Why Nepal, and why Pokhara

The time zone

Nepal runs at UTC+05:45, which is an unusual offset and an unusually useful one. Our evening and night cover the American working day. Our daytime covers the Gulf, most of Europe and much of Asia-Pacific. One centre, one building, one management line, both halves of the clock.

For a US broker this means the overnight queue is worked by people on their normal schedule with a supervisor present, rather than by someone at home at 4am fighting to stay awake.

The talent pool

Roughly nine in ten of Nepal's IT and outsourcing jobs are in Kathmandu. Pokhara has the universities and the graduates but far less competition for them, which shows up in the number that matters most in this business: attrition.

A seat that turns over every five months is not cheap however low the rate. You pay for it in retraining, in errors, and in the quiet erosion of everything you carefully documented. Lower churn is the real product of choosing a second city.

The cost structure

Nepali salaries let us pay above the local market, fund three weeks of training before anyone bills, staff a team lead and a QA reviewer on every account, and still start at $7 an hour. In Manila or Bengaluru the same supervision ratio costs materially more.

The infrastructure question

The fair question is whether Nepal can keep the lights on and the internet up. A centre has to plan for both, and ours does: two independent fibre providers on separate physical routes, and backup power sized for the full floor rather than for a few desks. Any provider unwilling to discuss this in specifics is one to avoid.

The festival calendar

Dashain and Tihar fall in October and November and matter enormously here. We publish the holiday calendar before you sign and schedule cover in advance. Being surprised by Dashain is a planning failure, not a cultural one.

Where Nepal is not the answer

Licensed work stays with your licensed people: we prepare customs entries, we do not file them. Heavy outbound sales calling into some markets is a poor fit and we will say so. Below about two full-time seats the supervision structure costs more than it returns for you. And a process that exists only in one person's head will fail offshore for reasons that have nothing to do with the team receiving it.