Nick Brown is the Founder and CEO of accelerate agency, a SaaS SEO and content agency with clients including RingCentral, Affise, and Toggl.
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When we shuttered our office in March 2020, my agency was a team of 10 people who were used to working together in the same room. Eighteen months later, our team includes over 70 people spread across four continents — most of whom have never met each other in person.
This transformation started with a huge surge in demand from our client base of SaaS companies. They wanted more of our expertise in digital marketing — a lot more — and we needed to scale our team quickly. It was all hands to the pump, and suddenly where people worked really didn’t matter. If someone with the skills we needed wanted to join us remotely, we were eager to welcome them on board.
Looking internationally gave us a much bigger pool to recruit from, but it wasn’t like anything I’ve ever done before. We have had to change and adapt, and I’ve had to learn a lot as we’ve grown.
Here are my top five lessons that I think any agency looking to scale internationally could easily transfer to their situation:
1. Be willing to reinvent your hiring process.
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As an agency, we have tended to rely on objective, standardized tests over CVs and in-person interviews to assess potential hires. This was just my personal preference. I’ve always been much more interested in what skills someone can demonstrate today than how many boxes they can tick on a piece of paper.
Because of this, we already had a system based on online testing when we suddenly needed to ramp up our content and outreach teams. This turned out to be ideal for hiring remote workers internationally.
Being less reliant on more traditional HR methods might sound a bit scary, but you should never be afraid to rethink how you do things. If your recruitment habits haven’t changed to fit our new reality, don’t be afraid to rethink them. If a team member can deliver good results on time while working remotely, that may be all that matters.
2. Business cultures vary widely, so be sensitive.
Every business culture is unique. Be careful not to assume your own way of working is the only way. This might sound obvious, but trust me, cultural differences can get complicated quickly. For example, in some cultures, it’s simply not acceptable to turn down a request to take on a new role or additional task. Early in our expansion, we discovered some workers would take on jobs even if they lacked the capacity to handle them.
This sometimes led to slips in quality, but even more worryingly, it led to some overworked, stressed members of the team. We are now much better at making sure no one gets overloaded just because they don’t want to say “no.”
As we have grown and added new working cultures to our mix, I’ve learned not just to be open to different ways of working but to expect them, and we work them into our own company culture.
3. Don’t let it end in ‘tiers.’
Our agency now has a physical office again, and there is a core group that works together on a regular basis here in the UK. It could be tempting to start locating all senior manager roles in the same location and relegate international remote workers into a secondary support tier.
This is a temptation we are resisting. We’ve grown our team quickly, but we want everyone who has joined us to have a stake in our future. This means everyone gets the same opportunities for career progression.
One of the big upsides of international growth is the much bigger pool of talent we can recruit from. Insisting that some positions be filled by people in specific locations limits that pool, and that would be a backward step. We want the best people in each role, wherever they live.
4. Develop leaders everywhere.
When the first lockdown started, we did have one remote employee in place — an administrative support manager based in the Philippines. What we did not yet know at the time was that she was also a great people manager. We’ve invested in her as a manager, and today she helps manage nearly 20 other team members located in the same country. As we’ve grown in other countries, we’ve looked for potential leaders to recruit or develop to fill a similar role.
Local leadership is important for making sure that issues related to local business cultures are identified and addressed appropriately. Don’t concentrate management in a single location. A worldwide team needs a worldwide network of leaders.
5. Invest in people wherever they are.
We may have grown our team rapidly, but we are determined to hang on to every employee as we grow. Hiring internationally vastly expands the pool of available talent, but it’s foolish to think that this makes team members expendable. If someone produces great results, you want to keep them, full stop.
As we’ve grown, we’ve expanded our salary and benefits package to ensure we remain competitive wherever our team members are based. In many countries, that means health insurance (something which is rarely a major issue for recruitment in the UK), and in every country, that means bonus structures and offering options for training and self-development.
We’ve scaled quickly through international growth, but we don’t take that growth for granted. As our team becomes more experienced, each member of the team becomes more valuable to us — and we want to keep them.
Make sure remote workers receive just as much attention and investment as everyone else who works for your company. Just as you would in your home market, find good people, continue to develop them and keep them.
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Author: Nick Brown, Forbes Councils Member
