Aaron McDaniel & Klaus Wehage - How To Be The Catalyst In Your Company's Global Growth

Foreign. Direct. We're going global. Today's show is all about going global. A couple of great authors sharing some fantastic stories. They've got more stories you can.

That.

You can count and count them, you can't count them all. So going global is the subject of our store, of our conversation today. We've got two authors on and we'll get to that in just a second. Hey, everybody, my name is Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Bring our show to you. Every week for years now we've got all these authors, entrepreneurs, CEOs, coaches, people talking about what it takes to scale and grow a business and all the aspects of it, from the strategy to the people to the operations, the cash models, all of those things and the leadership required to go there. Today's conversation is really at the core of the biggest scale are companies that go global. And so we'll get to that in just a second. You'll find our show wherever you get it, wherever you got this one now. Or you can go to scalingcoach.com so scalingcoach.com is the main website and and then of course, you can find our show. YouTube, LinkedIn, Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts. So in video and audio, whatever you dig, we've got it for you. If you subscribe and you like them where they are right there, then you'll get it every week. And, and that's a great place to do it. You can also go to our website and subscribe there to get updates from us on a regular basis where we'll post things. So all that more. Let's get to our guests now. Klaus and Aaron are joining us now and they're going to talk about their latest book, Global Class, which is doing fantastic in sales, bestseller all over the place. Interviews with. There's the book on screen if you're watching on camera. Global Class, really about going global and international expansion. What does it take? What's that involved? Something that I have just a little bit of background in and is a subject that I think is super cool. I love when somebody says they want to go global. They want to get out of their neighborhood and go all over the world. It's a big world out there. Klaus and Aaron, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Bill.

So where are you guys today?

San Francisco Bay area.

Both of us?

Yeah, back in my backyard. And Klaus, are you also in the bay also?

I'm in Alameda. And actually when we were writing this book, Aaron and myself, we lived very close by each other 30 minutes but we actually met only two times with each other over two years during the pandemic, so. So despite us being close, we're still a little bit far apart. I actually have a feeling that Aaron is trying to avoid me sometimes and don't want those in person meetings. But, you know, that's part of it sometimes.

You figured it out.

And Klaus, by, by name and accent, I should tell listeners you're a Dane.

I am a Dane. I'm a Viking. Yeah, exactly.

Yes. You guys are doing fantastic in the TV these days. There's more Viking shows.

Yeah, exactly. We're, we're spread history here, of course.

Pardon me. And Aaron, you're probably more from the West Coast, I'm guessing.

I'm, I'm from Silicon Valley, basically have lived here most of my life. I'm a California guy.

Nice, nice, nice. I'm originally from Los Angeles too. So. All right, well, let's, let's get into the topic as we do that. I think it's always really useful if you kind of tell your stories. How do you get involved? Give our listeners a little bit of your background because you both have really relevant background in the subject of the book itself before we get into the stories of the book.

Sure. So I, Silicon Valley native, I started, I started my career at AT&T as part of his leadership development program, sort of future C level. But I always knew in my heart I was an entrepreneur. So I worked up pretty fast in AT&T.

But I always did wave AT&T quickly. I did, I'm like, how could you be entrepreneurial at @t?

So I had started businesses while I was there. From custom wedding invitations to portable beer pong tables to a taxi app. Around the same time Uber came out. But I left to be a full time entrepreneur. A lot of my companies failed. Three of them got acquired. About six years ago, was asked to teach entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley's High School of Business, where I still teach. And then about four, almost five years ago, Klaus and I teamed up on 10X Innovation Lab, which is a consultancy and accelerator that helps companies expand to new markets. And most of our clients are international governments who have companies they want to connect into Silicon Valley. And we realized a lot of mistakes these companies were making. And that led us on an interesting journey that became the book.

But Klaus, sure I am Klaus, obviously I am Danish. I have lived and worked on four different continents. Santiago, Chile, Hanoi, Vietnam, from Denmark and obviously now in Silicon Valley. My sort of experience in Vietnam is interesting to the topic. I actually had the Pleasure of working with one of the largest beer brewing brands in the world, a Danish company. I'm not going to say the name necessarily, but that was the first time I saw that even the biggest companies fail when it comes to international expansion and growth. In fact, they've been there since, since the mid-90s and they still weren't successful in 2012. So they fired the whole team. Clearly not doing well trying to rebuild the team or rebuild the strategy. And that was why we came in there. Afterwards I came to Silicon Valley. I wanted to learn more about entrepreneurship and innovation. I had the pleasure of meeting Aaron in the early days because actually my now wife and his wife are good friends from Boston. In fact, their mothers are best friends. So you often say that we can't be, you know, we can't be too combative and everything because we have to stay nice otherwise our mother in laws will come after us.

