SaaS Stories
SaaS Stories is my not-so-secret quest to learn what it truly takes to succeed in the world of SaaS—and I’m inviting you along for the ride! I have the pleasure of sitting down with brilliant minds and industry trailblazers to explore their journeys, uncovering the secrets behind their growth, the gaps they spotted in the market, and what really drives them.
It’s not all smooth sailing—there are challenges, unexpected turns, and moments of reflection where they share what they’d love to change about their journey. Think of it as a candid, insider’s look into the world of SaaS, with just the right amount of curiosity, empathy, and wit.
Join me as I dive deep, selfishly soak up all the insights, and hopefully share a little inspiration with you along the way—one SaaS story at a time.
SaaS Stories
From Military Roots to Navigating Global Talent Solutions with Tom Larter
Join CEO Tom Larter as he reveals the transformative journey of WithYouWithMe, a trailblazing 250-person enterprise that began by aiding military veterans in career transitions and now champions a broader mission of supporting disadvantaged talent groups globally.
Discover how Tom's military background has uniquely shaped his leadership style, highlighting the pivotal roles of listening and valuing team expertise. As we navigate through evolving talent landscapes, Tom distills the art of simplicity in strategic communication and the power of aligning an organisation to a shared vision, especially amidst the rapid rise of AI and post-pandemic shifts.
Tom sheds light on the innovative integration of AI to enhance hiring processes, remove bias, and reshape company culture. As we reflect on global expansion strategies, Tom's wisdom offers invaluable guidance to entrepreneurs looking to navigate the complex terrain of international growth, emphasising the importance of strategic choices and customer collaboration in shaping successful global ventures.
Welcome everybody to another episode of SaaS Stories. Today I'm joined by CEO Tom Lata from Weeewitme. Welcome, tom Hi.
Speaker 2:Joanna, it's great to be here. Thanks for your time.
Speaker 1:Absolutely really keen to hear your story and what inspired the creation of Weeewitme. I believe you were number one employee of that amazing company, so tell me. How did it evolve into a global tech company?
Speaker 2:I'm happy to tell the story. It's been a very interesting journey over sort of the last eight years. So it came into being based on the vision of our founders who were very passionate about helping military veterans transition into really meaningful careers. Like me, many of the early employees, many of our current employees, came out of the military and sort of cared deeply about that talent pool and the fact that people were suffering real anxiety. You know there was high suicide rates, high mental anxiety around transition and so the business set out to solve that in some unique ways which we can talk about today. And then actually it evolved very quickly from not just focusing on military veterans but realising there are a whole bunch of different talent groups that were disadvantaged in their ability to access meaningful work. And we really wanted to solve that problem and we brought the process that we'd built for veterans and commercialised it into a business and scaled it globally and it seems to be working and it's unique that's amazing.
Speaker 1:What a cool story, um, what a great purpose as well. I think that this company has now your experience in the australian army. How did that shape you and your leadership style? Um, what? What do you think? You as well as you know a lot of the people coming from the military. What are some of the key set of skills they bring?
Speaker 2:So, if I answer the first part of your question, you know how do I think the military shaped my leadership style today.
Speaker 2:The number one thing that sticks with me from the military is you need to be a really good listener and to really value other people's experience.
Speaker 2:As a young army officer, you are the most junior in every aspect of that team, but you're in charge and you. You cannot be effective or productive or solve complex problems if you, if you haven't built trust, you don't listen to those with more experience around you and then make decisions and then, even if you followed the advice of others and it doesn't work out, you need to be accountable for that decision, because that's how you build trust and everybody learns so, like you learn that in a hard way in the military. It's very good at teaching you that and then bringing bringing that into business is excellent. I really rely on the executive team, the subject matter experts in our business, to help craft our solutions and our plans, and my job is not to tell people what to do. It's to keep them aligned to a vision and then remove barriers so they can be great, and I think I brought that from the military, but I don't think that's synonymous to the military.
