How the best ‘win in Asia’

Last week I was one of four panelists on the Asialink Business event How the best ‘win in Asia’: Business models from companies that are succeeding in Asian markets. The request was to share the learnings and how-to’s in taking a business to Asia. I have led Asia expansion both at an ASX-listed Corporate level, as well as a private company starting from day one in founding Digivizer. Being successful in doing business in Asia starts with making it personal and taking a long term view. I am sharing the key insights I shared in this article.

Being successful in doing business in Asia starts with making it personal and taking a long term view.

My passion for doing business in Asia  started when I was President & Chief Operating Officer of ASX-listed Australian technology company Altium in the mid-2000’s.  

We transformed what had mainly been an Australian company into a global one, with 97% of its revenues coming from offshore – much of that new growth coming from Asia, China in particular.

On quarterly visits, I literally saw the cities and companies in the region grow, mature and globalize at a rate greater than anything I saw elsewhere. Forums, smart phones,  mobile commerce – all were actively engaged with by a population intent on being successful. While we were still tethered to LAN cables in our offices in Australia, Europe and the US, China and Asia were going mobile and growing new businesses. 

It was then that I realised Australia represents only  0.33% of the world’s population. Asia has about 60% of the population, across 48 countries, each with its own culture, language and nuances. By 2040 more than 50% of the world’s GDP, and over 40% of the world’s consumption of goods, will be in Asia.

This is a massive opportunity for Australian businesses.

And in seeing that opportunity in the speed of mobile and smart device usage and the prevalence to connecting, engaging, sharing and buying online,  I co-founded Digivizer 10 years ago with these objectives and ambitions in mind: a global focus with a strong eye to Asia – in other words, to be where the growth is.

Digivizer now offers digital marketing analytics technology and agency services across Asia and the rest of the world. We’ve done so from our first few weeks. We now have a physical presence in seven countries, and serve a total of 14 countries in Asia. We work with companies that include Microsoft, Lenovo, Google, LinkedIn, Thinxtra and Roses Only, to name a few, but we also work with SMEs and startups – in Australia and Asia-  as well.

So my early exposure to the opportunities in Asia was at an ASX company, but those opportunities apply equally to private companies, including SMBs like Digivizer. 

Here’s what I’ve learned along the way:

  1. Personal relationships matter more in Asia than elsewhere. Trust, respect, cultural awareness, a commitment to business – all must be established, but when you take the time to do this, investing your personal time and educating/inviting/involving stakeholders, you can accelerate success.
  2. Invest in-region – through personal understanding, and hiring the best local talent.  Best talent means spending high in-market.
  3. Localization is much more than translation – you need to understand each country’s nuances, public holidays, celebrations, language, phrasing and location.
  4. Grow people to grow your business. Have development plans for your people, to keep, grow and retain them. Remember, they will be mobile as well, moving between countries, and even to Australia, as their careers develop. They are hungry for success, so ensure you help them be successful.
  5. Build cultural awareness across your entire organization – time zone awareness, cultural learnings, about your people are so important for removing any “HQ” mentality. Cultural business awareness has to be two-way.
  6. Think digital first. Customers in Asia often don’t have the same attachment to bricks-and-mortar brands as we do in the western world. Some of the most successful new businesses and customer engagement strategies are entirely built on digital, and Asia is a data-rich, data-first region.  There is a lot of comfort in digital banking, app usage, 3-way marketplaces, as examples. 
  7. Use technology to the maximum – Covid has accelerated this. We operated as a matter of instinct and habit on Zoom, Team and Google before the pandemic, but overlaid work practices. Use technology to promote mutual understanding, and as importantly, develop your organization’s culture across regions and language. It enables you to run cross-team projects, to share wins, create buddy systems, and more.
  8. Ensure you have strong banking and HR contracts that are relevant to the country and money runs smoothly. The mechanisms of doing business have to be right, and well-oiled. 

As a private company, you don’t have the luxury of patience – you don’t have the cash flow or resources! You can, though, still be successful – with the best-possible talent, a digital focus, and a regional, global view from day one. 

Thank you to fellow panelists Dig Howitt, CEO & President, Cochlear, Andrew Barkla, CEO, IDP Education, and Scott Speedie, Regional Head, Asia & New Zealand CEO Singapore, CBA, and also to Mukund Narayanamurti, CEO, Asialink Business, and the Asialink Business team.

Build capability in your organization so you can pivot fast and build a competitive advantage without breaking your vision

 

 

As we proudly progress with another product update released today (refer digivizer.com) I am reflecting on what it takes to continue to grow and do more than just survive. With key outcomes that include launching our new product, now made affordable for every business, expansion into Asia, 30% of revenues earned overseas, and the launch of our gaming and esports specialisation in goto.game, it has taken a number of pivots for Digivizer to grow to where it is today.