Family relations.

Yes. And I guess the reason why I have a duck shirt on today just to call that out is because I actually escape the winters and ducks do that as well. So we like warm weather. So that's why I'm here in California.

It's a beautiful day here in California, right?

Beautiful. Yep.

It's not bad. We're not yet into our winter season, so. Yeah. So I, that's really great. So let's get into the actual book. Talk about the research that you did that went into this. You interviewed a lot of people, you captured a lot of stories and lessons. I think it's interesting. I, I spent some time doing some international expansion with a couple different companies and I was always fascinated with all of the different, whether they be a lot of them cultural faux pas, but also linguistic mistakes and things like that that would go on as companies try to go around the world. And certainly in the United States where we have an awful lot of listeners, viewers, we do this a lot because we have such little exposure growing up in this country to living in other places. We don't learn four languages, we don't travel and take our holidays in too many places. And so you end up kind of doing things that you just make assumptions about the world.

Yeah, it's true. And, and language is the tip of the iceberg. Right? It's, it's, there's so much more to it. And I mean we, one of the stories we heard was from, was about tableau. They actually had been launching their product in, in Germany and some of their translation was not good and they got torn apart in the forums. These, these German customers Were like if we can't expect you to even like write in our language, how can we expect you to have a product that works? And so you know, it's, it's important to be mindful and, and you know, there was a time to use an American perspective. It was like oh this American product is great. But now, you know, customers are expecting that you localize the business for their markets.

Also in particular with the increasing competition around the world. Now just because you have, you're an innovative company in Silicon Valley doesn't necessarily make you that innovative in another country because they might already have an existing technology solution that actually serves that need as well. So you have to be better at localizing your product to out compete local competition as well.

Yeah, just being aware of all of the things like having that mindset and perspective I think is really challenging. I once had a small project. An old vendor and friend of mine asked me to help translating some British telecom documents for use in the US from British English to American English. With my background in telecom and, and I thought it was pretty interesting to see it. But then I can also remember managing projects where we were translating things from Spanish into for different Spanish groups and like even the word dial was used differently with different subgroups within Spanish speaking cultures. And it points to that larger thing of also like the language is only the first level. The way that you operate, whether or not you're innovative or useful or valuable in a country and how you are and the way that you manage and carry yourself are all totally different.

Yeah. Actually to use that iceberg analogy, we have this framework that's sort of a spider chart that talks about all the changes you need to make to your business to be successful. And we use that iceberg analogy because the top part of it go to market related is often what people think I need to change the language and the marketing and the pricing and you know we're good. But there's so much under the surface that you really need to think about to operate legally and effectively in other countries.

When it comes to a little bit of a story, I guess is Rakuten, a Japanese tech company. When they were expanding to international markets, one of the core values was speed, speed, speed, speed. And so part of their expansion strategy was to acquire a bunch of companies when it came into the U.S. when they actually want to launch product in the U.S. they tend to have labels where they have product descriptions. They were very long because Japanese people like a lot of information. But it didn't really resonate with local U.S. consumers. Right. So that was really, really something they had to change. But then when it comes to even management and acquiring a company in the uk, they had a really hard time getting that up and running. There is clearly something that weren't really working well. So they actually had to go over and understand that local culture in terms of how they were managing that local entity and really trying to tie Rakuten's core values with that local entity. What actually the cheap wellbeing officer did was to go over there, stand in front of the employees and and try to learn about the culture at a local level. And then he ran this workshop with a whiteboard where he kind of wrote up all the core values there. And then after absorbing all that information, writing that information down, he was tying a lot of those words and a lot of those core values from that local team to Rocketson's core values. So how do you actually bridge culture, you know, between entities, you know, in different places as well?

Yeah, I think that's a really useful insight. How is, how are your company values expressed in a local environment?

Right.

