It can be difficult to identify talent overseas, and especially challenging to find people who are a cultural fit with your organization. For this reason, there are incredible benefits temporarily sending the best people from your headquarters to help establish or grow a new market. These expats-or missionaries, as I call them-are tasked with hiring key people, building up a region, and ultimately finding a local executive as their replacement. Although initially, perhaps naively, I thought that such a mission could be accomplished in eighteen months, we‘ve found that it can take closer to thirty-six months.