Knowing how to survive by building a culture of learning and pivoting fast is essential because in the world of startups and early growth, nothing is for ever. As serial entrepreneur Steve Blank says in his book The Four Steps To The Epiphany, a startup is “a temporary organization used to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” I think that’s true of most startups. It’s certainly been true of Digivizer.

We’ve learned, though, that to build out our ability to grow-fast in our organization, we have needed to build the capability to pivot quickly. If you do, you can thrive and change direction to take advantage of new opportunities, and move quickly away from slower growth, and from initiatives that don’t provide returns or suck up resources.

Let’s take a look at the journey so far.

Changing direction to move faster

We started Digivizer with a vision to build a technology company, initially to track all Australians on the social web. Early customers were larger enterprises that included a number of Australia’s banks, tech and telco companies. All loved the data, insights and input into strategy that Digivizer was able to provide. Understanding the digital footprint and behavior of their customers with context was used for the first time by many of these organizations.

The promise of overseas expansion beckoned early on. Australia represents just 0.33% percent of the world’s population. Our horizon was always global, even as a startup. Early engagements included for a global company, as one example, incorporating and analysing Chinese language within our analytics engine.

Our pivot history

However, the learning in the smaller (and younger) Digivizer led to the first in a number of pivots: the investment to support such a multi-language contract ultimately proved too high for a fast return that would also depend on local representation. To help scale Digivizer technology we decided to stop other language support (despite the lucrative contract) and focus only on English.

By this time, more organizations recognized the value of real-time insights. They wanted turn-key solutions, support in real-time decision-making, content and managed digital and social marketing programs, and measurement of performance in real-time.

Our second pivot was to build a creative services team centered on social community managers and creatives that could rapidly build, input and track performance within the Digivizer platform. This allowed us to bootstrap growth and product development off client creative services revenue, whilst providing a point of differentiation. We were not an agency because everything we did was based on our own data analytics engine, and we were not solely a technology company because we could action insights in real-ime with creative services. This saw sales doubling each year for the three years.

With our technology now able to identify social segmentation around what mattered and who people were following, pivot number three beckoned – in audience-first thinking. Identification of influencers within market segments, and adding the ability to engage, track and report on the impact of any influencer programs, offered the next opportunity for growth.

The underlying platform that had worked in our early history began to slow scalable growth, and to stretch precious resources. We had originally built our own data platform to take advantage of low comparative cost, only to see the costs of maintaining that platform becoming excessive. A migration to the cloud, not a decision we took lightly or one that was simple to execute, allowed us to focus on building our IP, changing the focus for our valuable engineering resources.

Our most-recent pivot takes us back to our original vision: to provide a way to help grow every business by helping them understand and make better decisions around their digital investment.

Whilst continuing to deliver creative solutions, we’ve now our brought our technology to companies of any and every size, including and especially SMBs and startups, with our SaaS product.

Tough decisions reap rewards

At the time, some of these decisions were hard to take, but the results speak for themselves: we have gone to market faster than we otherwise would have.

Pivoting need not be drastic, nor mean discarding years of strategy and work. Our pivots were not fundamental changes in our strategy, but they were in prioritization of resources and implementation plan. And while some were momentous at the time, they were made with care and were completely congruent to our vision. What became obvious is that hiring, developing and building capability around pivoting, and seizing new opportunities, fast becomes the true business competitive advantage. When we started there were about 20-30 players in the same space. Now there are just two of us left in Australia of those early players, and we do and offer very different products and solutions.

Lessons learned

In planning to pivot, as part of developing a strategy that will meet your image, you must also incorporate a people strategy flexible enough to accommodate change.

You need to understand what your customers actually need and ensure that’s what you deliver in a way that they see as being valuable.

Always seek to build on the learnings from the steps you’ve taken before, without being hidebound by the actual steps or sunk costs.

To pivot is more than not breaking your business: it is about seizing the moment as each opportunity presents.

This article also published on LinkedIn

People strategies in fast-growth startups: creating sustainable growth foundations

When companies are in fast- growth stage, it is not unusual to have new people, reporting to new people, who report to new people, working with new technology, serving new customers. The growth inevitably leads to a ‘cascade of newness’. Despite your smaller size, you need to be super- disciplined at ensuring that in your haste to build and resource up as fast-growth demands, that you do not make hasty or incorrect hiring decisions. Nor can you afford circumnavigation around deep onboarding and knowledge-transfer programs designed to ensure new people understand the culture, their role, and performance expectations and measures.