What is the unique expression of them and which of them resonate more or said differently, show up differently in a different environment? One of the useful things that I'm reminded of and I was just this summer is our individual. Like we have individual kind of a stereotype, right? And then we have kind of the stereotype for our country. Like how is somebody from the United States perceived in the UK or in Germany or across Europe? There is definitely a stereotype. And then you may or may not fit that one more or less. And I kept getting reminded at this thing that I did for a pan European group this summer that like, oh no, dude, you are very much fit some American stereotypes of, you know, salesy, overly promotional, self serving.

Well, you know, to the point of core values. One of the things we, we talk about in the book, we introduced this concept of being a global class company, sort of playing on the words best in class, first class, world class. We talk about universalizing your core values. So a company like Walmart, one of their core values has been respecting the individual. That's a very American concept. When you go to other Asian countries as an example, it's much more about the collective and the group. And so that wouldn't resonate. And so companies need to think about those core values and how they're perceived in other countries and think about how to create some core values that are universal.

Another element also in terms of when you manage people, for example, in Silicon Valley it's very common to do transparent feedback between people, you know, business practices. Right. But when you go to Japan, that is not as common. So how do you tackle that issue? Right. And one company we interviewed that did it a little bit of a different way. They did it through surveys first. And so they educated that local entity, the local office, about feedback is. Okay. It's not, you shouldn't be too scared of it. It's really also about learning about how you're doing the company and everything. And so instead they introduced that survey first and then later transition over to be more in person, feedback, et cetera. So you have to be really sensitive to culture and the way you obviously are, you know, interact with the, with those local offices as well. When you scale international.

Yeah, I think that's the, the intersection of language and culture. Right. That you're speaking to in Japan. You're not going to get a straight no most of the time.

Exactly.

There is a word for no. They don't use it very often.

Right.

They say instead, oh, that would be difficult. That means never happening, dude. Oh, that sounds very challenging. Well, stick with Japan then for a second. Talk about DocuSign, because I think it speaks to that culture and in what you saw there. Or was that the.

Sure.

I mean, so what Aaron and I talk about in the book is that when you have scaled and proved in one market, you have to run your initial validated model through two filters when you go international government and regulation and culture. And to give you a very simple example on the government and regulation side, for example, in terms of key partners, when you go into Middle east, you have to often do a joint venture that impacts the way you operate in that market. But from a cultural standpoint, one of our favorite stories is DocuSign. When they get went into Japan, DocuSign could have gone that company way of doing things that Aaron described a little bit earlier, saying signatures is the future. And Hanko stamps. I think Aaron has the Hanko stamp in his hand. Hanko stamps is the past, the physical stamp that you usually use when you sign documents in Japan. But actually instead they partnered with the local hankustamp maker called Shachehata, shared a part of the economics, created an Ihanko and then scaled into Japan. Showed that cultural sensitivity and acknowledge that there's certain business practices they have to adapt to in order to successfully scale. Also, as you probably know, Bill, with Japan you have to show a little bit more of a commitment.

Right?

You have to show that, hey, we're coming here, we're not just going in and out. We're committed to that market. What DocuSign also did, which was interesting, was they also created a local board of advisors of Japanese influential executives from the ecosystem. Kind of say, hey, we're here for the long haul and we're coming to help help the market. Right. So those are some of the things that we talk about in the book.

So I assume this and maybe you could share some examples of it. But it's really useful to send somebody from a home country like your US based company, send an executive over there. But you also have to think about having a local partner, local executives and, and joint or, and, or like either a partner, a key executive or a joint venture to help you bridge that gap. You want to have somebody from both, not just one or the other. Not just a local partner, not just a home country operator. It's the mixture of the two that find a way to work together.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. So in our research we were told the, the most difficult but most important part of effective expansion is the team that you're building. And so we built this team building framework that kind of has four circles and then overlapping kind of Venn diagram with a diamond in the middle and often that diamond in the middle. People who have all these traits is a unicorn that doesn't exist. But in particular you need to have this overlap of local knowledge and company knowledge. Local knowledge being like native local understanding relationships. Company knowledge being not just cultural alignment but trust built and the ability to like know how to get things done. And so the, the old way people would think is like this notion of like, okay, I'm the expat who gets sent from headquarters to go explore this new land. And that's really not the way to most effectively operate businesses. You need that local understanding and you need to create mechanisms to get people you hire in that local market to understand better the company culture and how to get things done. You know, one of the more ideal stories we heard, which again, hang on.

