A company with four small operations across Central Europe eventually asks whether to run them from one place. The answer is usually yes. The mistake is assuming the whole operation moves.
Some functions consolidate cleanly and save real money. Others look identical on an org chart and cannot be centralised without losing the market. Knowing which is which before you start is most of the work.
What follows comes from having done it: three operations that had been running separately in Moscow, Istanbul and Hamburg, consolidated into a Warsaw base that ended up serving 11 markets.
The trigger
Not at a headcount. At a pattern.
You have three or more countries in the region, each with a handful of people. Each one has its own accountant, its own contracts, its own way of reporting. Nobody in head office can answer a question about the region without asking four people first, and the answers arrive in four formats.
At that point the cost of coordination has overtaken the cost of duplication — and that is the real trigger, not revenue.
The second trigger is a step change: a new market, a large customer, an acquisition. Adding a fifth country to four unmanaged ones does not scale; adding it to a hub does.
What moves
The test is simple: if the work is the same regardless of which country it serves, it consolidates.
This is the part that produces the saving, and it is larger than most business cases assume — not because salaries are lower, but because four part-time versions of a role become one full-time one that is actually good at it.
What does not
The test again: if the work depends on being in the room, it does not consolidate.
The workable shape is therefore not a hub replacing local operations. It is a hub plus a thin local layer — usually one or two commercially focused people per market, with everything behind them run centrally.
The real constraint
Every hub business case models salaries and real estate. The variable that actually decides whether it works is whether you can staff the languages.
A hub serving Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania needs people who work in five languages plus English. Warsaw can staff that, which is the substantive reason companies choose Poland over cheaper locations in the region — not labour cost, which is no longer the lowest.
Two practical points that business cases miss, both learned from staffing a Warsaw base that covered 11 markets:
Rare languages cost a premium and take longer to hire. Hungarian and Romanian speakers in Warsaw are findable but not abundant, and the recruitment timeline for them is materially longer than for the rest of the team. Plan the hires in that order, not alphabetically.
Native fluency matters more in some functions than others. Customer service and sales support need it. Finance, controlling and planning generally do not. Splitting the staffing plan along that line is what makes the numbers work.
Three patterns
Everything moves at once. The organisation loses four sets of local knowledge in the same quarter and spends the following year rebuilding it. Consolidation is a sequence, not an event.
The customer relationship is centralised with the back office. Revenue falls in the affected markets within two quarters, and the saving is wiped out by the loss. This is the failure that ends consolidations.
Nobody owns the transition. Each local manager is asked to hand over their own function while still being measured on local results. The incentive is to delay, and they do. A consolidation without a single accountable owner does not finish.
Sequence
Move the functions with the least customer contact first, and prove each one before starting the next.
First: reporting, planning and analysis. No customer impact, immediate benefit to head office, and it builds the information base the rest of the move depends on.
Then: finance, accounting and controlling. Local statutory filings stay local; everything above them centralises.
Then: order handling and customer service, market by market, starting with the smallest. If it goes wrong in the smallest market, you have learned something. If it goes wrong in the largest, you have lost something.
Then, only if the logistics support it: warehousing and distribution.
Never: key account ownership.
Each step should be reversible until the one before it has produced evidence. That is the same principle that governs a market entry, applied to an operation you already have.
Who wrote this
Operating Partner based in Warsaw. I run market entry and CEE hub operations for international mid-market companies on fixed-term mandates, and this is the part of the work I have done most often.
For 13 years I ran a foreign principal's Polish operation as the person accountable on the ground: 16 people to 400, extended across 11 markets, including consolidating three operations that had been running separately in Moscow, Istanbul and Hamburg into the Warsaw base.
How the mandate works, what it costs, and who it is for →
Written for companies of roughly €20–250M in revenue operating in three or more countries in the region.
