Ground Control: What Actually Happens Before a GCC Takes Off
India's Global Capability Centre ecosystem has crossed a genuine inflection point. There are now more than 2,100 GCCs operating across the country, generating close to $98 billion in annual revenue, a number that has grown 32% since FY2021 alone. For any global enterprise watching from outside, the conclusion looks obvious: the model works, the talent is there, and the path to setting one up should be reasonably well understood by now.
It rarely plays out that way on the inside.
Most organisations preparing to set up a GCC assume their biggest risk is finding people. Talent does matter, and India's market for it has tightened considerably as competition for office space in Bengaluru and Hyderabad intensifies and state-level incentive windows shift from year to year. But after working across more than 150 establishment engagements, we've found that the centres which struggle in their first eighteen months rarely struggle because of talent scarcity. They struggle because of sequencing. Decisions get made in an order that feels intuitive in the moment and turns out to be expensive six months later.
Where the sequencing usually breaks down
Location gets chosen before governance does It's tempting to start with the exciting question: which city, which SEZ, which building. But location decisions made before the operating model is defined tend to lock an organisation into infrastructure that doesn't actually fit how the centre will be governed. A city chosen for cost efficiency can quietly become the wrong city once the reporting structure and decision rights are actually mapped out.
The lease gets signed before the org chart exists Office space gets committed to early because it feels like tangible progress. Meanwhile the questions that should come first, who reports to whom, what decisions stay with the parent company, what gets delegated locally, are still being worked out in parallel. By the time governance catches up, the physical footprint has already constrained what's organisationally possible.
Leadership search starts only once the centre is "ready" This is the costliest sequencing error we see. Leadership hiring for a new GCC routinely takes longer than operational hiring, sometimes considerably longer, because the pool of candidates who can credibly run a centre that doesn't exist yet is genuinely small. Organisations that wait until the office is fitted out before starting that search are usually three to six months behind where they need to be on day one.
The fix isn't more planning. It's a different order of planning.
None of this means an organisation needs a longer runway before launching. It means the runway needs to be sequenced differently: governance and operating model first, location and leadership search running in parallel immediately after, infrastructure and workplace decisions following from those, not preceding them.
The centres that launch cleanly aren't the ones with the most resources. They're the ones where someone mapped the dependencies before committing to any single decision irreversibly.
