From 5 to 5,500 employees: Key to Fast and Efficient Scaling with Pranav Dalal

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, the only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we'll be breaking down going from five to 5 ,500 employees, the key to fast and efficient scaling. To drop these value bombs, I am brought to Pranav, Dalal, and the EO Fire Studios. Pranav, CEO and founder of Office Beacon, started his entrepreneurial journey in 2001 and has now expanded globally, growing to 5 ,500 plus employees across four countries, all without outside funding or partners. And today, Foundation will talk about scaling internationally.

0:38Let's talk about balancing and maintaining company culture while you're doing this and the biggest obstacle to scaling and growing a team and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Pranav and our sponsors. Is now the time to grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and now featuring football star Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump, at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire. Pranav, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:22In my journey, I don't have a safety net. So that basically means there's no backup alternative option for me. You know, when I have my sights on something, I literally just go for it and don't think about anything else. There's no safety net. And that's the concept. And that's the mindset that's really helped me through my journey. And Fire Nation, your safety net, by the way, can be the fact that failure is not final. If you do fail, I mean, you pick it up, you learn and you move forward in another direction and you just keep on innovating, pivoting and adjusting until you get that thing right.

2:01And that's why today we're talking about going from five to 5 ,500 employees, the key to fast and efficient scaling. And you've had some huge challenges when you first launched your business print off. What were the biggest and how did you navigate those? It started when I started thinking about the concept of remote staffing in 2000 and went to India pretty much after thinking about it for about a week. Being Indian myself, but not knowing the language and not growing up in India, that in itself was a hurdle, you know, going to somewhere where I hadn't been in probably 20 years on my own, renting an office, hiring some people.

2:47And the biggest challenge was really a culture shift. And the culture shift was that back in 2000, um, no one, no one in India really worked, uh, outsourcing or BPO, um, in, in that industry. So, and what that, what that meant was they had to work night shift. And so that just was not, you know, commonplace. So, you know, the way I kind of overcame that was really just throw money at the problem for that one is just paid people, you know, more, much more than they would have expected to have been paid normally and had them sitting in an office waiting for, you know, me to go get contracts. The second challenge was really internet.

3:25So, um, you know, it was just developing in India and I had, there was no, it's not like in the U S you can just, you know, go online order, you know, service. You literally had to go find, you know, who could, who could source it, who could put in the lines back then. And, you know, it was just literally the infrastructure was being built while I was starting this company. So there were considerable hurdles. The final one was really how I was going to communicate with these people. Today, you have so many different ways from text messaging. You know, you have online chat tools. And back then, you just did not really have any of those.

4:04So I had to piece together, you know, messaging platforms to be able to communicate real time. And so it was really inventing and building all the tools that are very, very easy and commonplace today. So one thing I want to dive into is that you went through those challenges, those struggles, those obstacles, and you built and you just scaled and you went fast and you did it efficiently as well. So talk us through your decision to scale your business internationally. Like when did that moment happen when you're like, now's the time and how did you do it? Not just fast, but also efficient. So there was, I would say that in, uh, after about a year or two of, um, starting the company, I was doing everything.

4:50I was, you know, selling, uh, I was the only salesperson. So during the day I was doing that at nighttime, I was kind of writing up SOPs, operation manuals, checking quality. and I realized pretty quickly I was going to have a heart attack if I just continued to work that way. So, so I really needed to, to lean on people, um, and make mistakes, be willing to, uh, allow mistakes to happen, kind of move fast, break it, learn from it and improve quickly. So I, I sort of embraced that mindset without damaging client, you know, relationships and, and damaging quality. and I had to do that very fast.

5:32So that was sort of a mental shift for me because I am such a control freak. But that then allowed us as a company to compartmentalize every client in a way that we could scale quickly. So we went through the same process every time. So this is back in 2002, 2003. Every client is sort of treated like a company in itself. So we have a process of HR onboarding, you know, there's a very defined way to bring on every client and how they're managed. And that actually treated, you know, that that that really worked very, very well for us in one country, which was India. when you talk about like then scaling globally um a lot of that actually was fate and circumstance um so about eight years after i started india there was a client of mine um who was doing some work out of india uh it was a subsidiary of vista print who contacted me and said we've got operations in the philippines and uh we don't want to manage it anymore and you know that's not their core competency.

