZY7qYkTblEVTxTSd?ref=bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com)

## **Frequently Asked Questions**

**What is nearshoring?** Nearshoring means hiring talent in a nearby country that shares a similar time zone with your business, allowing for real-time collaboration rather than the delayed handoffs typical of offshoring. Samson, founder of Plugg Technologies, built his company around this model, placing senior software developers across Latin America for U.S. businesses.

**Why does Latin America beat Asia for U.S. companies?** Samson explained that offshoring to parts of Asia often involves layered hierarchies where clients rarely interact directly with the people doing the work, slowing communication and limiting honest feedback. Latin American teams tend to be flatter and culturally comfortable pushing back on decisions, a dynamic Samson says makes Plugg Technologies' placements more responsive than a typical offshore arrangement.

**What roles can be nearshored?** Software development remains the most common role nearshored to Latin America, but recruiting, marketing, and operations functions are increasingly common as well. Samson has built multiple businesses around this, including a recruitment process outsourcing company staffed almost entirely with Latin America-based recruiters and his current company, Plugg Technologies, which places senior developers.

**How much can companies save by nearshoring?** While Samson didn't cite a specific percentage on this episode, he explained that nearshoring's real value goes beyond cost savings alone, since Latin American professionals typically offer stronger English fluency and closer time zone alignment than offshore alternatives in Asia. Plugg Technologies handles compliance, hardware logistics, and country-specific employment nuances that add real value beyond the hourly rate.

**Why is hardware logistics a challenge when nearshoring to Latin America?** Samson explained that several Latin American countries have import protections and tariffs that make U.S.-purchased hardware significantly more expensive, sometimes tripling the cost of a laptop once it crosses the border. Plugg Technologies manages this logistics directly for clients, along with onboarding and compliance, based on firsthand experience operating across multiple countries in the region.

**What does Plugg Technologies do?** Plugg Technologies is a nearshore staffing company founded by Samson that places around 85 mostly senior software developers across Latin America with U.S. businesses. The company handles hiring, onboarding, hardware logistics, and compliance, and has grown out of Samson's broader career building recurring-revenue staffing and recruiting businesses over the past 11 years.

*Brian Samson is the founder of* [*Plugg Technologies*](http://plugg.tech/?ref=bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com) *and host of* [*The Nearshore Cafe Podcast*](https://open.spotify.com/show/1pm8NbZY7qYkTblEVTxTSd?si=2b91cd2994594dd2&nd=1&dlsi=f6711e1986e144ef&ref=bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com)*. This post is based on his appearance on*[ *Big Talk About Small Business*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjs1mbMExDM&ref=bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com)*.*