Global Class featured on top leadership podcast Scaleup Valley by Mike Dias
Mike Dias’ Scaleup Valley podcast, a leading podcast for high-impact leaders and scaleup companies, featured Aaron McDaniel and Klaus Wehage on their newest episode entitled, “The Playbook for Building a Global Company.”
Key takeaways include:
[min 12:54] - Describing something that most business leaders often overlook, Klaus said that conversations about expansion should be “right now” not one year later because there’s a lot of internal capability building that needs to be done. It could be bringing international talent that could be a link to that market. It’s not like you can just push the speeder now that you’re ready. You need to slowly build up to it.
[min 16:29] - Aaron broke down the expansion / global growth process in 3 stages:
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Market entry - where the goal is PMF.
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Market growth - where the end goal is “Company-market fit” that has cultural and structural elements in it
3. Market maturity - where the goal is deeper penetration of the market
[min 30:23] About the frameworks developed in the Global Class book, Aaron said, “The traditional agile methodology is not effective in the global context because the whole focus there is to pivot, iterate and change until you find the right model. That’s great in one market but if you do it in 4-5 markets, you’ll create vastly different models (i.e creating organizational complexity). Instead, you need to find the right balance between localization and organizational complexity, hence, why we have developed a new approach called “Global Agile” which includes a new strategy tool called ‘Localization Premium Analysis.’
There are many companies that have faced this issue and who have gone all in on finding PMF at all costs. With this comes scaling challenges and teams will suddenly hit a brick wall where they have to go back to the drawing board and fix this complexity and figure out where to internationalize or standardize parts of their model to ensure organizational scalability.”
All these insights don’t just come from Klaus’ and Aaron’s experiences. It stems from in-depth research and interviews with more than 400 international business leaders across 50 countries from more than 250 of the world’s fastest-growing companies, which include Google, Canva, Slack, Shopify, and Shipbob, among many others.
They have developed a unique set of insights (supported by case studies) that can help organizations of all sizes, industries and growth stages build successful global businesses.
About Global Class
The Global Class team has developed THE playbook that teaches organizations the right mindset, culture, and strategies to successfully build global businesses. Through consulting engagements and practical tools (+ case studies built from conversations with over 400 executives from the world’s fastest-growing companies), we help executives with companies valued at $1B to $100B reach global scale. From market entry to global scale, we help companies build the foundation for successful global growth through management consulting services, customized platforms, and more.
