NZ Business Podcast - Paul Spain
00:13:50 · Jamie Beaton
[00:13:50] S0: So we kick this off with Shandre and I over in Albany. And then today, we've got about 400 full time staff, a Fortune 100 based here in New Zealand across a lot of different companies we have here, sheltered up in Parnell, you know, just actually a floor below the ice house where I did my internship that kinda got a lot of this rolling. So there's a bit of, nice kind of, poetry there. And then we also have thousands of mentors around the world. These mentors are often at schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton. They're in the Rhodes community. They're in top schools like Tsinghua in China. They're, you know, from Auckland Medical School, you know, top schools in Australia, as well as great companies like Facebook and Uber and Google, things like this. So these mentors are the ones providing the service delivery to students, as well as a team of strategists, which, you know, are responsible for the students' kind of candidacy plans. So that gives you a sense of this... Of the, you know, personnel. And Crimson's now in about 20... I think we're in 27 different markets now with offices in more than 20. And each of these markets has localized teams, speak the local languages, which has been quite instrumental to our success. That's really the expansion. Key markets for us in terms of personnel would be China, would be America, would be actually Russia as well. We've got, you know, quite a lot of head count in in a lot of our different markets.
00:14:58 · Paul Spain
[00:14:58] S1: Yeah. Wow. That's that's quite a bit of growth and a lot of people that you've got to look after. So how did you how did you do that? What were the sort of the steps that have that have allowed you to do that? You You obviously had to get some, you know, some funding funding along the way. And then, you know, how do you how do you operate in terms of deciding, you know, who to get, you know, what sort of resources you need to hire, and how's that journey tracked, and and, you know, who are the other people involved in terms of, you know, board and and advisers. You're obviously a pretty, you know, pretty smart guy, Jamie, but it's always useful to tap into other people. Right? So how's that? Yeah. How's that looked?
00:15:42 · Jamie Beaton
[00:15:42] S0: Cool. Okay. So I guess for some context, first of when we started this, Feng Zhou, our third cofounder, Shan Rui, and I, we were all 18. Right? So we had no previous business experience. I think I'd actually run, like, a little party business that Kings, you know, raw material. Shan Re had done some tutoring. Feng Shu had done a bit of tutoring. That was it. So we really had to build a good team around us quickly, and we had to level up. That's actually one of Crimson's four values, level up, which really speaks about constantly learning so you're equipped for the next phase. And we think about that as cofounders that, you know, the the Jamie Chandra and Feng Zhi of 2013, you know, could not handle the Crimson of today, and probably the 2020 version of ourselves can't handle what we can become in three years, so we need to keep learning quick. So as far as each phase, I guess we think about, you know, what, you know, talent we need in in the organization. You know, a good example of this would be we'd be going from 50 to about a 150 staff. You know, at this point, you know, I was very naive. I'm still naive, but I was more naive then. And I thought, you know, HR people, you know, is this this is just like admin? I don't need this kind of layer of complexity in... Inside Crimson. So we didn't have any company values. We didn't have a lot of the classic kind of onboarding procedures you you might have. And so I was confused as why we were hiring staff, and they didn't feel the kind of deep connection to the Crimson mission that our first sort of 50 staff did. You know, I quickly realized that a lot of these staff, when they were joining Crimson, we weren't really onboarding them properly, and they weren't really seeing the values that, you know, were making us who we were. So we brought on board this, incredible Kiwi exec called, Penelope Barton. She came out of Xero and Vend as our chief people officer, and she worked with me to put... And the team to put in place a number of these values, which have, you know, really remained consistent since that day. And, you know, that really resulted in formalizing a lot of our things like performance reviews, you know, our org structure. Back then, you know, there wasn't even a single org structure grid in the company. You know, the contracts weren't even in a very consistent state.
00:17:25 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
So she came and put in place all of that structure working alongside us as we kept learning about this stuff. And then, that, for example, has really helped us ramp up our scalability on the people side. So now, you know, I just got off a call last night, which was a new starter call. So, for example, whenever our new starters join, we run these calls with the cofounders walking them through the Crimson journey, our key values, you know, what we're about, our key KPIs and goals for the year to make sure everyone's singing from the same hymn sheet and really, you know, there is one Crimson across the world. So that would be an example of, you know, a key evolution on the people side, you know, pretty important for us. [00:17:56] S1: How much pain was there before you made that decision to employ chief people officer? Yeah.
00:18:04 · Jamie Beaton
[00:18:04] S0: Yeah. I would say there was, you know, reasonable pain. There... It wasn't wasn't too bad, but I think it could have gotten worse because we were hiring really quick. Right? So we went from about 30 staff to probably more than a 100 really fast because we had, I think, closed either an a or a b round at this point. And so we, you know, had a lot of capital. We had big growth targets, and we had to ramp up in a lot of geographies. So, yeah, there was significant pain. And also, we were going across into many markets very quickly, which was a very intentional strategy. And so doing that while fixing these procedures, you know, it's kinda like fixing the the engine, you know, while rolling forward. So there were, yeah, there was some pain there. Also, a lot of other, you know, I guess, key learnings. When you bring in a leader, they're responsible for building their team. They're taking a massive leverage bit on that leader. So in my case, you know, I was very naive about digital marketing, for example, also about technology. And so in the early days, I brought on some people who, you know, were very good at convincing me they were legends in the space, because I didn't really know much about... And then they went on to build very big teams that, you know, weren't particularly effective. We end up having to basically replace those entire teams and, you know, start from scratch. And now we've got, like, a really wonderful technology function with a really solid CTO, same on the digital marketing side, but, you know, had to just go through those natural learning curves as, you know, as cofounders, we weren't familiar with these different domains. But now I think we're relatively well across kind of all the key functions. We've got really solid leaders in place and a really good exec team. You also mentioned advisory board. That's been very crucial to our success. I think one thing we've done pretty well is bringing on board great advisers at the various stages. So notable ones would be, I guess, you know, John Key, obviously, New Zealand. But in the earlier days, a guy called Jason Linger, he was on the board from Tiger Global. He was the second in command at SEEK over in Australia before he left SEEK to... And he was an early employee. He went with him the whole journey.
00:19:47 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
Then he went to Tiger Global, and so he was instrumental in guiding us through the process of many of the kind of org chart development things we had to do, building our operations functions, building out, you know, financial functions, etcetera. Other great people would like Janine Manning, who, from the early days, made sure that we were doing things like auditing through KPMG and stuff, which is really used for capital raising and putting in place really good financial controls. So, yeah, we've... We... I mean, we have a a long list of advisers to this day on everything from the education side to the data science side to the growth side. The recent one would be Ed Baker. He joined us. He was head of international expansion at Uber, sold a company to Facebook, was there for several years, and invested in us recently, and has been a great advocate for how we can grow CGA, our new school, for example. So I've always... [00:20:29] S1: This is your Crimson Global Academy? [00:20:31] S0: Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Crimson Global Academy are New Zealand's first online online high school, and we're growing really quickly, which is really exciting. So these different advisers have been instrumental as as young cofounders who've been trying to learn learn fast alongside a very strong kind of full time bench as well, which we keep improving and growing.