Speaker 1:I love that. I I think leadership it's not about telling people what to do. It's about leading them to be the best you know, to do their best work with all their strengths that they bring to the table. Um, what I mean speaking of advice that you get from others? What's maybe one of the best advice you've received?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. I think, from a leadership perspective as a CEO, the best advice is when you're going through change and transformation, which seems to be a bit of a constant state for scale-up businesses like start with, why? Now, I didn't get that from Simon Sinek, although I appreciate that's quite a profound point of his. It came from an executive mentor of mine who was very much on the belief that people need to understand why. If they can understand why we're doing something first and foremost and that needs to be really simple and if you can communicate that simply, then you're halfway through getting people to come on board with you with whatever change or problem is is going, and that served us well that's so true.
Speaker 1:I heard from uh this strategy workshop I went to recently. He was saying you know, whatever the company strategy and mission and winning aspiration is, it needs to be communicated to everybody on the team. Um, you know, no matter how junior they are on the team, uh, you know, that way they're going to feel like they're part of the mission, they're part of the team and they're more likely to kind of serve and help and, you know, enjoy the work I mean, I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 2:When you think about strategy, you know, some of the other advice I've had and I deeply believe in is that strategy is nothing without execution, and if you want good execution it needs to be simple. And so, for better or worse, when we talk about our strategy, you know it's literally on one page or two pages, and we try to use simple language. And you know, and I think, if you, your executive team should be capable of communicating the complexity of the company in a simple strategy, and if you can't hear that language when you're just getting around the business, then people don't understand the direction you're heading, and that's a constant, that's a constant battle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely now. Do you think the talent landscape has changed quite dramatically in recent years, like maybe with, you know, the COVID-19 pandemic and also with AI being introduced? Are you seeing any shifts?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean this is a big question. There is undoubtedly significant shifts going on in the talent landscape, even in the eight years that I've been working in this space just in this company, but I even observed it in my in my later military years when I was working in recruitment for the military. Um you, there is a lot going on. Um, I'll maybe try and distill it into three areas. So we focus deeply on people in our business. So we believe that one of the most valuable traits for the future is understanding your ability to learn something new, and that's valuable for an individual, but it's also valuable for the organization. So there's two ways to look at that problem. One is I look at your past roles and I infer what I think your ability is to do future roles based on what you've done in the past. That's the most common thing that's been going on in talent forever. That's everything from resumes to behavioral interviews to all that sort of stuff. It's a risk-based model seeking to benchmark your future success based on your past experience.
Speaker 2:The second option, which is the thing that we care deeply about, is you look at someone's underlying aptitude and personality in relation to their ability to learn future skills. That has changed significantly in the last 10 years. That has become far more valuable because of how fast skills are moving in the market, particularly in white collar type roles. And so I think we've seen a shift now of people starting to value potential over experience, and we've been on that journey for the last kind of 10 years and it's nice to see that shift.
Speaker 2:The two other things that we've seen probably for me that stand out is um, um companies are starting to value um young skills and diverse talent more than they were sort of 10 years ago, for sure, because of the skills over experience concept. And then they're also willing to take a bit more risk on programs and driving retention. Since COVID, for sure, there's been a bigger focus on retaining and growing current talent over hiring. I think that's in part due to hiring not being fast enough at solving some of their talent problems. But also, you know, people had to do a lot to look after their people through COVID and I think that's resonated in companies to kind of keep and grow talent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Coming back to what you said earlier about, you know, trying to hire people that are good at learning something new, for example, how do you, how can you measure that you know in the very early days of interviewing them or like looking at their CV, what are some things that stand out that will tell you this person is capable of learning something new, adapting to change and is capable of learning something new, adapting to change.
