The Fintech Marketers and Leaders Podcast
00:13:52 · Shameer Sachdev
[00:13:52] S1: I just want to touch upon the distribution of the team. I mean, there's always an ongoing conversation between fully remote, full time in office, hybrid, you're very, very distributed. How do you manage that as a business? And then leading into the fact that you're scaling really rapidly and going into new territories. How much importance do you place on that people piece, then ensuring that obviously you're able to maintain almost like inclusivity, even though people are so distributed?
00:14:27 · Pranav Sood
[00:14:27] S2: Honestly, I don't think we've nailed it. And honestly, I don't think anyone has globally. Think really hard pressed to find an example of a company where it's working perfectly. We have a bunch of different and maybe slightly unique challenges that we lean into. Some of them are about geographic distribution and the time zone elements. Some of them are about language. So not everyone who works for Airwallex has English as a first language. Some of them are about functionaldiscipline and speciality. So someone in marketing may not be speaking the same functional language as someone in sales or product or wherever. I think from our side, what we try and do is the following. One is really double down and emphasize the company wide rituals, so the town halls, the updates, the stuff that we share across the entire business. The second is to try and create, as far as possible, quite a decentralized operating model across our regional businesses. And so myself as a GM and my colleagues as GMs, we're all part of the executive team. And the reason for that is because that allows us to be able to run the businesses in the different parts of the world in a really coherent way. And so rather than being purely VP of sales or just commercially focused, you're instead responsible for everything. And that puts an additional responsibility on you to go and ensure those connectivities and those links exist between the functions in your part of the world and the functions globally. Obviously, travel has not been possible for the last couple of years in a completely wholesale way. But certainly, the last six months or so, it's opened up a lot. And so there have I've certainly been traveling a lot. I've spent a lot of my life on the plane over the last few months. And I think that helps, just the literal act of being there and being able to shake someone's hand, go out for lunch with them, whatever it may well be, helps to foster that. But I'd be lying if I said we'd nailed it. And I think it's one of the areas that we talk about the most as a leadership group because we really recognize that we're on that chapter of our growth journey where it's no longer a zero to one game anymore. It's a one to 10 or maybe a 10 to 100 game. And in order to get from that 10 to 100 mark, it stops being possible unless you find the right operating model to scale effectively.
00:16:49 · Pranav Sood, Shameer Sachdev
So it's a big topic for us for discussion. It's actually something we spent a bunch of time on as an exec team just a few weeks ago at our off-site. But as I said, Shamir, if you've got any great suggestions, I'll happily write them down and pass them off as my own. [00:17:05] S1: I wish I had some nuggets of advice. I mean, we're fully distributed as well. And I mean, even to this day, I mean, we're 12 people now, so we're a lot smaller. I mean, we still run our all hands session every day for a couple of reasons, to create transparency across all the roles, but then also at the same time as a check-in for all the team members as well. Because it's that well-being and mental health piece that you've gotta be mindful as well, especially people are kind of cooped up and focused on their work. I think that's probably my biggest concern. I never really worry about people doing their job. More worried about their mommas doing it too much, if that makes sense. Because there's no one there to turn the lights off at the end of the day and walk out of the office. So if someone's still working, then actually are they overworking?
00:17:50 · Pranav Sood
[00:17:50] S2: I think that's a great point. And it's one of the things that we've been doing a fair bit here in EMEA with the Airwall X team, which is running wellness weeks. We've got now a bunch of mental health first aiders that we've trained. We've got access to the employee assistance programs and various other things that we've been trying to add into the kind of offering that we bring to our team. And I think you're absolutely right that there's a lot that rests on your shoulders as a leader to create an environment where your teams are working effectively but also healthily. What we do is hard. There's no dodging that. It's a difficult thing. Most of your life is failing in things or being told no. And that's pretty draining after a while.
00:18:33 · Shameer Sachdev
[00:18:33] S1: Yeah, an endless fighting of fire sometimes and it can take its toll. And I think the bad thing about the pandemic was is that, although it kept bums on seats, there wasn't an... No one was looking up from their screen. I had team members just collecting holidays because they were going, well, I'm not gonna go anywhere, so what's the point in taking time off? I'm only gonna sit at home. But it's... You know, that bit is improving. The other bit that I find really, really valuable is really refining our onboarding process. And we've we've kind of... I wouldn't say we've got it down, but it's constantly evolving, constantly improving. I mean, how you, you you're scaling up really, really quickly. I like to find out a little bit about your sort of processes. Do you have things like distinct onboarding processes and things like that that help that scaling, even in terms of hiring, for example, for hiring, onboarding, those sort of bits and pieces.
00:19:31 · Pranav Sood
[00:19:31] S2: It's an area that we're focusing on, but I don't think we've yet nailed. From my point of view, the process of getting someone into the business and making them successful starts at the moment when you begin the interview process, and it doesn't end until they finish their probation period. So it's not just a question of getting bums on seats and then leaving them to do their work. I think we try and do a couple of things. One is making sure that we have a really structured onboarding program in place. I think that's particularly important in a business as global and as distributed as ours because it isn't immediately obvious to people sometimes who they need to be in touch with. And not being in the same office or in the same country sometimes means that you need to be guided to know, here's what so and so does, here's where they sit, here's how you contact them or how you interact with them. The second thing is we've invested probably ahead of the curve a little bit in terms of enablement and things like that. So even now, we've got probably 120 odd people in EMEA as a whole and probably 30 to 35 in London as part of our commercial team. Even at that scale, was really keen to make sure we brought someone in as a sales enablement person who could help both our salespeople, but also our broader commercial people continually upscale, but also rapidly on board. And as we look into next year and some of the expansion that we're planning to do both across Europe into different markets, but also into different products, I think it is really, really, really important that you have an enablement and onboarding program that scales because, as you know, you invest a lot of time in people to drive your growth. And people don't necessarily stay forever. If you have to get new ones, you can't wait waiting for two years for them to be productive. So I think onboarding is critical in that process.