Let me hold the story for one second, let me just underscore that. So I lived in multiple countries growing up. I lived in Europe, in the Middle East, I later, I lived in Latin America. I've worked in many more regions than that. I spoke four languages growing up, you know, so you might think, and I have often worked in international global business stuff but, but I always feel like an ignorant American in spite of that. Right? Like, you know, I try, I learn a few phrases, I try to immerse myself. I think about, I Try to be aware. But I still, I never feel like, oh, I'm Johnny International.

You know why, Bill? That's because you are what we call an intrapreneur entrepreneur as an international. And what we basically found is that there was this certain type of person that was the catalyst to the success of these companies expanding globally. And not only did they have, you know, a, an agile mindset, being flexible, a company mindset, but also what we label as a cultural mindset. So global mindedness, cultural curiosity, cultural sensitivity and empathy to understand other markets, to not assume, oh, I know this, and we're going to do it this way. But just like you're describing in yourself, because of those formative experiences, you had the ability to say, okay, we need to adapt this business. We can't make assumptions. We have to truly seek to understand and not think we know it all.

Yeah, I think it's critical and it comes up again and it's deeply humbling, you know. Yeah.

Well, the other thing too, and I know this will resonate with you, with your experience. We, we found that the international expansion was a very solitary experience. And so our goal is to make it a shared experience because what we found is the entrepreneurial community that we're part of is very well connected. But this international expansion community is not because you are the one person focused on another market while everybody else is focused on the core. And so, you know, to be able to connect people, to create this common language we're creating, to allow people to share best practices is a big part of what our mission is.

Maybe just to share a little small example is that we spoke to a SaaS company, an American SaaS company. They expanded to the UK. Again, can't mention the name, because I think that would be a little bit sensitive. But the managing director in that country, his founding team had only been to the UK two times, I believe collectively over two years. One time, over two years.

They had been there one time in their whole life.

Whole life. The whole life. Yeah, exactly. And so how could they understand what happens at a local level? It clearly shows that they don't have that curiosity.

Right.

They just sent him over there just to fix things. And that's a problem. Right. You really need to make sure that you also have the leadership team bought into the concept of international as well. And that often happens later. First when you start to kind of maybe reach 30% to 40% where revenue is generated outside of the U.S. then you start just get that curious curiosity from leadership team. But that actually has to happen. A little bit earlier in terms of like bridging the, the local knowledge and the company knowledge, the different strategies that you can take. And we always use the example of Blah Blah Car, which is the sort of old lift model in Europe. It didn't really work that well in the U.S. but in Europe it works pretty well called Blah Blah Car. And they, they thought international, thought global. In the, you know, very early on when they were building the business, they also changed their brand from Kubert Rush to, to Blah Blah Car very, very quickly. But one thing that they did was that was really interesting was that they started to hire people from Spain very early on and brought them back to the headquarter. So they learned about the blah blah culture, you know, how to build a coalition, buying within the organization and then they send them to Spain to then launch in that market. And that was really effective because then they learned the company knowledge. But then also they had the local knowledge because they were from Spain. And that really helped the expansion to be successful. Other models that exist is ThoughtWorks is a consulting firm. They have a CO GM model where they send over a GM from the US and then they also basically have that person team up with someone locally Plat as an example, they send one over and then the higher one there. And then they make that transition happening where the person that they send over actually teaches them on the plat culture, et cetera. And then Uber, as a classical example, they send a team and then hire the team. So kind of bridging between the, you know, that local culture and also company culture, which is very, very critical.

Yeah, I think that like finding the connection, working through the details, being humble about the whole thing, really, really useful. You started to talk about this entrepreneur and you mentioned in our preparation, Abe Smith at Zoom. Can you say more about that?

Sure.

So Abe Smith is, I'll almost call him one of our evangelists now. Abe Smith is the head of International Assume. And he's been just an amazing, amazing person to work with over the past two years. We actually sent him a message on LinkedIn, say, hey, we're researching a book. And then literally a minute after he's like, sounds cool, send me an email. And then we actually had a meeting very quickly. And, and since then he's just been incredibly supportive of this project. But, you know, his experience is interesting. We often in the book talk about formative experiences, which is experiences in your early days that sort of shapes your sort of career trajectory. He was an English teacher in a rural fishing village in Kushu, Japan. That gave him the aspiration and the motivation to build an international career. And so he gained that cultural mindset and awareness early on in the early 90s. Then later he actually joined a bagel company that helped develop and grow and then help also expand to Japan. So he gained that agile entrepreneurial mindset as well. And then later he actually worked for Cisco, Sishin and WebEx where he gained that, what we call company knowledge, understanding how to build coalition and buy within very complex organizations to drive certain initiatives. So he is that ideal profile that covers all the layers of that pyramid of an entrepreneur that we describe in the book.