Speaker 2:All right, so With you, with Me, I'll answer by explaining our core value proposition offerings With you, with Me, does two things. We run a free social impact program that helps disadvantaged groups disadvantaged in the sense that they might find meaningful work difficult because of whatever their past experience is. So veterans, neurodivergent, indigenous refugees, like those types of groups we have a free program that allows them to sign up, go through some cognitive aptitude personality testing, which is matched to a skills framework, and says hey, joanna, did you know you'd actually be really great at software engineering or business analytics? And it does that via an algorithm that benchmarks your aptitude against the future skills. Of course, you have to go on and then learn those skills, but what we found is it's very motivating because it defines self-efficacy and says you'd be great at this right at the beginning of the process, and we see four to five times more learning outcomes than you would in traditional online learning as a result of that.
Speaker 2:So we know it works and so we basically, off the back of that program, which has over 100,000 people more now globally on it, we run a recruit train deploy business that helps put people into work with employers of ours. Off the back of that, we realized that's actually really valuable technology that companies could be using internally to manage how their existing employee base is growing and moving and, you know, evolving. So we now apply the same algorithm and tech in our sas product that is improving retention, improving learning outcomes, growing people in more diverse pathways. So, to answer your question, instead of asking someone what they've done before, either directly via an interview or looking at their resume, we just get them to do the testing, and that's the start point for the conversation. It's not the only part of the conversation. There are plenty of reasons why you'd still maybe want to look at their past experience, but we completely remove the barriers by looking at someone's ability first, their affinity to learn something, and then take an approach from there as to whether they're suitable or not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. It's kind of disrupting the original hiring model in a way which we know doesn't necessarily always work. What were some of the biggest turning points in? With you, with me, on the growth journey? You know what helped you scale.
Speaker 2:So with Youth Me, it's had a very interesting growth journey. So today the business is predominantly 50-50 split between Australia and the UK, almost certainly by revenue and customer base. And then we have a small go-to-market play in the US through one of our partners and that's a growing region for us. But in past years we also had a very successful large operation in North America and so we went from being this this is the first turning point we went from being this kind of 15 to 20 person startup in Australia to this 250 person global business that was in us, canada and then the uk, and we kind of did that growth in about 12 months, around the, around the time that we kind of did our series b, you know our series b round, um. So let's call that turning point like the foot on the gas. That was the, that was the strategy. It was like grow as fast as you can, get as much ground, market share, spend capital, and that was what was happening in tech companies globally at that time. That brought us into the second turning point, which was realizing that that all happened pretty quick and maybe we were not fully ready for that expansion at that speed. Not uncommon, right, even though the lessons are well documented, sometimes you have to learn them, and so you know sales weren't as predictable as we wanted. We maybe didn't have the perfect product market fit in all the different regions. And then, of course, you're trying to scale the knowledge of the business amongst those employees as you're onboarding and growing, which takes time. Those employees, as you're onboarding and growing, which takes time. And so, despite having great brand credibility and a really strong momentum, the underlying business wasn't performing as well as we'd hoped.
Speaker 2:Then you had the economic change. So, post-covid, you had the Ukraine war kick off. You had people stop investing as much in tech stock and the landscape changed, and it changed very quickly from foot on the gas to get to profitability, and that was a big shift for a lot of tech companies, particularly scale-ups and startups, where that really wasn't a big focus, despite the desire to be a profitable business. That's not how the funding model worked. So we had to commence what I would describe as a shrink to grow play. That was a key turning point, realizing that we had to commence what I would describe as a shrink to grow play.
Speaker 2:That was a key turning point, realising that we had to do that, and that took a good 18 months to two years to really do that properly and that's quite painful for companies that have gone through that. You know you lose a lot of headcount. That's not easy. You redefine your business models, you really sharpen your productivity and you go to market strategies and that's kind of we're on the back of that now doing a succession around the founders to an, you know, a follow-on executive team is quite pivotal for any company because you do lose something special when the founders step out of the business if they do step out of the business and the company really changes its persona at that point.
