I’ve been working in international employment and corporate services since 1991. Twenty years of that was at TMF Group, where I went from accountant to a seat on the Group Board of Directors. In 1992, I ran the overseas operations of a UK manufacturing group as Managing Director, real local directorship, real presence, across multiple jurisdictions. Long before anyone called it “Employer of Record,” I was doing the work.

When I left TMF in 2011, EOR was a new idea. The early providers, people like Tim Burgess and Duncan Macintosh at Shield GEO, Ben Wright at Velocity Global, were building something genuinely useful. But they didn’t have entity networks yet. So they came to companies like mine, GOT International, and we built it for them: local entities, payroll, compliance, the local HR problems nobody else wanted to touch.

For a while, that worked the way it should. When those early providers had the volume to bring things in-house, they did it honestly, fair notice, clear timelines, respect for what we’d built together.

Then the industry changed. A second wave of providers came in faster, better funded, and far less careful about what they promised. Clients were sold things that weren’t legally possible. When reality caught up with the sales pitch, subcontractors like us took the blame, and the unpaid invoices.

I founded GOT International to do this properly. We paid our employees on time, every time, even when we weren’t being paid ourselves. We kept that up for years, across multiple countries, until the debts owed to us by three major EOR providers grew too large to absorb. In 2025, GOT International stopped trading. We fought it in court and lost, not on the merits, but because we ran out of money before they did. The hardest part wasn’t the company. It was having to let down the employees we’d always put first.

That’s the “bad.” Here’s what I did with it.

Nova Satus Global exists because I know exactly what it costs when this industry is run carelessly, and exactly what it takes to run it right. Every entity structure, every payroll setup, every compliance decision we make for a client is shaped by three decades of seeing what happens when providers cut corners, and by the discipline of having built something that didn’t.

If you’re a company that needs to employ or contract people internationally, or a contractor who needs the work done properly, I’m not asking you to trust a brand. I’m asking you to trust someone who has been on every side of this, including the side that got burned, and built Nova Satus Global to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

— Ingmar Booij, Founder