I think it's really useful drawing people that already have a little foundation as you would for any other things. Little bit of exposure makes a huge difference in, in that kind of thing. You can go and work some other place and, and you can know what you don't know or have a sense of it having been in another place. Right. Like knowing that you have, you know, once you've learned another language, once you've been in another culture, then you have a sense that there is more than one way of looking at the world, more than one way of working.

I, I just reflect sometimes a little bit on my early sort of international experiences.

I.

My first experience was to immerse myself in, in Chile for, you know, that was only a month though. But I actually stayed with a family there, a local family, the whole time. And in my sort of teach at university and school, I was taught that Pinochet is this absolutely horrible dictator, which obviously not a nice guy. But then I end up staying with a family that was absolutely adoring Pinochet. The mother had multiple pictures on the wall where she's kissing him on the cheek. And that to me was a big shock. I was like, wow, what did I step myself into this like, dictatorial family. But then, you know, relaxing a little bit and starting to learn more about the family and sort of why they made decisions and didn't really address the issue. They end up being my, what I call now, my Chilean family, who also dedicated the book to, as well, because they really taught me about being very cultural aware and sensitive and respectful as well to how people make decisions in other cultures and so forth.

You know, if you had a Danish exchange student coming to the United States today and living with two different families, they might have a very similar kind of an experience here.

Right?

That's true with, with dramatically different perspectives depending on which family or which community that you lived in. On the local leadership. You know, I Think that's another thing that I've done some work in the Middle east and in different countries and, and I spent some time in Dubai and people said, oh yeah, yeah, this is a great place to live, a great place to do business for a lot of reasons. But you, if you have any thoughts or opinions about the rulers of the government, you keep your mouth shut. And that's not something that you want to speak out loud ever.

Yeah, like, yeah.

And the same thing is true in a lot of other places. Right. We think of that there. But don't go to Thailand and talk about, about the King or the Queen. Right? That's like, keep your mouth shut. That's off limits. And if you want to do business, that culture and, and I have, it's a lovely place to do and the people are lovely, but that is. You don't cross that bridge. Right.

Whereas Denmark, we trash the monarchy all the time. I think there's. They're in the news a smaller percentage of people who's actually truly bought into the monarchy, whereas it's a little bit more of like, great. They are marketing Denmark history and so forth. Wonderful. Here's a, Here's a pile of cash. You go do that around the world so you can speak a little bit more transparently directed them or hence why we're super direct in that country.

The Danish. The Danish Queen and, and princes in the news in just this week. Right. And the same thing. True. Like we see in the uk. Totally okay to speak your mind about the Queen, you know, in general when the Queen's passing. But there are people that said some pretty nasty things in the last little bit after the Queen. The vast majority being adoring and respectful and. But very different environment than some of the places where you cannot talk about what. What is okay and what is not okay. Right. Are really interesting things. Yeah, fascinating. Years ago my boss warned me not to do business in Russia and he said, yeah, like it was okay for me to sell stuff into China, but I couldn't do business in Russia. And that was like his rule about what culture was okay or not. Many others did, obviously, and for many years companies expanded greatly into that. But what are the rules? What are the norms? What can be expected? I think you point to some really good things. Talk about the unspoken or unknown things I've had. I remember the first time I negotiated a contract in with an Asian counterpart and I thought we were all agreed on things and, and thought we done. But then I noticed until we actually exchanged money and services, we were still negotiating. And it really upset me the first time it happened. Afterwards, I, I came to recognize it. But how do you figure those kinds of things out?

So throughout the entire book, we have a bunch of these, what we label as often overlooked aspects. And you're exactly right. I think talking a little bit about what we mentioned before, that's where there's that importance of having that local knowledge. Like a couple quick stories. One, in China, often in B2B business relationships, that final invoice is not paid. So you send it and it's sort of a show to, you know, the, the, the party that's supposed to be paid doesn't take payment because that's supposed to be showing the value and future of the relationship. And if you don't price accordingly, you are going to miss a lot of revenue. Another fun story, we won't mention the investor name, but, but Flexport was expanding into Europe and they wanted to open a bank account. And we heard tons of these, like, bank account stories. People think, yeah, I'll just go open the bank account the next day, we'll put our money in. It's not that easy. So the Flexport team there, they had to go get the passport of a very prominent Silicon Valley investor because he was a minority owner, he invested early in the company and it became very difficult just to open a bank account because of some of these differences in rules and regulations.