Speaker 2:And that's what happened for us. And so I would call that kind of maybe the re-imagining turning point where you are holding onto to some of the roots and the heart of the business. You know we care about people, we want to help those disadvantaged groups, but you lose some of the energy you get from original founders and you have to replace that with vision, strategy, collaboration, you know alignment, things like that that keep people really focused on on scaling the business back to successful growth. That's kind of the phase we're in right now and that'll happen for probably another couple of years as we rebuild and continue to grow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's the first time I've heard of founder succession, but I do understand. You know, the need for the founder to step away. Especially when the company scales to a certain amount, the founder's not necessarily the best person to then take it from this point to that point. So it makes complete sense. But tell me a little bit more about the founder succession. Like, is that basically based on? You know, everyone's kind of feeding off the founder's energy and vision and then all of a sudden things just become a little bit more structured and strategic? I guess, yeah, there's energy and vision and then all of a sudden things just become a little bit more structured and strategic, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's so many factors here. You're right in what you're saying. And there's plenty of books that talk about, um, the value that founders bring to companies. Right, founders are a unique energy source for companies, right, that's why it's why the investment world loves finding great founders, right, that, that entrepreneurial spirit, that spirit that's really motivating for staff. But they're also humans in their own right, and so you can't just expect the founder to stay on that one vision forever. You know they've got big dreams, they've got stuff. They want to work on different programs.
Speaker 2:I've met a lot of founders over the years who are like I've built this thing, but I really want to build this thing over here. And you know there's all these facets about, well, right timing for what outcome and what they want to work on. And that's kind of our experience, right? So there is an element of the person that builds something isn't necessarily always the person that continues to grow that thing. Most of the time they don't like doing that either, because they like building stuff, they don't like managing stuff. Some of that's our, is our kind of truism as well, for with you, with me. So that's why the vision is still alive, literally the, the heart and the brand from day one back in 2017, is still alive today, but the way in which that's gone to market is shifting as we change our business persona yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Um, tell me about some of the marketing and sales campaigns or strategies you had in place that really helped with that scaling, specifically in markets like the UK, the US and Canada.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a great question. So I draw your attention back to the two sides of our business. One is this social impact talent service where we're really helping people get into meaningful work, and then one is this classic HR SaaS application that we're really helping people get into meaningful work, and then one is this classic HR SaaS application that we're trying to scale right and there are two different parts of the journey. You could think that the talent business is seven years, mature, really easy to understand, people get. It has a strong social purpose and so a lot of our marketing campaigns were very much around that like diverse talent, in-demand skills, domain defense, security, clearance. We've got this ability to solve your talent problems so we would use direct marketing, direct sales.
Speaker 2:Events were very popular for us throughout the years. So pre-COVID big employment expos where you could show the talent out the years. So pre-covid big employment expos where you could show the talent. Nothing spoke louder than an employer meeting a veteran who'd recently come through a digital course and was competent and confident and, like it, just blew them out of the water right. So the events were really popular.
Speaker 2:Strategy for us that that continues today in the virtual sense and so that that business was very much focused around that um and then and then we did leverage a little bit of kind of like partner strategy.
