The Fintech Marketers and Leaders Podcast
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.
00:21:19 · Shameer Sachdev
[00:21:19] S1: I will never build a process, but I'm a big fan of process. And that's why I have an ops manager to do that for me. And we kind of use that in order to create consistency between the work that we're carrying out for our clients. Do you guys take a similar approach for Airwallex? I mean, because obviously, if you're growing at a rapid pace even, the biggest concern that I would perceive would be dropped balls and I suppose information that exists in people's heads and not in shared drives, for example.
00:21:46 · Pranav Sood
[00:21:46] S2: The theory is always that you should do as much as you can to put processes in place. The reality is that sometimes it's really hard to find the space to do that when you're all hands to the pump trying to get the customer on board or support them or whatever. And so for us, it's actually one of the big focuses over the next couple of years, which is really systematizing some of what we've done. And I think we started that in places. So we have started to bring more repositories of knowledge and more centralized views of what works and what doesn't. Some of the alignment that we've done functionally over the course of last year or so has really helped in that regard as well. But I think still, one of the downsides of growing as fast as we have is that you don't necessarily always have the time to sit and write down how does it work and how should it work. And as a consequence of that, there is always, you do carry risk as a business and as a leader because there are people and there are bits in the business where pockets of knowledge exist. And sometimes you don't even know that the knowledge is there because you've never needed to use it. But for sure, I think if I have my way, I'm the kind of guy, I'm probably the opposite to you. I'm the kind of guy who writes to do lists of things that he's already done so that I can cross them out and feel good about my completion.