6:46And so they called me, I immediately said, I'd love to go see it. I'd never been to the Philippines and immediately upon arrival and seeing the country and just the way it was and how the people were, I just knew instantly it was my gut instinct that I'm going to do this. So I agreed to take it on from there. You know, we started with, I'd say about 50 people and it grew to thousands there. So that was circumstance. And then, so it's just sort of opening and walking through the door as those doors are presented to you. And, and, um, and I just kept moving forward and our process helped us, uh, set it set up in country after country.

7:27Um, one other thing too, is that we do, I do not have any family members, uh, managing any part of the company. I do have two kids who are, uh, who, uh, are in their early twenties who've joined the company at an entry level, but the pattern of replication country to country was not due to, you know, having family members kind of oversee things. It was really a process that we can replicate over and over again. Now, one of the biggest things that blew me away looking through your story and your journey is that you grew rapidly, but maintained control of the company. And even more impressively, you avoided outside funding.

8:07How the heck did you accomplish this? I love that part of this journey because I do get literally emails and calls on a weekly basis from private equity, which I refuse. And let me start by saying, you know, because of the internet bubble that burst in 2000, I consciously just said to myself, I'm not going to go through that with any, you know, my own personal journey of this company. I saw a lot of friends and co-workers who really struggled after that and you know because they had a lot vested in the companies they had started and had in you know others invest in so that was my mindset from day one my second mindset was really to create a family multi-generational family business which now we're on second generation you know they're they're not managing but they're they're involved and so the way that I sort of looked at it was how were we going to fund every stage.

8:58So I'll give you an example. You know, we are one of the larger Adobe license holders and licensees in the world. I mean, we have a lot of graphic artists. 10 years ago, you know, these licenses were$1 ,500 a person, like, and that's a lot of money, like, you know, so when you're talking about hundreds or thousands of people, and then multiplying that for no, but they'll be licensed by that much money. I had to figure out ways to fund that. I wasn't, you know, I didn't have cash on hand to just pay all that. So, you know, it's just, I found, um, uh, companies that would, um, fund, uh, equipment and software purchases here in the U S, um, and, uh, private, not, not, well, they, they weren't banks, but they were, they were companies who did that.

9:45And so, you know, we paid the interest, we paid it off, You know, it took years to do. And then Adobe changed their model, of course, to be more of a SaaS based model, which made it a lot easier. But every step of the way was was it was a challenge as well. You know, in countries overseas, usually when you buy like hardware, computer servers, there's no lines of credit. There's no there's no, you know, credit facilities. I mean, usually it's like you just pay cash for all of that. So that's where, you know, we had to be creative. We also found companies in those countries that could help fund and we paid the interest.

10:28I mean, it wasn't easy to find, but we did that. We did that as well as we used a lot of cash flow for the necessary expenditures. And usually the hardware was the main one. office space. That was always a challenge because in India, especially there's not like a commercial market, especially 20 years ago, like you would have here in the U S where you can go to a CBRE or online and just easily find commercial real estate. So that was a challenge, you know but I did find some buildings initially that were very inexpensive. They weren't in the greatest areas, but it was very cheap. And those buildings appreciated considerably and we refinanced them and then used money to grow.

11:13So every step of the way, we were able to find ways, creative ways to fund our growth without giving up any, a single percent in equity of the company. This is powerful stuff, Fire Nation, especially for people that are looking to scale fast and efficiently. And we have a lot more to talk about around this topic and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Is this your year to grow a successful business? Are you looking to learn the proven processes and success systems that have been used to create thousands of millionaire success stories? See thousands of success stories and testimonials from real people just like you who Clay Clark has mentored and coached into prosperity at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire.

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13:48Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash fire. Zip Intro, post jobs today. Talk to qualified candidates tomorrow. Pernod, we're back and our listener base are entrepreneurs. They're small business owners. They are fire nation. How can entrepreneurs balance maintaining company culture with managing a large and diverse global team? How do you do it? One of the things I introduced to manage company culture was really communicate effectively and often. And so every month I have town halls with every country location. So we invite every employee in every country to a town hall. So it's a zoom call. And we have hundreds or if not thousands of people joining.