Maybe just another example, in some countries you have to pay a 13 salary as well, right? It's expected just, you know, like an extra month salary for a month salary. In terms of contracts, you talked a little bit about, like, you know, you can't really expect things until it's actually, you go into planning mode and actually sign the document and so forth. But with Brazil, from my experience, at the very least, you can't really count on whatever you agreed upon before signing the agreement will also be what you're doing afterwards as well. All of a sudden it's completely different, right? The scope of work is completely different, which is a mess and a nightmare. Right? But then when you just contrast that Japan, you, you spend a lot of time going through the negotiation, going through the contract, and you sort of stick to the script. So two very different cultures when it comes to doing business.

I, I think in some respects, like with regard to contracts, the US and Europe are a lot more similar than different. But with regard to that, in the rest of the world, there's vast differences in what's written on paper and what actually happens and knowing and understanding that is a big challenge. Building that into the work and sometimes.

That even comes in, into the core offer. Like a story we heard in some situations, some industries, more on the consumer side. In Nigeria, they will offer a free meal to a local restaurant as part of the sale to show the like viability and trustworthiness of the company. So there's, there's a lot of really cool stories and examples that you need to understand to be successful in different markets.

Little funny customs. Yeah, it, I mean at first it can occur like a pain in the butt to try to go do something like why don't they just keep it simple? Right. I think is a really interesting thing. But if you lean into it and you get a partner, there's something good there. Talk about Walmart in Germany. That's an interesting one. Sure.

So we, this is actually a story we lead off the book with. We jokingly say that in, in Germany it's all about the sausage and that and what, what we refer to this was a, someone we interviewed had a partner who's German who talked about it. Like in order to be considered a German sausage, it has to smell, taste, look, feel everything like a German sausage. What Walmart ended up doing in expanding into Germany is they wanted to do things the Walmart way. So they implemented their value proposition of low prices. Well, on the grocery side, Germany had very low prices anyway and very established, you know, supply chain relationships that Walmart couldn't compete against. Then on the product side, in us we're used to prepackaged meat and then these other brands that are associated with Walmart, well, those weren't trustworthy to Germans and they like to actually, you know, go to the butcher. And then probably most, most interestingly, the culture of Walmart, Americans who go in, you, you get greeted by someone at the door, hello, welcome to Walmart. You know, glad you're here. Right. Well that freaks Germans out. Like culturally they're like, whoa, like leave me alone. Like I'll, I'll let you know if I need you. But otherwise. And so they ended up failing, losing over a billion dollars because they wanted to do things the American way, the Walmart way, not understanding the need to do things a local way.

And with that story, I often reflect my time in the beginning in the US when I went to Trader Joe's, people started to pack my shopping bags and I was like, no, no, no, I want to handle that myself because we're just used and accustomed to that. So we kind of want to go about our own way when going to Supermarkets. But you talk about maybe a strategy that it'll be docusign again, sorry about that. Another great example. When it came to Germany, they knew and recognized that it's going to be really hard to do it themselves. So instead they actually partnered with Deutsche Telekom and got their, their app integrated within, within the phone and so forth and then went to market that way, right? Aligning themselves with the German brand because German consumers just like and love German brands because I think it was like way back in the past, 80 years ago or something like that, they launched this big massive made in Germany concept because the economy is so terrible back then. And so since then it's just been ingrained in, in the German population that we want to buy German products because we're supporting the economy. So it's really hard as an outsider coming into Germany. So DocuSign strategy was quite effective. Right then aligning with the German brand, getting associated with that and then later put boots on the ground because they already gotten that traction, built that awareness around it and so forth.

You know, I think though that what you're pointing to also says that there's no universal hard and fast rule. Because when East Germany joined the west and unified, right, the desire for Western brands was like through the roof. And people would like lay out in East Germany and Poland they would like lay out and put out for display the Western like health and beauty brands that they had. Oh, we have deodorant from the west and we have shampoos and things like that. Like you could see somebody was very proud to show that we've adopted Western products and other times and they would go, I remember the early McDrives in the east and the McDonald's drive throughs and the idea of like going through the drive thru was fascinating to them. But if you tried to eat in the car, they'd sort of freak out. Like wait, what are you doing? You can't just eat like no, no, no. You drive through and then you eat while you drive. They're like, oh my God, that's just bizarre. What are you doing? Like stop, pull over right now. We have to get out and make a little picnic or something.

