How did you grow a team 30x during a pandemic without going over budget?

A plushie.

How did you go from a team of two to 75 people in the middle of a pandemic?

Without using the box? Great question.This one is cool because it's a professional experience that I don't have.

I hoped to have because it's my job to manage a relatively small team.small in an industry that is quite slow, and I was lacking a little that point of continuing to grow professionally from the point from the perspective of knowledge.

And it's also true that my salary was a bit stagnant.the last year and a half or two years.

And that made me listen to one of my best friends from my master's degree who was in,that moment, in a startup that wasn't very well known.

But we're talking about 2019, called Glovo, now known all over the world.

I did some interviews, the first one with Human Resources, but I wasn't convinced.

I did the second one with the then CEO of Spain and Portugal, with Diego, and I was blown away by what he told me.

Diego is strategy, here it's expansion.We need to expand Glovo throughout Spain.

Okay, so what's the strategy?And there was one phrase that I still remember because it made me laugh so much, which is:Well, you're the Head of Strategy, so you tell me.

That was, let's say, a vote of confidence and at the same time quite a big challenge.

The cool part was: one, understanding what they were doing; two, understanding how they were doing it.doing, and for that I had to go to the operations department, which at that At that time, they were in charge of expansion.

And I asked them well, in terms of expansion, how much are you at?

How many cities are you launching?About once a month.

And they told me: well, three or four every month I mean, okay, if they've been able to do four, four cities a week and they've It worked, let's put together a plan to launch in four cities.every week, and we're going to put together a team so that it can do that.

When I returned to the operations team that was doing the expansion and told them that,They called me crazy.

This cannot be done.And then I went to talk to finance, where there was some concern.because expansion into other markets, when done it was rushed,and it turned out to be costly for the company.

In other words, I had a problem, which was that it wasn't self-sustaining, and there was a lot of talk about that.with Glovo's CFO, Edu, and I proposed, "Look, this is my expansion plan." These are the reasons why we are expanding to the entire this list of cities.

And I know this concerns you, so i promise you that we will to undertake a self-sustaining expansion, such that if the company at any time moment there is a problem and it means that we have to stop that expansion, the only thing we have to do is relocate people.

But everything we've opened won't consume your resources.

And that conversation was really cool because the phrase Edu used in that The conversation was: "Coming from you, I believe it." And under those conditions, do whatever you want. And whatever you want.was to expand Spain and Portugal from 100 locations to 460 locations in two years and move on to an expansion team that, when I arrived,consisted of just one person.to a team of 75 professionals.

And then how do you convince companies that don't believe your product is a good fit for them?

So they let you try, and they let you iterate and evolve?

That's also quite interesting, how to convince someone.

Tell them: Well, if you don't believe in this Let us try,and we will show you that it can be done.

And hey, if we can't, there won't be any cost to you.

We've got you covered.I would say that at that time I didn't have a reputation for being able to do that.

What's more, it shows that you have a clear vision of things.

When I joined, the first thing I did was bury myself in everything and crunch the numbers myself. That also makes a big difference.

When you show this proactivity from the start,It completely changes your paradigm of what you think about that person, and if later you demonstrate that your ideas are appropriate in other unrelated areas,In other words, I didn't prove that I knew how to do an expansion,but I did prove that I knew how to keep track of the numbers, had good ideas,that I was able to help improve my fellow students,the director of operations, the commercial director in negotiations that we also had a good understanding that we knew how to manage the different stakeholders we had.

This ultimately creates an environment of trust.If what you say is going to happen actually happens.

If the commitment you have previously made, both in terms of what they are the results we are going to get or what the deviations are and why,and that makes sense and people see that happening and that you're in control of what you're doing,It's much easier to be allowed to do bigger and bigger things and things every time.

More risky, because in reality it's not that risky if you know what you're doing.that the person will have it under control. And that completely changes the paradigm.