Finland is live. Where does a workforce company go next?

We just put our first crew on a data centre site in Finland. So the question is already the next one: Spain, France, Portugal, the Nordics? Choosing the next country is not about the map, it is about where the cranes are and whether you can set up to make money once you get there.

People ask me where we go next, as if it is a line on a map. Spain, France, Portugal, the Nordics. The honest answer is that the country is the last thing you choose, not the first. You follow the cranes, and right now the cranes for data centres are moving fast across Europe: Spain and the Madrid and Aragon corridors, France around Paris and Marseille, Portugal on the Atlantic cable landings, and the Nordics where the power is cheap and the air is cold. Any of them could be next. The map is not the decision.

The real question is not where, it is whether you can make money once you are there

A new country is only worth entering if you can set the company up to actually turn a profit, and that depends on things you cannot see from a brochure. What does it cost to employ a man there, all in, once the state has taken its share? What are the local rules that quietly eat your margin, the construction funds, the holiday pay, the social charges? Can you price competitively for the client and still have something left after you have housed and moved the men? If the honest answer is no, it does not matter how many cranes there are. You do not open.

So setting up is not paperwork, it is design. You structure the company so the money works: the employment model that is legal and lean, the allowances that are genuinely available and not invented, the rate you can quote the client that beats a local subcontractor and still leaves you a margin. Get that wrong and you are busy and broke. Get it right and one crew pays for the next country.

A new country is only worth entering if you can set it up to make money. The cranes are necessary. They are not sufficient.

And then the messy part nobody writes about

The clean version is companies and margins and rates. The real version is a lot less tidy. When you land in a new place you rarely have the perfect house waiting. You put men in temporary accommodation, Airbnbs, serviced apartments, whatever is available this week, more expensive than you would like, while you hunt for the proper long lease that makes the numbers work. You carry that cost for a few weeks because a man under a roof tonight matters more than the perfect roof next month.

And the men move. In Finland we had crews driving between cities, hours up the road to one site and back, because the work is where the work is and you do not get to choose the distance. You plan the housing around the drive, or you plan the drive around the housing, and some weeks you are doing both at once. None of this is in the pitch. All of it is the job.

Finland taught me the sharpest version of it. We set the company up from nothing, put seven men on their way, booked the house, signed the contracts, and then days before the start the client moved the entire project to another city, hundreds of kilometres away, while the men were already travelling. Temporary rooms while we found the new house, long drives until the logistics settled, a deposit left behind as credit for next time. We absorbed it and the crew still started on time, because the company was built to bend. That is the experience I now take into every new country: assume the ground will move, and set up so it does not break you when it does.

Why every country is worth the mess

Because every country you set up properly becomes a place you can put Romanian crews to work, legally and well, for years. Four entities now, around sixty people on data centre sites across Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, each entity opened the same way: follow the cranes, check the maths, set it up to make money, then deal with the mess of Airbnbs and long drives until it settles. The next one will be the same. Spain, France, Portugal, the Nordics, we will see which crane moves first.

The company that can walk into a new country, stand up the whole structure, and have a crew earning inside a month is rare. That is the company I am building. The map does not matter. Being ready for whatever is on it does.