Equally in fast-growth you need to resist the urge to prescribe and over- engineer on process. The key to growth is getting really smart people in, making sure they know where the company is heading, and then enabling and encouraging them to forge the path within a “one team, one dream” business focus, yet at the same time be encouraged to take individual responsibility for making smart decisions, and delivering measurable success.

Building foundations

Foundation elements in getting this right start with the talent and skills of those you employ. Alongside these sit attitude – does this person share your values, will they be a good collaborator, and aptitude – are they the right ‘fit’ for your fast-growth environment. You then want to ensure everyone aligns around customer success first. If you focus with clarity on the customer’s success (and what you do to enable it), it is the best way of ensuring your own business and everyone’s personal success.

How do you hire to ensure you have the right people?

For Digivizer, hiring starts with the mandate: look for smart, talented people, who get things done, are infinite learners and are not an arsehole. Our values crafted by our employees themselves are not negotiable, focusing on “one team, one dream”, truth and transparency, responsibility, courage and growth.

Getting our foundations right is one I think Digivizer on the whole has done well. We ensure everyone is clear about our vision, our objectives, our values, our success measures and our recruitment and care of people. We then continually check on progress with everyone. Nothing beats survey data around employee engagement, performance, and satisfaction to ensure we get this part of our business right and the best it can be. Our leadership mantra is simple – grow people and you grow business. Spending time understanding and providing challenges for people, is the surest way to deliver growth.

Despite knowing the importance of getting our people culture right, we have recently experienced growth pains we needed to address. As such, I wanted to share our painfully learned and reinforced lessons to help others going through similar growth periods:

  1. Some people won’t grow with you. They liked it small, they liked it when they were more important and integral. As you grow you need people who can grow ahead of you and those who see the need to continuously grow and learn. People either grow with you through multiple levels and evolutions, or they can’t (or won’t). You need to quickly identify and deal with those who can’t grow or cope with fast change,. They will be happier elsewhere, and so will your team who want to stay focused on the growth challenge.
  2. Employees who come from larger corporates or consultancies, where process and bureaucracy are well-established, can be uncomfortable and unhappy in a fast-growth company. Whilst some say they want the start-up/growth experience, you need to find a way to identify people who have the capacity and the willingness to switch from big corporate steady-state mode, to hectic ground-moving growth mode. Whilst you need principles to guide decisions, it is far more important to hire and encourage people’s comfort in fast-moving environments, where they thrive on continuous change, risk and complex challenges. You want people who want to choose the scary upside-down roller-coaster over the safe merry-go-round. You can’t ever afford for anyone try or desire to make things slower or easier. If you see that is the motivator, you need to address it immediately.
  3. Excuse-making and sub-cultures are like cancer – you need to address it with radical candour and if not completely and quickly realigned, cut it out of your organisation immediately.  Coach those who are willing but never allow those who think there is an option to resist change, or to not take on responsibility for culture, values, performance and outcomes. It is never OK to have an alternative view counter to your company vision. Explain the surgery to the rest of the team once you have acted, to remove any concerns of those who are doing the right thing. It is important that people are encouraged and feel protective of their environment, and see that they are responsible for the changes they want to see, and feel empowered, energised and secure about doing the right thing.
  4. Don’t ever lower the bar on hiring. And the more critical the role, the more important it is to have multiple interviews, and multiple interviewers. Whilst you need to move quickly, you need to get your recruitment right as the opportunity cost on getting this wrong (distraction and what is not delivered from someone who is holding the seat of someone who could be great for you). For hires that you are unsure of, or for teams with a structure in flux, turn these roles into timed contracts which allows you to more easily change and shape your organisation. If for whatever reason someone is not right, deal with this immediately. You can’t afford to allow those who don’t represent your values to erode the teamwork and team values already built.
  5. Ensure the values are real every day – your team must know what they are, you must talk to them, share them, live them, relate decisions to them and ensure they are present in all you say, do and communicate. You can never over communicate the values and drivers for the business.
  6. Make sure your leaders know how to practise radical candour and can do performance management discussions. It is critical that everyone in the organisation has regular discussions around:
  • Here is what you are doing really well – provide specific examples and what behaviours you observed that lead to great outcomes
  • Here is what you really need to be focusing more time on. You need to be really clear about what is expected, how this helps, and how they will know if they are successfully performing. Ensure you commit to a follow-up time to address it
  • Here is something that will be a potential issue and hinder your performance if you don’t address it immediately. Be 100% clear if someone needs to take some immediate action to ensure that their success or ability to stay in their role is not at risk
  • What can we do to help ensure your success (and then help them)!

