Hiring Staff+Setting up an Office

[SecretSauce]

My affiliate business has grown to such a point that it has become my full time job and hiring part-time remote staff is proving to be very inefficient.

As such, I am looking to setup a proper office with staff and treat this like a real company. In the 'because I can' category I want to locate this office in the most desirable location possible.

I'm looking for some advice on where that might be along with what to look for when hiring employees.


I'll need:

-Customer service reps
-Marketing Executives (to work with the poker sites, develop content for sites, come up with new site ideas, promotion ideas etc)
-HTML/CSS Coders
-PHP/Database coders
-Project Managers

And as for location:

-Must be gaming friendly
-Would be nice if it were a tax friendly place to incorporate, though this is not required
-Would be nice if it were an english speaking country, though this is not required
-Should be a cool place to live in with fun things to do. Close to a major international airport. Where in the world is not important.
-Must have an abudance of candidates to perform the above jobs
-Must be a place where foreigners can setup a business or office easily and not have to deal with loads of red-tape, government corruption and loophole jumping to hire locals
-Nice looking ladies is always a good thing as well



So:


1. Where to setup shop?

2. What to look for from staff? Particularly the marketing executives. What type of background am I looking for here? I want people I can train to do this job who aren't going to feel strange doing it with the legal aspects of online gaming as well as people who aren't going to take what they are learning and go and do it on their own...I"d like to be able to freely share information with them without feeling like I'm training a future competitor.


Thanks!

[bahh]

1. First country that came on my mind was Costa Rica. It is gaming friendly + tax friendly. You can do lots of stuff when you're not working such as surfing. The climate is perfect (at least for me). Maybe it is not close to a major international airport but it's close to the U.S.

I guess you can find good looking ladies in CR as well

[SecretSauce]

Hi and thanks a lot.

I know Bodog is based or partly based there, but they have a large delegation of people working from Canada. I don't know all of the details but I'd imagine that the Costa Rican's are not great at the type of marketing campaigns that Bodog runs etc. Also are there a lot of programmers in Costa Rica?

Not trying to shoot down your suggestion, I'm open to investigate any and all suggestions, just posing some questions I hope others can fill us in on.

[bahh]

Don't know about programmers in CR but I doubt there are lots of them. Maybe someone with a bit more insight can answer that question.

How about Malta? It's gaming friendly and a bit more developed than CR. You can probably find good staff there as well. Its close to Italy and Greece. The EU regulatoins will make it easy to recruit staff from allover Europe. The climate is ok. European ladies are nice.

I know that people from Sweden would move to Malta if they were offered the right salary.

[mfosouto]

My suggestion is: do not come to Brazil

Not that I would mind helping you, but the laws around here punish companies so much, that I don't know how they survive.

Although in the ladies part, we may have something...

[bahh]

Parts of Asia is very cheap to live in. What about Macau? Gaming friendly. Cool city, cheap, close to Hong Kong, nice weather. Asian girls if you like..

[pokerforfree]

Hey,

Anguilla should be OK regarding to Gaming and Tax. Might wanna check that out. Perhaps Mark (FocalClick/SunPoker) knows as SunPoker has an office there.

Anguilla is definitely good for other things as well: always nice weather exept for an occasional hurricane. The beaches are COOL!!! And being close to Sint Maarten you can go partying and checking out some good looking women.

Good luck,

Hopefully you'll be an example to us!

Giorgio

[kaus]

Toronto

All the ammenities including major international airport for your clients.

As far as employees you could find each and every one that you mentioned and than some with the experience and qualifications needed.

I imagine there is not much issue with this type of buissness, an old school friend ended up there and works as a web designer for one of the larger porn companies has been there developing sites for quite a few years...but not sure about regulations and tax stuff.

[SecretSauce]

Thanks for the great ideas all.

If anybody knows anything about the regulations in Canada or possible some creative corporate structure ideas that could have the office based anywhere. For example I heard that FTP had offices in Los Angeles though they were technically a separate company just providing support services.

Anybody know about the laws in Canada RE: online gaming?

Vancouver would be a cool city to live in

[SecretSauce]

Somebody just recommended Panama to me. Anybody know anything about Panama?