14:35And I'll usually present myself as a few others, you know, company updates, but followed by, you know, an open ended Q &A session for any employee to ask, you know, raise their hand and ask any question. I think that built a lot of trust and has really strengthened our company culture. I think one other area that's very important is I do not, I'm very visible. So in the past, there were some mistakes I made, which was having other people sort of represent at a senior level things that I was doing. And the lesson I learned from that is I've really got to be front and center at all times. It's not too taxing on my time, but it is very important.

15:20So people understand, you know, who I am as a person, the transparency I bring. And that really transcends down to every level of how we organize ourselves, how we conduct ourselves at every level and what the expectations are. So for me, communications is absolutely critical, being visible and then being available to, to, you know, set the tone, you know, with employees at every level. Five to 5 ,500 employees. I mean, your head must spin sometimes, Pranav, when you think about that. I mean, it is just mind blowing on so many levels. So let's talk about the biggest obstacle that you encountered while scaling.

16:04For entrepreneurs in general, when you're scaling fast, I think one of the main areas of focus needs to be on controls. There's different types of controls. So there's controls for performance, you know, having dashboards for KPIs, really being on top of having visible and transparent numbers to look at and having your teammates and at every level being able to understand how we're doing as a company. The second one is financial controls, especially the way we're set up in so many different countries. You know, that that's something we spend a lot of time on to avoid, you know, any tampering at any level from any country, any place in the company with misuse of funds.

16:54And that is that there on occasion, that's been a challenge to make sure that we've got the protections. And, you know, if there's a loophole anywhere, someone will find it. And that's where we built a strong team to make sure the financial controls are much, much stronger, especially in our case, where funds are going everywhere globally. Um, and then, um, you know, setting up expectations with clients, um, that's super important, you know, um, entrepreneurs, big or small, we're sort of beholden to our clients, but being very, very transparent with the client at every level and setting the expectations will help, especially early will help that relationship long-term because if you don't do that.

17:42Customers are going to always rely on what you said originally. And if it wasn't strong enough, they're going to keep propagating that. And it's going to be hard to change their perception later on. So those are the areas that I kind of focus on that have been really impactful, very important, and the challenges that we have faced and overcome. Let's talk about offshore staffing. How, in your opinion, is that going to evolve as we move forward? And what's your specific role in this transformation? What we see are two things happening. One is since COVID, there's been a proliferation of offshore or remote staffing companies and people available in that space.

18:28and what we are seeing though is small companies they may start off you know on a freelance network finding a a freelancer and quickly if they add more and more freelancers they're realizing very quickly they're not able to manage those people it's very difficult it's scattered the reliability is not there so when you think about scaling it's fine to start that way but you really have to have an organized company like us that can handle the HR, handle the legal requirements and employment requirements in every country, because freelancing, if you are employing them as a freelancer, but they're working for you full time, and we have encountered this with other companies, you are legally liable and could be legally liable to treat them as an employee, not a freelancer.

19:18and that can come back and haunt you later. So that's one trend we're seeing is companies coming to us with that problem and we're helping them out and growing with them. The other one is AI. So, you know, we see, you know, a lot of impact in different areas. Fortunately, not in the areas we're working on, but, you know, AI is definitely either feared or really embraced and we're embracing it because it's here to stay. We are building it into our client engagements to be more efficient. We're building it into our sales process to be able to expand quicker so that we can become experts in that area and help any company handle that.

20:02And if you're not doing that, I think as a remote staffing or outsourcing company, you're really going to miss the boat and fall behind. You've really got to look forward of how you can embrace it and have it help your company in your growth trajectory. Pranav, if Fire Nation is really connecting with the words that you're saying and wanted to learn more, what is your call to action for our listeners today? Where do they go? What do they do? If you would like to contact us, learn more, I would definitely go to our website, officespeacon.com. There's a call to action right at the top to set up a call.

20:39You can put your notes in there. I love to talk to entrepreneurs, so I am available to talk about unique growth strategies. I do a lot of public speaking as well. And so, or you can talk to my team about your challenges and how we may be able to overcome them. And I think that's the easiest, simplest way to get through to us. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, and you've been hanging out with PD and JLD today. So keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Pranav, P-R-A-N-A-V, in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up.

21:20and Pranav, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Pranav for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation. Are you ready to rock your very own podcast? Check out our free podcasting course where I will teach you how to create and launch your podcast for free, freepodcastcourse.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. is now the time to grow a successful business attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by clay clark and now featuring football star tim tebow and president trump's son eric trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire again request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire Select Sedans therin enroll

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