What does a successful people culture in early-growth companies look like?

It is important to understand that start-up/fast-growth cultures are not for everyone.

Smart people who have traded in roles at larger companies are replacing having lots of other people, processes, systems, money and prestige/leverage that they may no longer have in start-up/fast-growth stage companies. This can cause tension between those used to working at organisations with deep pockets and plentiful resources, and those who understand the tight cash that most start-ups operate within which requires smarter thinking or happiness to do without. I have seen some of the best and creative ideas flourish when being developed within budget and time constraints.

It’s important to keep aspiring to build, change, and improve a people-culture as you grow, and ensure everyone plays their part in its nurture. The most valuable people are those who are happy to work to objectives, no matter how difficult they are, and are happy to be measured by key results, clearly identified, and answer whether they are on track or not. Assume everyone is there to do the right thing, and then build off that base-assumption to improve the results.

Always focus on results, not effort. It’s important to have a results-driven culture rather than one that rewards effort. It should never be around the number of hours someone works, or how much time goes into a project. Either you achieved what you set out to do or you are not doing the job needed. If the latter is the result, conduct constructive retrospectives to identify what needs to be done differently.

A great growth culture has your team happy to be challenged, to continuously learn, test and apply. To change tacts when things don’t go to plan. They are happy to ask whether there’s a better way – and most-important of all, to take responsibility for making that happen.

They are highly adaptable, can roll up their sleeves, take responsibility for delivery and understand all kinds of challenges and options for a company at any of its stages.

They also enjoy the feeling of success that comes with delivering on the objectives for the customer, and in celebrating the milestone achievements along the way,

As a leader in fast-growth, what you do and say impacts culture. Everything must be your own team and your customers success front and center. It will keep your culture grounded in high performance, high enjoyment, high care, and trust in the high rewards that will come.

What are your experiences and tips for managing people culture and performance in fast-growth?

This article is also published on LinkedIn.

Taking your business through growth

I was recently invited to speak at a tech entrepreneurs’ lunch.

In the audience were entrepreneurs just starting out sitting alongside those a number of years in who had successfully navigated the stages of early growth to something more sustainable. We were also lucky enough to hear research presented by Cameron Research Group on key growth inflection points for SMBs.

There were a number of insights gained through the research and the discussions that followed:

1) Focus and commitment to success

Many had chosen to do their own thing not just because they were driven to harness an opportunity and to create a new future, but also because they liked the control it offered. Entrepreneurs felt they could live the life they wanted, and the more time spent on forging their own way, the less likely they could ever work for anyone else again. The result? Total focus on making their venture successful.

2) Managing growth through key inflection points

The way someone was able to run their business in the early days could only get them so far. That point seemed to be at 20-30 employees, at which point entrepreneurs needed to think about switching from a control model to an empowerment model, from an authoritative leadership style to more democratic style of leadership. This meant hiring differently, bringing in new systems, enhancing leadership capability, and formalizing HR and marketing resources and programs.

The next growth inflection point was at 70 employees, where the audience again recognized that what had been built to get them to that size would need to be revisited again, particularly in terms of systems, leadership and culture. The main concern each entrepreneur had was on how to keep and protect their company’s culture and the way they wanted their business to run when they could no longer be personally involved with, or connected to, every decision.  An emphasis on investing in building a strong culture based on values, trust and empowerment was key to those who were successful.

3) Four main growth pain points

This seemed to be universally agreed upon. To grow their businesses from startup to success, entrepreneurs needed to:

  • focus on cash flow,
  • scale recruitment and performance management
  • scale sales and marketing,
  • control costs.

Everyone agreed that all of these were challenging, especially when gearing up for sustainable and often accelerated growth. This has certainly been our experience at Digivizer and we have put much investment in each of these areas.

What was particularly insightful for me was the number of businesses that had realized they had to switch their marketing models from doing it themselves to recognizing they needed external solutions.

And it was especially interesting to hear that once businesses grew to that 20 employee point, they needed to save time and become better at seeing and understanding what was working for them. In particular, it was time for them to invest in solutions as it was important for them to easily and quickly know the ROI of marketing expenditure. They needed to be able to easily measure what was working for them, and to focus resources there ie do more of what works and fix or stop doing what was not working. Data matters and tools could help over manual options.

This resonated with us, given that at Digivizer our focus is on helping businesses create better experiences for their customers by knowing more about them and what they care about in order to help them generate leads and sales from digital.

All of which makes me even more focused and committed to rolling out our technology and solutions in an affordable way for every business.

This article is also published on LinkedIn.