Building YourCoach: How a Health-tech Startup Scaled with Georgian Talent
- Natia Gabarashvili
- 12 hours ago
- 7 min read
Key Takeaway
“One thing I really love about working with you is that we never hear 'no' as an answer.
It’s always, “We’ll figure it out. Give us a minute.” And you always do.”
Says Marina Borukhovich, CEO & Co-Founder of YourCoach Health.
YourCoach Health, a U.S.-based company and the infrastructure layer for health coaching, didn’t come to Georgia looking for an outsourcing shortcut. They were looking for people who could move fast without breaking things. People who would treat challenges as a shared responsibility, not someone else’s task.
What they found was more than talent. They found a way to scale without friction.
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YourCoach in 60 seconds
YourCoach operates at the intersection of technology and human behavior. Their platform provides white-label infrastructure and coaching services, helping people work on everything from stress and anxiety to weight management and loneliness through lifestyle modification and lasting behavior change.
YourCoach works with health systems, employers, and digital health companies. Behind the scenes, they manage a network of more than 4,000 validated health coaches, combining data, quality management, and human oversight.
The company’s core belief is simple: technology should support people, not replace them.
That philosophy extends beyond their product and defines how they build teams.
The secret to their rapid scaling wasn't just found in Silicon Valley or New York; it has grown with the hearts and minds of an extended team in Georgia.
The Scaling Problem Most Startups Hit
Like many fast-growing startups, YourCoach faced a familiar challenge.
“It's not hard to find great talent, but it's really hard to find talent that is part of your team that builds the product with you,” explains Marina.
People who:
Don’t just execute tasks
Understand the mission
Take ownership
Build the product with the founders, not for them.
At this pivotal point, we met the YourCoach team. Broader regional instability forced the company to quickly relocate and restructure parts of its distributed team. Speed, legal clarity, and continuity became immediate priorities.
They needed help managing a distributed team without turning “people operations” into a second startup inside the startup. That’s when Valerian Gegidze and Eugene Borukhovich reconnected on LinkedIn.
“It was game-changing,” Marina says. “You were so helpful that we could continue working with our people all over the world, without disruption.”
But the story of YourCoach and Georgia started way back.
The Beginning of theGeorgia Chapter
When Marina and Eugene first visited Georgia, they didn’t come looking for talent, but something clicked on the flight home.
The warmth, the work ethic, the curiosity, it stayed with them. They had the same thought:
“Why don’t we have anyone from Georgia on our team?”
The answer wasn’t only about cost. It was about alignment.
They had seen a rare combination of qualities. Strong education. Curiosity. Ownership. Warmth. A willingness to take responsibility without being asked.
Shortly after, the war in Ukraine forced a much harder reality. YourCoach had team members across Eastern Europe, and suddenly, relocation, legal clarity, and continuity were no longer theoretical concerns. They were operational priorities.
Georgia offered what the company needed at exactly the right moment.
Time-zone overlap with both the U.S. and Europe
A deep and underexposedtalent pool
Multilingual professionals who are comfortable working within global teams
A stable environment to support long-term employment
Most importantly, Georgia offered the ability to build real teams, not outsourced functions.
YourCoach was clear from the start.
“These are not outsourced roles,” Marina explains. “These individuals are part of our company. They’re YourCoach employees. We just work through a trusted local partner.”
That distinction mattered.
What stood out almost immediately was the depth of capability. During hiring, it was common to meet candidates speaking four or five languages. Technical and operational skills came paired with accountability and care for the work itself.
The Deep Process: Roles and Results
Before a single role was hired, Team Up worked with YourCoach to slow the process down just enough to get it right. Not to overthink it. To remove risk before it shows up later as payroll issues, compliance gaps, or misclassified roles.
The goal was simple: build a high-performing global team that feels internal, stays compliant, and scales cleanly.
Step 1: Define Roles Based on How the Company Actually Operates
The most common failure in global hiring is misalignment between role reality and legal structure.
Team Up started by mapping each role against operational truth, not job titles.
For every position, we asked:
Is this role embedded in day-to-day decision-making?
Does the individual report directly to internal leadership?
Is long-term continuity critical to product or customer experience?
If the answer was yes, the role required full employment through an Employer of Record model. No exceptions. No “temporary contractor” shortcuts.
This eliminated misclassification risk before it existed.
Based on this assessment, three core roles were structured in Georgia:
AI Backend Engineer
WordPress Developer
Customer Support Specialist
Each role was defined around ownership, accountability, and measurable outcomes. Cost was a consequence of structure, not the driver.
Step 2: Execute an Employment Structure That Holds Up Under Scrutiny
With compensation and role scope aligned, Team Up executed full EOR employment for each hire.
This included:
Locally compliant employment contracts
Clear IP ownership and confidentiality protections
Proper employee registration and documentation
Clean alignment between operational control and legal responsibility
The outcome was simple but critical.
These were not “remote resources”; they were legally employed team members, fully integrated into YourCoach.
This structure matters not only for day-to-day operations, but for investor diligence, IP protection, and long-term scale.