Speaker 2:So which partners have lots of access to work and this would be a differentiator for them? So, like a big consulting firm or a big recruitment company, how do we leverage some specific channels to sort of scale and get some market share relatively quickly as you grow? On the SaaS side of the business it was a little bit different. You're playing in a much more flooded market. There's lots of tech involved in HR now there's plenty of competitors. So what's actually worked for us after many years of kind of testing adjusting is an event-based go-to-market. So we try and do large webinars where we can be thought leaders on our specific value proposition ie potential, over-experience, cognitive aptitude, focusing on the people and then really intimate settings with potential prospects and customers where we can have a detailed conversation about their challenges and really understand what's going on before we start to get them into the sales cycle. So that, coupled with classic sales outreach and some partnership strategy, is kind of how we've launched globally and we continue to go to market.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really. I'm not surprised. Partnerships has worked. That's always such a good way to scale. It's good to hear events and webinars, um you know, are working well as well. Um, coming back to some of the scaling and growing pains or challenges that you've experienced, you mentioned a couple there in my in my last question, but what are some other big challenges that you faced, as more on the sass side of things, and how did you overcome them?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean I definitely can list some of the challenges. I think we're still overcoming many of them. That's a process, right. The first one for us is product market fit in a very quickly evolving talent skills space. You know, like you kind of everything's lumped together in one sense. You've got learning management systems, you've got enterprise resource planning ERP systems, then you've got the suite of HR've got enterprise resource planning ERP systems, then you've got the suite of HR recruitment tech. Like there's all these products and it's moving very, very fast, as you alluded to, you know, skills and different testing and all this sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:So, trying to not be too early with your thinking which has caught us a couple of times where, like, the customer doesn't actually think they have a problem that you're solving yet and therefore it's hard to sell and not being too late that they've already bought into a product or a particular vision and they're trialing something and you can't and you can't get in. And so we're constantly in this cycle of listening to the customer as we evolve our product to sort of hit that sweet spot in the middle, and I do think that is the resolution you have to have as much customer sentiment, data and access to the customer to understand what problems they're trying to solve, as you can, to inform the way that you're you're putting your product features and growth in in market. Um, the second challenge for us is you're evolving your customer facing and sales teams globally as you evolve your product and fit to market. Because the story changes slightly, the pitch changes and and it's hard, so that's in one part, finding people that are quite comfortable to operate in that type environment. So they don't need a structured script, they don't need a perfect kind of pitch layout.
Speaker 2:The customer profile isn't perfect, yet it's this kind of pitch layout. The customer profile isn't perfect, yet it's this kind of consultative engagement with customers to really understand their problems and then help solve. That's a particular type of person. But it's also about how you run the business. We've got to communicate that effectively as the product releases are done. We've got to constantly try and run mentoring and training to keep teams up to speed on what's going on and short feedback loops from customer deployment cycles and lessons learned. I don't think we're, you know, I don't think we're killing that yet. I think that's a constant challenge that we're evolving with over time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. Are you finding different challenges in different markets, or are they all pretty similar?
Speaker 2:There's definitely different challenges in different markets. Um, like the uk, for example, is well known to be one of the forward leading hr markets in the world like they've. They're way more progressive they've. They've kind of seen the hr tech boom. They've invested more in that. So when we started to launch the sas product over there, people kind of got it faster and the challenge we were facing there was differentiate unique value, price point. You know, how do you make this thing make sense? Whereas, say, in Australia, we were really helping people understand it. They were like hang on a minute, what problem is that solving? Why do I need that? You know, I've already got this thing over here here and it was a completely different kind of go-to-market problem to overcome and definitely differences in the regions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know in Australia it's actually very hard to find people that you know. The unemployment rate is quite low. I think everyone's really struggling to find good talent. Are you finding the same problems in the UK and the US, or are they quite different?
Speaker 2:um, the regions are different again. I mean the us has a significant surplus of people and talent but potentially harder to find the right skill at the right time in the right location. Um, I do think still a lot of the challenges people are finding is how they're recruiting and looking for the right person versus is that person available or not. So you know, if your mechanism for trying to find talent is, I need specific experience, I need specific certifications, and that's your basis for making decisions where you're immediately shrinking your available talent pool right from the get-go. So of course it's going to be hard, but companies we've worked at that are looking at aptitude. They're looking at ability to learn, recency of certifications, culture, fit. So you know lots of companies would say we hire on culture, we're happy to build skills. That's true to some extent. They're having that. We've got a wider talent pool to operate in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. I find you know attitudes important, willingness to learn is important. Um, some personality traits, yes, I think with with a lot of skills, they're very much trainable. So if you've got the right person you can almost train them anything.
Speaker 2:Great.
Speaker 1:What are some other trends you're seeing, you know, in terms of how companies are hiring? So you mentioned, you know they're quite like stagnant in what they're looking for. What are some other mistakes they're making or some trends that you're seeing when it comes to hiring?
