Pranav Dalal, CEO and Founder of Office Beacon, started his entrepreneurial journey in 2001. He has now expanded globally, growing to 5,500+ employees across four countries, all without outside funding or partners.

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Guest Resources

Office Beacon – Trust The Remote Staffing Pioneer. Check out their website and set up a call.

3 Value Bombs

1) Embraced the mindset of moving fast and learning quickly without damaging client relationship and quality.

2) Treat every client as a company. Set up expectations with your clients by being beholden and transparent to them most especially in the early stage.

3) Being visible and available brings transparency and it is critical in setting the tone with the employees at different levels

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Show Notes

**Click the time stamp to jump directly to that point in the episode.

Today’s Audio MASTERCLASS: From 5 to 5,500 employees: Key to Fast and Efficient Scaling

[1:21] – Pranav shares something that he believes about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

• He doesn’t have a safety net in his journey. He has no back up or alternative option. When he has his eyes on something, he goes for it and that is his mindset that helped him through his journey.

[2:16] –  Pranav talks about his biggest challenges and how he navigate them.

• It started when he thought of the concept of remote staffing and went to India. Although he was Indian, he didn’t grew up there and doesn’t know the language. The biggest challenge for him was the culture shift.
• In 2000, no one in India worked in an outsourcing on the BPO industry. He worked night shifts and paid people more than the normal pay that they expect.
• Another challenge was the internet because at that time, it was just developing in India and the infrastructure was being built when he was starting his company.
• The final hurdle was communication to the people because there was not a lot of messaging or chat tools. He had to piece together messaging platforms to be able to communicate in real time.
• He invested and build all the tools that are now easy and common.

[4:42] – Pranav talks through his decision to scale his business internationally.

• At first, he was doing all the work. Then he realized that he needs people to lean on and allow mistakes to happen because he learns from it.
• Move fast and learn quickly is the mindset that he embraced without damaging client relationship and quality.
• Back in 2002-2003, they compartmentalized every client  and that allowed them to scale in a way that they could scale quickly. They went on the same process everytime.
• Every client is treated as a company. They have a process of HR onboarding and had a very defined way to bring the clients in how they are managed and that worked very well for them in India.
• It was a lot of faith and circumstance when they scaled globally. Eight years after they started India, he had a client who offered him their operations in the Philippines that they can not manage. He went to Philippines and loved the country. He followed his gut instinct and took it. He started with 50 people and grew it to a thousand. He opened doors that were presented to him and keep on moving forward.
• Their process helped them set up country after country. And they keep on replicating that process.

[8:09] – Pranav talks about how he grew the company rapidly and maintained control and avoided outside funding.

• He is getting emails and calls from private equities but he refused them because his mindset he wants to build his company without others investing in it. He wants to create a multigenerational family business and now they are in the second generation. They are not managing but they are involve.
• He looks at the way on how they aregoing to fund every stage . They become creative and find companies that will provide them the equipment and software that they need.
• Office space is also a challenge but he found buildings that are cheap, bought it and those buildings appreciated considerably. He re-financed them and use the money to grow. In every step they find creative ways to fund their growth without giving up any single equity of the company.

[11:35] – A timeout to thank our sponsors.

• ThriveTime Show: Become the next success story, schedule a free consultation and request tickets to join Football Star, Tim Tebow & President Trump’s Son, Eric Trump at Clay Clark’s next business conference today at: ThrivetimeShow.com/eofire!
• ZipRecruiter: Enjoy the benefits of speed hiring with new ZipIntro! Only from ZipRecruiter. Post jobs today, talk to qualified candidates tomorrow. Try ZipIntro for free at ZipRecruiter.com/fire!

[14:35] – Pranav talks about how an entrepreneur can balance maintaining a company culture with managing a largeand diverse global team.

• To manage company culture you have to communicate effectively. They have townhalls every month with every country location and they invite every employee to attend it. It is through a zoom call with thousands of people joining.
• He will present company updates followed by an open-ended Q&A sessions and for any employee to ask. This builds trust and strengthens the company’s culture. He also made himself very visible to them and sees to it that he is always at the front and center.
• Being visible and available brings transparency and it is critical in setting the tone with the employees at different levels.

[16:27] – Pranav talks about the biggest obstacle he encountered while scaling.

• The main areas of focus is to be in control of the performance by having a dashboard for KPI’s. The numbers should be visible and transparent for you to see how are you doing as a company.
• Another one is having financial control especially the way that they are set up in different countries. To avoid tampering and misuse of funds, you have to build strong teams to have a strong financial control of where the funds are going globally.
• You also have to set up expectations with your clients by being beholden and transparent to them. This should be done in the early stage because it will be of great help in the long term relationship.

[18:34] – Pranav talks about how offshore staffing will evolve and go forward, and what’s his role in that transformation.

• Two things are going to happen. One is the proliferation of off shore or remote staffing. When you think about scaling, you have to have an organized company that can handle the HR and legal requirements for each country.
• The other one is AI which is either feared or embraced. For them as a company, they embrace it. They use it to build client engagement and sales process so that they can be experts in that area and help companies not to miss the boat and move forward.

[20:52] – Call to action.

• Office Beacon – Trust The Remote Staffing Pioneer. Check out their website and set up a call.

[21:47] – Thank you to our Sponsor!

• ThriveTime Show: Become the next success story, schedule a free consultation and request tickets to join Football Star, Tim Tebow & President Trump’s Son, Eric Trump at Clay Clark’s next business conference today at: ThrivetimeShow.com/eofire!

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