A chat with Alberto Alcañiz

Partner at Redslim and Director of Operations

Alberto, in 7 years Redslim has turned into a team of 30 and growing. How did you manage to keep the team together during such a journey?

Seven years, already a long journey! Probably a combination of different factors.

What helped us a lot in the early stages is to have as a board the same purpose and mindset. We are trying hard every day to transmit those to everyone at Redslim. We have specific goals as a company, and they need to be achieved in certain ways.

Another thing is the set of common goals. In a contrary to many companies where individual objectives are defined, we work as an organisation with a set of three objectives that are common to everyone. They are part of a long-term view and everyone can contribute to them in one way or the other. You need to know what you are working for and how you are working to achieve objectives. This simple thing allows us to push in the same direction with the same conviction.

There is one quote from Henry Ford which I use a lot and it says: "Coming together is just the beginning, keeping together is progress and working together is a success". Keeping this long-term philosophy and sharing it proactively is important for everyone at Redslim. That said, Redslimers are true team-players, each of them with unique set of skills simplifying everything we do. That helps a lot to keep them together, right?

Finally, we hired very strong profiles during 2020, including a new Account Director, Head of Operations, and a new Head of Technology so really looking forward to seeing their impact on our organisation.

Talking about new hires, you say that you ‘‘recruit based on talent, rather than location’’. What advantages do you see in having employees in multiple countries?

Good that you did not ask about the disadvantages, because we do not see any!

There are many good reasons for having people in different countries and I can think of three that make the difference for us.

Firstly, access to true talent. No matter where you are or where you are coming from, if you are the right fit, we will "make it work". This sentence may sound obvious nowadays, with the pandemic situation and the increase in remote working everywhere, but it was not the case back in 2013 when we started this model. In that respect, we have 7 years of intense experience around how to best work remotely and what models to use.

Secondly, proximity to our clients to serve them. Clients are at the centre of everything we do. Our client-base is well spread around the world, from Paris to London, from Amsterdam to Dublin, from Chicago to Copenhagen so having people in the ground in these places or close to them allows us to have that proximity required to work in the way we want to work with our clients.

Finally, diversity. It gets simpler by having people in multiple countries. Among the 30 of us we have a healthy variety of 9 nationalities: UK, France, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, Cyprus and Poland. We are doing constant efforts around this area to ensure we have a balanced mix of diversity within the team. From culture to background. There are wins when you mix competences and experiences. We have room for improvement around this one, but we are getting there.

In general, even though we are in multiple countries, we are always aiming to reduce distances either by getting together while attending client meetings or via our famous off-sites events. The fact that the board itself has 4 individuals with 4 different nationalities in 4 different countries, being France, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland, since the very beginning recaps our mentality.

The team at Redslim has grown by a lot in 2020, and you are still hiring. What risks do you see in such a fast growth and how are you tackling those?

The last 24 months were exponential acceleration for us with many good things happening at the same time. Managing organic growth in a sustainable way had been a yearly constant for some time but clearly, back in 2018, we underestimated the fast-track growth wave!

From my perspective there are two main risks: scalability and planning.

In terms of scalability, it is not an easy one and one where we invest efforts every year to overcome any issues. Optimisation of internal processes, resource allocation and planning are common vehicles we are using to control scalability, but that is not where we want to stop. The journey we are undertaking is to be a tech driven company, even more than before. We are establishing a Tech Hub based in Paris, and the rest of the organisation is working hard to invest ahead of the curve in the latest technology. This ensures room for scalability, but it also allows us to position Redslim as the driver for the next generation capabilities in the industry.

Regarding planning there is an important question: How do you plan versus unprecedent growth? There is plenty to read about on this topic but when you double the size of the team in less than 24 months with the double of revenue to manage, both at the same time, you are into the real battle. At Redslim we are tackling this unprecedent growth with an introspect 12 weeks program which will allow us to improve on many aspects within the organisation and to implement an "agile planning" culture. This is all about becoming a team of multiple cells, all of them connected via the individuals enabling a culture of accurate and flexible planning in a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis.

These terms "agile vs planning" and "accuracy and flexible" might sound contradictory but the combination of them is powerful, allowing us slowly but firmly to place ourselves in the spot we would like to be for 2021 and beyond.

2020 was a year of unprecedented changes. How did Redslim went through those months, and how prepared was the team for such an instant switch to remote working?

We are facing without any doubts unprecedent changes and difficult times everywhere. Despite that, we have been comfortable with remote working since the day one, this year was simply too much of that!

On a personal level, I come from Spain, one of the countries where the effects of COVID-19 have been more extreme. I can tell we have had some devastating months this year. We are blessed that the trust from our clients remain untouched and that the business has been growing.

We did not have a switch to remote working per se but we had an increase in the remote working impacting everyone at Redslim. While we were equipped for no disruption from an infrastructure standpoint, from a people perspective we were far from being prepared. Think about it, we have many Redslimers in a very young range of age, some of them living on their own, some others living in a foreign country with their families somewhere else, without the possibility to even go to the office…

We are still adjusting with small steps every day. Redslimers with kids are drafting their own schedules, people working abroad were invited to go back to their countries if they wished so, we extended the usage of Holidays from 2020 into end of June 2021... We are basically moving ourselves into full flexibility mode.

The reaction from the team was outstanding though. Those months were not easy as we had to deal with unprecedent growth and we had to do it in a new global environment of uncertainty. When in April we had to run three kick-off projects with Mars, L'Oréal, and Bel remotely, it was not easy at all but our team was able to convert these into big successful stories in our 2020 chapter. We are lucky that we can still celebrate success in such a complex year!

We had to put on hold the use of our offices in Oxford, Zug as well as our brand-new office in Paris. We are keeping all of them because we are hopeful and confident that this uncertainty will go away at some point in 2021. Our off-site meetings, where twice per year we take the whole company to a 3 days trip into a place in the world to enjoy time together, have fun and do a bit of work… had to wait this year. But all of that will come back soon!

We hear that leaders are having hard time adopting to working from home and struggling with establishing relationships based on trust with their teams. Where does your trust come from?

In my case, trust is granted from day one, no need to prove it. Somebody could think this is the wrong move but that is how, in the early days, I wanted to be treated and that is the way I am treating others. If you do not trust the people you work with then you have a big problem, it does not matter if it is working from home or working from the office.

Now, trust comes with responsibilities too and the main one, from my perspective, is to do what you say you will do. In such remote environment it is key that we stick to our commitments, internally and externally. Think before committing but, once you commit, deliver against it. You decide "when" to deliver against that commitment, it is your decision. It is not a problem if you want to do it at 6am in the morning because you want to practice sport in the afternoon or at 8pm because you like to work after you put your little ones to bed.

In my case, I have the advantage that I know most of the Redslimers on a personal level so establishing trusted relationships was simple. The beauty part about trust is that it works both ways, they also trust us in the direction we are taking, and they trust that the decisions we are taking are for their own benefit.