When fashion search engine Wantering opened an office in New York City last year, its Vancouver-based CEO was spending about a week each month in the Big Apple.
Soon after, Matt Friesen found himself absent from the West Coast headquarters for half a month at a time while he was networking and expanding his tech startup’s global presence.
Like most leaders of early stage companies, Friesen had to find ways to provide staff at the home office with direction while he was expanding the company, securing partners and raising funds from investors.
“I won’t pretend that I’ve perfected it but it’s something we work really hard on all the time,” Friesen said.
The company launched a new extension for its search engine on the Google Chrome browser in early November. It was a task that required precise collaboration between the West Coast and East Coast teams – but melding the technical side of things in Vancouver with the artistic side embodied by the sales and marketing engine in New York turned into a challenge, according to the CEO.
“It’s trying to communicate as much as possible, and as the person who’s setting the vision and is on the ground, actually working with and speaking with clients and partners, it’s, ‘How do you translate that back to a product team which is thousands of miles away?” he said. “It’s hard.”
Every three weeks the company holds “sprints” in which it plots out the next three weeks of work, and there are also weekly updates between those sprints.
Employees also use an instant messaging tool to give updates about what they’re working on that day. Different departments also compile summaries of the week for everyone else to see.
“It’s a transparent way for us to see what people are doing, what activities they’re working on,” Friesen said. “It’s something we’re working on all the time but that’s the only way we can do it.”
Another Vancouver-based company, Food.ee, used creative delegating to avoid the absent-CEO trap. When the online food delivery service, which began transporting high-end lunches to offices in downtown Vancouver in 2012, was ready to launch in Toronto last month – the first time it would go live in another city – CEO Ryan Spong recognized it would be tough to provide vision and direction to the startup if he was constantly overseeing progress in another office.
“That was a potential problem and we have ambition to be in more cities,” Spong said.
He decided to move the Vancouver operations manager to Toronto for three months to assume the new role of launch manager and train that city’s general manager.
“We’re an operational-based startup; we’re not a pure software play. We’re going to be in other cities and have this same challenge,” the CEO said.
“So that’s why we structured the business that way. The organizational chart requires somebody who goes in like sort of a Navy SEAL.”
So far, it’s worked out.
Spong said his travel time as CEO has been minimized and he’s only been back to Toronto twice this fall to oversee the company’s launch in that city.
Despite the challenges of being away from headquarters, Friesen said it’s difficult expanding a startup if the face of the company never leaves the relatively sleepy confines of Vancouver.
"[Clients] want to be doing business with someone who is here with them,” he said. “It’s completely changed conversations in how we’re viewed.”
