Effectively Offshoring Your Back Office with Sejal Gulati

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, the co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with my friend Sejal Shah Gulati. Sejal is the Chief Growth Officer at Now, which is a B2B FinTech company serving SMDs. Sejal, it is great to see you.

Sejal Shah Gulati: So nice to see you.

Matt Blumberg: So you have had a really interesting career. You have worked at small companies and massive companies. You've worked here and in India, and I wanted to key in on sort of one aspect of the arc of your career to ask you a question today. So while you were in India, and I think before you went to India, you had been working for Time Inc. You went to India, and you started a ground up company to do analytics for marketing and some finance and ops, basically sort of back office for Time Inc in India. So you were the CEO of a company that grew, I think, to almost 1, 000 people, if I remember correctly.

Sejal Shah Gulati: Yes. That is correct.

Matt Blumberg: In Bangalore.

Sejal Shah Gulati: Yep.

Matt Blumberg: Which is amazing. And I think the company then got sort of subsumed back into Time Inc when-

Sejal Shah Gulati: It was a standalone company and then was purchased by Timing Inc.

Matt Blumberg: By Time Inc. Okay. So my question for you is advice for US entrepreneurs who are interested in offshoring large swaths of their back office. What are your top three things they need to think about?

Sejal Shah Gulati: Well, number one is long game, play the long game. You should think about your company as global, and India is a wonderful place to hang your hat or put your flag down, but it's a long game. And so, I wouldn't think of it as short- term cost savings. I would think of it as long- term growth options. So that's my number one.

Matt Blumberg: Okay. So we're playing the long game.

Sejal Shah Gulati: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: We're in it for the next 20 years.

Sejal Shah Gulati: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: What's number two?

Sejal Shah Gulati: Number two is choose the right leader. The leader needs to be essential to the management team. This is not your offshore leader. This is someone that should be reporting directly to the CEO, is part of the business processes. It puts your offshore team on the same level as your onshore team, which really is the best way to leverage the talent. Offshore talent specifically, and I can speak specifically about India.

Matt Blumberg: Okay. And number three?

Sejal Shah Gulati: And number three is porous boundaries. And so what I would do, and again for startups, this may feel a little foreign, no pun intended, but I highly recommend cross- fertilization. So you should have your executives, especially if you're just starting out, go and spend time in the offshore office, and your offshore team spend time in the home office. That's really the best way to build a team and really leverage the global economy and the global workforce, which is why a lot of people do an offshore team.

Matt Blumberg: So that was one follow- up question I was going to ask. You have to hire someone local to build and run the local operation. Do you recommend partnering with a firm that will sort of like co- employ your people or starting from the ground up, or start with A and then move to B?

Sejal Shah Gulati: Yes, and. So I think it really depends. If you partner with a firm, you need to make sure that the firm is aligned with you with your values. Oftentimes there are firms that are just different and you want to make sure that they're aligned. I do recommend, and this is where it goes back to my number one advice, which is play the long game. It benefits you to hire someone in the market that's a member of your team and have potentially someone from here go there to mentor that person. Again, it's playing a little bit of a longer- term game, but the most successful companies that have really global operations and big, big companies, Goldman, Apple, Google, that's what they've done, where they've said, " You know what, we want someone on the ground who knows the market but is in line with our culture." And I don't think that's out of the realm for startups at all. I actually think startups are in a great position to do that.

Matt Blumberg: I think that's great advice. It's one of the things I always tell CEOs when they're setting up shop like in Europe, which is usually where you start if you're running sales abroad as opposed to back office, to make it work really well, you have to put an exec on the ground there for a while.

Sejal Shah Gulati: 100%.

Matt Blumberg: It's good to hear it's the same.

Sejal Shah Gulati: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: Probably and more so.

Sejal Shah Gulati: Yes. And it's about culture, which I know you talk about a lot. And I think the people that I've seen who thrive in a global environment put in the time to make sure that the culture is there and they have the right cultural fit.

Matt Blumberg: Sejal Shah Gulati on going global. Thank you so much for being here.

Sejal Shah Gulati: Thank you. Thank you so much.