Speaker 2:There's a number of trends that we've kind of worked within, I guess, as they've shifted. So we definitely saw and are seeing a shift away from the requirement for degrees. That started happening a number of years ago, you know, across the big blue chip companies and specific certifications, and a shift more towards probably what industry would describe as like micro-credentialing or other versions of like certification, vendor-based certification. So there has been this shift from that, what industry would describe as like micro-credentialing or other versions of like certification, vendor-based certification. So there has been this shift from that and I think that does open the aperture to more diverse talent pools. But it hasn't gone far enough for us. We'd like to see that go more down the potential path. We've definitely seen a shift to try and remove bias from the interviewing process. Now that can be tech-en enabled, but it can also be interviews and the processes that they're using to validate people. Some of the stuff that's come off the back of that is like the programs. So more programs have come up. We would like to run an Indigenous program, a veteran program, a women in tech program, and I think those programs are quite good because it changes the risk appetite for the hirer. So they're not thinking. You know, they're not expecting a talent acquisition person to make this risky decision. They're running a program designed to hire these types of people, which I think is quite good.
Speaker 2:A bugbear maybe that hasn't shifted much is probably the tech that's doing resume pre-screening. You know, I think that's disheartening, to be honest. I remember being an event recently, last year in sydney, and and a graduate put his hand up and he said I've literally applied for thousands of jobs and I've had no response, not one response all. And I spoke to him afterwards and I said Joe, I just want to reassure you that it's got absolutely nothing to do with you. There's a pretty good chance that nobody even read your resume. It never made it through the ML system that was pre-screening and passing your resume against the criteria because of whatever didn't meet the perfect tick box right so there are still.
Speaker 2:There is still plenty of that going on and that needs significant overhaul. I appreciate that there's thousands of applications at times for jobs, but there's better tech. There's better tech to get the right people shortlisted for jobs now and I think that's shifting slowly yeah, for sure that's.
Speaker 1:that sounds terrible, but unfortunately, um, I think it's shifting slowly. Yeah, for sure that sounds terrible, but unfortunately, I think it's the case for a lot of organisations. They probably do try and make it a bit more streamlined or easier for themselves, and I think they'd be sat on a lot of great candidates as a result.
Speaker 2:It's the problem, right? You can't come out on one day and say we can't find any people anywhere and then your method for screening through the thousands of people trying to work in your business is what I just described Like. That doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Coming back to this type of tech and I think also with you know, the AI and how businesses are starting to now use that. How is AI impacting your business? Are you using it much? Um, is it helping?
Speaker 2:is it tell me about your experience so, um, this part of it is really exciting for us. One of the foundational principles of our model is that we can take the outcome of the testing the aptitude and the and the big five, match it to a skills framework. We use something called skills for the information age, sofia, which is a global framework. We have a strong partnership with them and, effectively, we're telling people their affinity to learn these skills, and once you've done the testing, once you can match against skills, and that can be skills in learning or skills in jobs forever. So it's this awesome piece of tech. It's not AI. It's a synthetic validity algorithm that predicts your pretensity to learn something.
Speaker 2:What's being interesting for us now is that's only one part of the picture. It's a really important part of the picture, which is measuring someone's skill potential. What we really want to do, though, is also capture their existing skills, and that's not just looking at the job you did last and the five core skills of that job. That's everything. That's like everything in your life that you've done, whether you're a return to work mom, whether you've worked in hospitality when before you left school. Like the AI can now really help us understand your life and then infer skills relevant to future skills going forward.
Speaker 2:That's quite powerful in a number of ways. It means I don't have to ask users on our product to give us as much information. I can infer more and get them to validate it. That's a powerful user experience. I can also match to way more diverse future skills and then empower the individual to think differently about their careers and empower the company to think differently about how they retain and grow people. So we're starting to use AI in the inference space and to make our user experience more enjoyable, and that's been quite valuable for us yeah, that's really interesting.
