How to Fund your Startup
You read about it in the blogs, hear about it from a friend of a friend and see it in the news, but when push came to shove and we needed to raise some money for our start up, we had no idea what the “correct” way of doing it was. So for us, we decided to do what we knew best - Hustle.
Step 1: Identify a problem
It all started when our Co-founders Nick and Vince were having dinner and chat turned to the common pain points of the outside vs. realities of running a business. One point in particular made them really laugh; how Nick - owning both a hospitality recruitment business and a restaurant, ended up being his own biggest client some weekends! It dawned on them both, that even though they had such different businesses, they still faced a very common problem: the difficulty of accessing quality support staff on demand.
Recently resigning from one of the top recruitment firms, I was feeling disillusioned with the industry and was looking for an opportunity to pursue my own venture. Nick was a mate from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and he called me one night, saying he’s got this crazy idea that he knew I’d love. But when I caught up with them and they outlined a detailed strategy and business plan with some crappy drawn wireframes on paper napkins, I was impressed. They asked me what I thought.
Well reader, I saw the future.
Step 2: Design a solution
Everything about it made sense. What I disliked about the industry, it could address, and what I loved about the industry, it promoted. But if I’ve learnt anything in the past few years it’s that everyone has ideas, but very few have what it takes to execute. So I asked, how are you going to turn this into a reality? And that’s where I came in. They weren’t as tech savvy as I was and drafted me in initially to turn their wireframe drawings into something more visually appealing. Sounded easy enough, so I went off and found a magical tool called Marvel and Paint and got creating.
Fast forward a few weeks and Vince told Nick and I that we were invited to have dinner with an investor who had previously invested in one of his other projects, and wanted to hear about Weploy. So a few hours later, there we were in Nick's restaurant and Van and his wife walked in - he looked at Vince, then looked at us, and said, “what are you doing here and who are these two?
Great start.
Vince knew us well, and instead of telling us that we needed to hijack an intimate and romantic dinner for a business proposition..., we better just do it. So we all sat down and he started introducing us and explaining Weploy, for the very first time. Van wasn’t interested. I pulled out my phone and showed him the wireframes and by the end of the dinner he was interested, but not convinced. I like to think it was more to do with the wireframes than the Vietnamese Fried Chicken that improved his mood. Either way, we had a few days before he was to return to Vietnam, where he would be pitched 1000 more ideas and our opportunity would probably be lost. We tried to arrange another catch up but time just didn’t permit and we were out of ideas. Until Vince sent us a text message saying, “I’m going to Vietnam, be back in a few days.” We didn’t hear anything and then one morning I woke up and looked at my phone: “WE’RE IN”
Step 3: Hustle
This is my favourite part of the story. Vince knew that Van was close, but needed some one on one time and wanted to see some tenacity and determination to turn this idea into reality. So Vince did some investigating and found Vans returning flight and booked himself on (he still complains about having to buy a business class ticket!) When he boarded the plane though, he found he had misjudged the seating and was seated one person away from Van. So he asked the person in between to swap places but he wouldn’t comply, so for the next 8 hours, Vince leaned over him and walked him through the business plan point by point, until finally, Van turned to him, nodded, smiled and said; “Ok, let’s do it. But one condition, you make this global.”One week later, we had $1 million in the bank, and a year on, we’ve won multiple awards including the most recent Emerging App of the Year at Xerocon 2018, are working with some of the coolest and most forward thinking organisations Australia has to offer whilst changing people’s views on employment daily.
What challenges is Xero facing in talent acquisition?
The Team Xero value proposition to the candidate market is a strong one: we believe that you can come and do the best work of your life at Xero. And you can do so at a business that:
- Is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world
- Is purpose-driven and committed to having an impact on the lives of our customers
- Has a set of meaningful values that underpin everything we do
- Is always looking to the future, questioning how we can continue to innovate to best serve our customers and stay ahead of the curve.
One of the hurdles we face, which is actually more of an opportunity, is making sure we are truly capitalising on the above messaging and amplifying it to our target candidate markets.
Whilst we have a strong value proposition – very helpful for any inhouse talent team – we also have our challenges too, primarily around scale. In a relatively short period of time, we’ve evolved from a beautiful accounting software start-up to a global small business platform. In the process, we’ve acquired a rapidly expanding customer base and built a geographically dispersed workforce of 2,500 employees. There will always be competing interests in a hyper-growth environment, so one of the main challenges for our our Talent Experience team relates to prioritisation of our hiring. Have we nailed that yet? No, but it’s something we’re continuing to work on in conjunction with Xero’s leaders.
How does tech support the recruitment process for you at Xero?
We use a range of tools and technologies to aid our recruitment process here at Xero (there are some variances by region). As we continue to evolve our TX function, we’ll keep reviewing both existing and new tech to best support our efforts across employer branding and attraction, assessment, background checking, on-boarding and talent pooling. We also consider how tech can help us work best with candidates, hiring managers and each other.
While tech is the ultimate enabler, we believe it will always remain human interactions that drive the best outcomes.
What are you doing to promote diversity within what is stereotypically a male dominated industry?
From a gender diversity perspective, we work with some amazing partners like Work 180, Code Like a Girl, Tech Girls Movement, Girl Geek Dinners and Ladies that UX to showcase working life at Xero and highlight the opportunities for women in technology. In addition to our internal programs (part-time developer programs, career change programs etc.), these partnerships have achieved some fantastic results for our workforce composition and the communities that we support.
We also recognise that gender is only one element of diversity. Indeed, our hiring practices, ways of working, internal education and workshops and external partnership development need to reflect the diversity of our 1.8 million subscribers. We will continue to value and embrace diverse experience, skills and perspectives so that we can work better together and continue to innovate for our customers, partners, and the communities we interact with every day.
How does Xero's Talent team work with hiring managers when hiring?
We view hiring as a partnership between hiring managers and the TX team. In our opinion, the key to a good hiring outcome is complete clarity on the position, the candidate requirements and the hiring process itself. We also encourage hiring managers to constantly be out there meeting good candidates in-market and thinking about succession planning for their teams (whether they’re hiring for a vacancy or not).
What aspects of working at Xero do you highlight to a candidate during the recruitment process?
We make a conscious effort to lay all of our cards on the table. Nobody likes finding skeletons in the closet when joining a new business, so we go out of our way to be really transparent about both the benefits and the challenges of working at Xero. Naturally, some of the challenges don’t align well with everyone: Working at Xero is fast paced, constantly changing and requires working with ambiguity, and we call that out throughout the recruitment process. But for those who are up for the challenge and bring a growth mindset and bias for results, the opportunities are second to none when it comes to working with amazing people, evolving team Xero capabilities, and solving problems that have a positive impact on the lives of our customers across the globe.
A Gartner survey reveals 88% of organisations have encouraged or required employees to work from home due to Coronavirus, enforcing a global ‘Work from Home experiment’ which none of us saw coming and nobody had planned for.
For successful business in todays’ unpredictable environment, having an agile mindset when it comes to resourcing is critical. Customer Service teams in particular are under pressure to deliver on expectations and being prepared for flux in demand is essential to maintain their levels of service. We spoke to Customer Service leader Tristan Fardy on a Webinar recently all about how he is able to consistently meet high levels of service, and he admitted his number 1 priority is being able to right-size his team during out of cycle increases.
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