Step 3: Payroll Execution That Does Not Break Under Pressure
Payroll is where most global hiring setups fail quietly, then catastrophically.
Team Up ran the full payroll engine, so the founders didn’t have to continuously worry about:
Tax withholding and statutory contributions
Employee registration with local authorities
Monthly filings and compliance deadlines
Payslips, documentation, and payment routing
From YourCoach’s side, the experience stayed simple.
One monthly invoice, predictable costs, and no payroll fire drills.
This removed an entire class of operational risk from the leadership team.
Step 4: Onboarding People Into the Company, Not a Vendor Model
YourCoach is a mission-driven company. That requires context, not just contracts.
Team Up aligned onboarding with how YourCoach actually works:
Direct integration into internal tools and workflows
Clear communication expectations across time zones
Explicit boundaries around availability and working hours
One insight from the founders proved especially important.
Georgian talent tends to over-deliver and under-set boundaries. Without clear leadership signals, it quickly leads to burnout.
Boundaries were treated as part of onboarding, not an HR afterthought. This preserved performance and retention over time.
Step 5: Talent Capability That Changed the Equation
As hiring progressed, the capability depth became obvious.
“The talent is absolutely incredible,” says Marina, “As we're interviewing for a customer service position. Four or five languages these candidates know!”
For a company serving diverse B2B clients and end users, this shifted expectations around what “good” looks like.
It was not cheaper hiring, but accessing a capability stack that was difficult to replicate in other markets.
Step 6: Ongoing Operational Support That Stays Invisible
The strongest EOR partnerships fade into the background.
Team Up remained involved across:
Ongoing payroll and compliance management
HR administration and support
Scaling up or down as the headcount changed
Issue resolution without escalating everything to the founders
This is what Marina referred to when she described the experience as “game-changing.”
The mental load disappeared. Execution became routine.
What This Process Proved
For YourCoach, this approach validated three things early:
Georgia could support both technical and operational roles at scale
Cost efficiency did not dilute ownership, culture, or quality
A properly structured EOR model removes friction instead of adding layers
At that point, the question was no longer whether this setup could work.
It became how far the model could scale.
What Changed for the Client
The impact of this setup wasn’t incremental; it was structural.
Once the team in Georgia was fully operational under a clean employment model, the internal dynamics at YourCoach shifted in ways that were immediately visible to leadership.
Before: Growth Carried Hidden Operational Weight
Before working with Team Up, global hiring created constant background pressure.
Cross-border payroll required attention and manual coordination
Employment risk lived in the back of the leadership’s mind
Relocation decisions introduced legal uncertainty
Hiring in new countries felt possible, but fragile
None of these issues stopped the company from growing. But all of them slowed down decision-making.
People operations were quietly becoming a second system that the founders had to manage alongside product and strategy.
After: Hiring Became a Strategic Lever, Not a Liability
With Team Up managing employment, payroll, and compliance in Georgia, that pressure disappeared.
The shift showed up in three clear ways.
1. Focus Remained on the Product and the Mission
Founders thought less about payroll cycles, filings, and local regulations. Those concerns moved into the background.
What stayed in focus:
Product quality
Coaching outcomes
B2B client growth
Long-term roadmap decisions
As Marina put it:
“It’s such a relief knowing that the operational and compliance side is handled. That’s not something we need to continuously worry about anymore.”
2. Team Quality Went Up, Not Down
Cost efficiency did not come at the expense of capability.
The Georgian team quickly proved itself across:
Joint stewardship of core systems
Faster execution on web and platform updates
Higher-quality, more empathetic customer support
Multilingual coverage that expanded service reach
3. The Company Gained Structural Confidence to Scale
Perhaps the most important change was psychological.
Once leadership saw that:
Employment structure held up under real conditions
Payroll ran without exceptions
Compliance no longer depended on the founder's constant attention
Hiring stopped feeling risky.
Georgia became a repeatable model, not a one-off experiment, and global expansion shifted from “can we do this?” to “where next?”
The Founder Perspective
For Marina and Eugene, the difference was operational and emotional.
Global employment no longer felt like something that could break at any moment. It became boring, predictable, and safe.
That’s exactly how infrastructure should feel.
As Marina summarized it:
“Honestly, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do without you. Having that worry completely off our minds changed everything.”
Why This Matters for Other Companies
This case isn’t about Georgia alone. It’s about choosing structure over shortcuts.
For companies building distributed teams, the real risk is rarely talent. It’s misclassification, payroll drift, compliance debt, and founder distraction.
YourCoach avoided those traps by treating global hiring as an operating system, not an experiment.
That’s what changed.
Ready to Build the Same Way?
If you’re scaling a distributed team and want to move fast without creating legal or payroll risk, this is the model YourCoach chose.
Team Up helps you:
Hire full-time team members in Georgia and across the region
Stay fully compliant without opening local entities
Run payroll, taxes, and HR administration without founder involvement
Build teams that feel internal, not transactional
You manage the work. We handle employment, compliance, and payroll behind the scenes.
If you’re hiring for your first international role or scaling a multi-country team, we’ll help you design the structure before problems appear.
Talk to Team Up about building your global team the right way.