Speaker 1:What about, like ai related job roles? Are you seeing any of those maybe coming out? I don't know. Like prompting engineer, do you think there'll be a space for that in the future?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, look, we, look. We're seeing that. I think you know prompt engineering is a good example. You are seeing more jobs come on the market that are kind of specifically around that, although I don't think it's the most impactful thing. I think what AI is really disrupting is the task level that sits with inside occupations. So we are definitely seeing lots of companies interact with us saying we know our occupations are changing because of the way AI is removing tasks or adapting how tasks are done, and that's building efficiencies, productivity and we need to restructure and all these sorts of things. So it is driving an underlying change to how businesses structure their people. That's a great thing for us, because we're there to help bridge where they go next and what they do. That's having a far bigger impact, I think, than specific AI jobs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. Coming back to what you said earlier about, you know, hiring for culture fit, how do you maintain a strong company, culture fit? Um, how?
Speaker 2:do you maintain a strong company culture, especially when expanding globally? Um, I, I genuinely believe leadership shapes culture. Yeah, uh, and how you build your, you know, your executive or your senior leadership culture will permeate across the business. And so, when, when we think about, when I think about culture, I think about what do I want to display and what values do I want to make sure we uphold, and then how do I communicate that across the core leaders that are going to influence the business? And then I think you couple that with understanding.
Speaker 2:Well, from a values perspective, what do the employees in the business want? You know they care about our purpose. So, when you look at our values, well, from a values perspective, what did the employees in the business want? You know they care about our purpose. So, when you look at our values, it's things like think big, you know, fix it, have heart, and these were things that came out of our employees saying this is what we value, and so we build the culture around that. So our product is about looking after people and we have heart in the way that we engage with our users, you know.
Speaker 2:But also we're trying to change the landscape on skill inference, which is a big idea. So we're thinking big and we're trying to fix a complex social problem. So there's this interconnectedness between values and culture. I think that's important, and the final thing I would say is well, how do you do it when you scale a business or you scale globally is you have to live your culture, you have to display that culture that you want from others and you have to remind people of it. So that means, when I catch up with people, we talk about the values. When I catch up with people, I ask them how they're going and I reinforce the fact that that's culturally aligned with our business, like you know. And so you've got to actually talk about it, or as much as you can, and I encourage the leaders to do that as well yeah, yeah, you know that makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1:I assume you know, with people in all different countries, you probably schedule a lot of catch-ups as well absolutely.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think that's been tough because you can't, you don't want to direct that, you want the organization to kind of organically do that. And so one of the challenges that we face, candidly, is when you're driving to profitability and you're running a shrink to grow strategy, you don't have as much money to spend on some of the employee incentives that you'd like to, and so that limits the ability for that kind of organic culture to be built, which means you do have to. You know, when I travel or when the leaders travel, there's almost like an unspoken rule. It's like get the team together, you have to get the team together because we're all remote, right. Like get people together, go and do something, go client side together, you know, problem solve, get in a room and solve a problem the company's facing together. Like you do have to just drive people to interact and be together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I together. Yeah, I love that. I definitely believe in you know there needs to be togetherness at some point.
Speaker 1:It can't all just be on zoom, agree, agree, um, some of the sash founders listening today that are kind of you know that they've scaled their business. They may be thinking about globally, funny enough. One of the questions I ask a lot of founders on this podcast is um, you know what, if you could go back in time, what would you take? And they all say I would have tried to go global sooner rather than later. So for those ones listening at the moment, what advice would you give them about going global?
Speaker 2:Even though I've had a different experience going global, where we had to kind of retreat in some aspects and then go forward in others, I agree that going global, particularly out of Australia as a tech founder, is an important part of the journey because you you open up a whole different investment portfolio. It's an exciting story. People at the market will really get behind you, so I do think there's a lot of value there. So what I would change differently if we had our time again is the way in which we invested globally. I would have taken a kind of growth, a winning work, growth perspective of that, not a capital injection in order to win work, and I think that would have been a slower global growth, but we would have grown as we won business and took market share sort of side by side and held onto a little bit more capital so that we could test and adjust what was working and double down on things. Our approach was very much let's get a team on the ground, let's invest heavy, and then the kind of the right sales and customers will come, and they did, but maybe not to the extent that we would have liked. So maybe I just adjust the way that we went global.
