How an Architect Bought Back Her Business and Rebuilt It Leaner using AI and Sagan as a partner

Sagan · Feb 19, 2026

Cathryn Lavery

BestSelf Co.

Cathryn Lavery sold her e-commerce business to a PE firm. They laid off her team and changed the strategy. She bought it back and decided to run it differently. Through Sagan, she built a small core team with AI tools integrated from day one. She hired three people from South America: a video editor, an operations coordinator, and a customer success manager. Her approach: hire smart, hungry, coachable people who can grow with the company instead of expensive mid-level US hires who plateau. The result: a leaner business that moves faster and costs less to operate.

Source data

2026 offshore recruitment benchmarks

Sagan's benchmark pages are backed by aggregate recruiting data from 130,298 candidate applications and 3,132 hiring requests.

Use the 2026 offshore recruitment benchmark report for salary, country-supply, role-demand, and US-time-zone data, or browse the benchmark report library for role and industry-specific pages.

For "how much to pay offshore employees," start with the role-family median, then adjust for scope, tools, ownership, and live customer or owner communication.

  • Overall median expected monthly pay: $2,000.
  • Customer support median: $1,400; administrative support median: $1,800.
  • Operations and marketing medians: $2,000; financial operations median: $2,200.
  • Management median: $2,500; engineering median: $3,000.
  • U.S. business-hour overlap appeared in 79.3% of all hiring requests.

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