That is funny.

You know, one of the companies that we, we, we talked to, one of the executives was, was Talabot in Middle East. They're like a delivery service, kind of like an Uber Eats doordash. And, and the, the person we talked to, Mo, he was from Turkey and he talked about how or he had experience, excuse me, working in Turkey, but he Basically explained, like for a long time in Turkey, having American products was a cool thing. And then it's changed more recently where they're like, no, we're not just going to take the cookie credit that the Americans have. We want it to be localized for us because we're different, we have different needs, we have, you know, different system.

I want to double click if, if it's okay to double click on the burger stuff you just talked about. Bill. There's actually a story we learned from our employee Victor, who is Brazilian. Actually, he talked about, you know, Brazilian people consume burgers very differently. So I'm not sure if people can see the whole image here, but basically the way that Brazilian consumers are eating is like basically putting ketchup on, taking a bite. Putting ketchup on and taking a bite. So if you imagine the Heinz ketchup that does big splashes, usually in the US And Denmark and other countries, you just put it in the middle of the burger and then you just eat it. Right. Simple as that. But with that tube, it splashes too much ketchup on the burger. You know, for the Brazilian consumers had to innovate and change that so it's smaller squirts. In addition to that, also the lid on, on the Heinz ketchup, you know, you wanted it to stay open so you don't have to pick it up, open the tube and then put it on. So to make sure. So they also have to make sure.

You got a burger in your hand.

Yeah, exactly. Because you have a burger in your head. So. So the adapted for that market and then also use that innovation at a local level to also use it for other markets as well. They had a similar way of, of eating a burger, just to give you an example.

Well, I think it's great. Let's tie the thing together. So sometimes you have to adapt to local market. Other times the local market learns your way and likes it. Other times the local market's hungry, if you will, for a different approach because there's something annoying in their culture and they love that this comes over and is available. Right. So there's no like hard and fast rule about whether to adapt and localize or to bring your own. And you kind of have to feel your way through it. And sometimes a company will come in and they'll like have a greeter that's initially off putting, but then after a while people think it's kind of quaint that that happens. Right. Like the whole way. IKEA has taught the whole world to shop in a different way I still find it horrifying, but many people dig it. You know that whole like experience walking through the little maze of things and finding stuff and then taking it home yourself and all that kind of thing. But that is something that started in another country and now is known and adopted pretty much as it is around the world. Right?

Yeah. Two thoughts to that. One, that, that ties into one of the, the big things we talk about which is this need to have two way innovation. So it's not headquarters saying this is the way we're doing it, but creating mechanisms so that a good idea that happens in one market can then be spread over a whole global footprint. But, but also what you're talking about also kind of gets to the core of what we talk about in our book. And that's how you, you can't necessarily just localize everything or assume the company way is going to work. You got to find this new balance. And we, we make the reference that global is the new agile. Meaning like companies, you know, understand agile, but when you look at the next thing, global is that opportunity. But you have to have the right alignment and mindset within the company. Just like everybody has to agree on using the agile methodology versus the waterfall methodology. And we also found that it's much more of an organic process. It's not like we're going to go open an office in the UK and hire 20 people and have a big ribbon cutting. It's how do we in a more iterative fashion test out these different markets and learn and then ultimately adapt the business in a way that fits maximizing resources and increasing success.

You know I think they the it's so fascinating this idea of the two way innovation. A couple days ago my daughter shows me a video of a Korean heavy metal band. And, and I'm watching, I'm like wait a minute, this is, this is like K pop style costume metal, choreographed young women doing choreographed dancing but screaming in a heavy metal style to heavy metal backing track. Right. Completely horrifying to from like an American or UK heavy metal or even German for that matter. Like metal kind of tradition of craziness. And yet I can see that it'll have a back kind of influence and it'll start to affect other others as well. So there's that cross pollination going and I mean not too dissimilar when you think about not true heavy metal. But Kiss back in the day was a super costumed performance that is iconic now with time but, but even in its time.