Speaker 2:The only other thing I would add is well, how many countries do you want to tackle at once? And I do think one is enough. And how you pick that region is interesting. I have had people ask about well, you just want to go to the US. The US is quite a hard market to figure out, if you fit. Canada was a great market for us, the UK was a great market for us and we chose to go to the UK after the founders had spent some time there and our plan was to go to the US until they'd spent some time in the uk, and then we're like no way this market's way better for us and that was a right decision.
Speaker 1:That was a good decision yeah, I think everyone's got their eyes on the us because it's the biggest market. But you're right, I kind of have to think about what are some of the other things that would help to create this a more relevant and, you know, better market for us to grow in. So maybe there's, you know, like you said, in the UK everyone already knew the problem and they were trying to solve it actively, whereas in Australia it was a lot of education around the problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what your product does and what your business does is really, really important to the market. I don't believe that what our product does right now, in terms of focus on people, grow, talent retention and the way that we're scaling so a b2b enterprise product, I don't. I'm not convinced. The us represents the best market for us to get to where we need to, which is why we've sort of doubled down in the uk, um, but we can't ignore the us, so that you know we do. A lot of the companies we work with in Australia and the UK, their parent companies are in the US. So the strategy is to kind of leverage the work that's already been done to then get to the US.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And so my last question is exactly that question that I just mentioned, which is and you kind of have answered it in a way, but more from like a going global perspective, but you know, both from a professional and a personal perspective, if you could go back in time, what would you do differently?
Speaker 2:um. I'm thinking because I think that's an important question um professionally, like from a company perspective, I think we could have spent more time getting more customer data on our sas product early on to stay on pace with how the customer was solving the problems that we were trying to help with um. It comes back to my earlier point. At times we were too far ahead and it wasn't working and at times we missed it slightly. I'm talking feature development and problems that we were solving. So perhaps a freemium model or another model that just had more customers on the product, so we had more data early on and then we could sort of scale that would have been quite useful and we just kind of didn't have it, but I'm not sure. Scale that would have been quite useful and we just kind of didn't have it, but I'm not sure that that would have been easy.
Speaker 2:Personally, I don't know that I would change too much. Personally, I think having a clearly aligned executive team on a very simple strategy to do the one or two things that work really well is what we would do differently. We did have a kind of startup mentality where we were trying lots of things and you can fall into the trap of you need to experiment lots to figure out what you're going to be good at. But when you do figure out something that's working, you can forget not to double down on that thing and stop doing all the experiments. And so maybe you know having the wherewithal as an individual leader to sort of say no, we really need to double down on that because it's working and that's where we're going to get growth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that as advice. Actually, I mean, just on the data thing, I love that quote, which is data is the new oil and I think you know everyone's getting so much data coming at them with all the tools and the tech and all this disposal, but it's the people that are kind of taking a step back and going let's read the data and let's try and analyse it and figure out what this actually means and work with that. That, I think, are going to have, you know, a lot more success.
Speaker 2:I agree, and my focus on customer data is is deliberate, you know like where? Where our sas product is right now is is it's evolving and moving fast as a space and a problem set, and so you almost need to co-build it with the customers that are adopting it. They are our early adopters, they've bought into the vision, and so we need to kind of go on the journey with them and solve the problems together, and then eventually things will scale and others will come on board. So it's critical for us to have that data.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely something to customer-led growth.
Speaker 2:I agree. Yeah, couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1:Well, tom, thank you so much for being on the show. I've certainly learned a lot. I love all the insights about going global. I think you've probably inspired a lot of founders today, so thank you so much for all the insights.
Speaker 2:It's a real pleasure. Thank you for your time. I hope people check out with you and me and there's something interesting there for you.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, thank you.
