I get asked a lot about advice on either building out, or rebuilding a failed cybersecurity operation in EMEA & APAC. It seems a lot of organisations go through the same pain and wonder why it is not an overnight success. I thought I would share a few of my personal insights I have learnt over the last 25+ years of building EMEA & APAC operation
Let the entire company know
So the Exec team and board have made the decision to expand their market reach, create more revenue and build out operations in EMEA and/or APAC. Firstly – great decision! It makes lot of sense, not only does it help the company grow but it also significantly adds to the overall market valuation and builds in resilience rather than being reliant on a single market.
Instead of keeping the decision just in the exec suite and boardroom, make sure you share it with the wider company. A lot of the time existing employees have not been through an EMEA & APAC expansion, making sure there is a good understanding of simple things like operating on different time zones, different cultural nuances and generally making sure there is an inclusive nature rather than a “them & us” feel, will greatly enhance the experience for all involved and speed up the expansion which ultimately results in a quicker delivery of the primary objectives & KPI’s
Who to hire? A Heavy Hitter?
Most companies that are looking to expand into EMEA & APAC will default to hiring a heavy hitter from a big, long established software company – generally someone that is running a $10-$20-$30m business. I have seen this strategy fail more times than work, in fact I have only seen it work once in 25 years. The main issue is the heavy hitter is used to having all of the infrastructure around them, a great name that opens doors and of course a great run rate business. They don’t have the skills to build out an operation from the get go and know what is required at which point.
Building an operation from scratch or taking over an operation that has only a few people usually does not go well. The reason; it is very easy to get overwhelmed with the number of day to day tasks in an EMEA & APAC operation. I have seen people quickly lose focus on what is important (making revenue) and concentrate on areas of the business that seem important but that actually don’t need to be put in place until much later down the line. It is essential to have a solid business plan for EMEA & APAC and ask the question every day……….“is what I am doing today going to lead to deals closing or does it just look good?”. Be careful not to have a busy fool on your hands.
Do I go big bang or start small?
Always a great question, what I have seen work the best is establishing a beach head team (yes team, not single person), in a single country. The UK is always the easiest place to start, it is the top market for CyberSecurity in EMEA and also translation of software & collateral is not needed. Again, it is all about focus – acquiring or building on your reference customers in the UK is the number one priority, once you have a good run rate make sure you quickly hire more people in the region to scale and expand, don’t wait for year end, hire quickly and decisively when you see results (more on that strategy later).
Dev cycles
You need to make sure you get buy in from the dev team when you are looking at starting or expanding EMEA & APAC. Make sure you have provision in your dev calendar for the nuances that come from EMEA & APAC. I am not saying you will need to rewrite great swathes of code, and all of the enhancements should go through the usual process and be sanity checked before committing – but just make sure to have some dev time set aside for what is important to customers in the region and that will help sell your product. Also ensure you check local compliance and other regulations too, some of them are easy to miss and no customer will buy if your product is not compliant.
We tried all this and it has not gone well?
So you hired someone to get things established in your new market, it kind of trundled along but never really took off. This is far more common than you think, even when you have an incredibly successful product that sells well in other markets, getting established in EMEA & APAC is not always easy. Firstly don’t naturally think it is the people you hired, it may well be down to a number of other factors, getting to the bottom of that will save you a lot of future pain. Getting rid of the folks you hired and starting afresh my well just give you the same result. Understanding what did and didn’t work is key to ensure you don’t get a repeat of the less than stellar results you were hoping for.
If you do find it was the team you had in place, then get a new team on board but make sure you don’t carry any prejudice with you from the old team. A very common mistake I see is because it didn’t fly the first time, more micro-management, reporting and clipping of budgets/ability to market is put in place. All this will do is frustrate your new team and make them feel they are not trusted, a cycle that just repeats itself over and over.
We are up and running in EMEA, how do we scale?
Watch this space, the above was all about starting up & getting established – scaling an EMEA & APAC org is a topic that deserves its own writeup. Having been through it many times, I am in the process of creating a piece that I will publish soon. Happy hunting!