Yeah, that actually reminds me of a concept we call linked markets or basically the fact that what you do in one market can be scaled to other markets. Like actually you know, bringing up Korea, Airbnb as they expanded into, into Asia they saw Korea as an influencer market for Japan and China because Japanese Chinese consumers look to Koreans for the next hot thing. So by them localizing for Korea first and making those changes then when they went to Japan and China after the amount of complexity they incurred and changes they needed was less so they created a lot of scale and momentum. I know there's another good story around, around South Africa and, and Star Television.

Maybe maybe just a different story because we only have a little bit of time to the point of feedback loops and, and two way innovation etc. Right. It's really, really important from a leadership perspect initiate these things that you show these things as well. So I was just, we were just in Japan like a month and a half ago and we met with the, the co founder of Rakuten and Rakuten back then in the early days they spoke Japanese at the office but they chose to say hey no, we got to be committed to global. We're going to change the language in our office and speak English. And that's extremely hard for a Japanese organization to do. And a little bit of a, you know an additional story to that was that chief well being officer Masada Masatara san, he didn't really speak English well beforehand so it was a big challenge for him. But he rose to the challenge. Right. And so really learned English now and, and, and as a co founder leader actually committed to that, to that goal, to actually becoming a truly global organization in terms of communication Then what's interesting is that Rakuten holds something called an asakai, a Monday morning meeting every Monday. It's a ritual. They're committed to it where the CEO Mikitani san sits down and have a town hall and just talk about Corvette. No mission, vision, core values and certain decision that they're making strategically and tying the back to core values they recorded. It's a, it's about, I think it's about an hour or so. Then every, you know, three hours later descended across apac, three hours later descended across Europe and EMEA and then three hours later descended across the US and Americas to make sure that all offices gets exposure to this content, this recording. In addition to that, the regional offices also do their own Sakai's Monday morning meetings, record them and then send it back to the headquarter but also to the other local offices. This is a great example in terms of how you actually communicate clearly across a multi geo footprint and really are committed to ensure that you want to learn not just from the headquarter side but also from the local offices side in terms of what they're doing at a local level.

Well, to connect then and wrap things for our scaling audiences. This idea of a standardized recurring meeting that happens daily, that happens weekly and that has a rigorous agenda and is designed to flow information up and down in the organization to and often begins with a review of the company's purpose, values, brand promises, bhag things like this where we reflect and we tie those into the actions of the day, week, month, quarter is core for scaling up companies that in our audience are using the whole scaling up framework and is a brilliant tie in yeah Aaron, now.

There'S one caveat to that when you look at the global context we look at that is actually when you have that so if you're always expecting that everyone else across the world comes to the schedule of headquarters it creates us versus them mentality. So the important thing is to to make sure you're distributing that so everyone gets their fair shot at at facetime and at being to their schedule to.

Be mindful you got to manage and be mindful of time zones and being even handed with things and there's a delicate balance there to be done with things and there's no simple one way answ there's a world of things in this I want to point folks to globalclassbook.com we'll put the link up here. The book is Global Class and it's really about going global. There it is on the screen if you're watching in video with us. Globalclassbook.com we've got it in the crawl. We'll put it in the show notes as well. We've talked about a lot of stories here but you can hear underlying it. There are frameworks and diagrams and things like that to help you think about your company and going global. If you've already begun the move global and you want to up your game or if you're just now contemplating it or planning for it in the coming year, this is a great book to go read learning and hearing the stories, thinking about the frameworks. So so important. Do your homework, do your research even if you've already begun it, it's really valuable to up that. Thank you guys for joining us. Reminder to our listeners if you want to give us feedback or get in touch or if we can link you up to anyone you're going to send us an email to info scalingcoach.com the website is scalingcoach.com so the email info scalingcoach.com I want to give a shout out to Wanda Mitchell getting our show ready, our guest prepared and that kind of thing. It's a lot of work. It's not easy to do because these terrible guests, you know, they're just don't.

Listen.

Don'T stick to the script.

Yeah. And then of course to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish who created the whole scaling up framework, the Rockefeller habits and started this whole movement about business growth that, that we love to work with. So thanks to Vern and to the team at Potfly Productions who gets our show edited and audio sweetened up and show notes created and posted out every week. So thanks to those guys. Thanks everyone for listening, for watching. We'll talk to you again next week. Keep scaling up. Bye bye now.

Thank you, DJ Bill.