Going Global – Leading a Global Business
The first two Going Global blog posts were around how the REA Group (realestate.com.au Ltd) oganically entered the New Zealand market and how we acquired new businesses to enter Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Having acquired the businesses, the next challenge for any CEO is how do you manage a global business in such a way that you encourage the local team grow as fast as possible while ensuring that the overall requirements of the of the company are met. In addition, as the overall growth of the REA Group was being fuelled and financed by the highly successful perforamnce of the Australian business, it was important to ensure that the ongoing growth and success of the Australian business was not impacted.
The first step we took was to separate the Australian business from the overseas businesses so that we could maintain the strong profitable growth of the local operations. This was achieved by appointing Shaun Di Gregorio to be the General Manager of the Australian operations and at the same time, we created a corporate team that was responsible for driving the growth of the complete company.
This separation of Australia from the corporate team allowed the corporate team to focus on putting in place common reporting and finance structures, driving the overall growth (organic and acquisition) of the business, and finally establishing a consistent approach across the company to sales, marketing, and technology so that experience and knowledge are shared across the Group.
We then looked at how the countries reported into the corporate structure. What was clear is that the larger countries (Australia, the UK and Italy) all had the capacity to survive and drive their own growth. They had internal finance and HR teams as well as enough staff to be self sufficient. These 3 countries reported into me as CEO. The other countries (New Zealand, the UAE, Hong Kong and the Greater Luxembourg Region) were all smaller countries and didnt have the infrastructure to be totally self sufficient. It was therefore decided that these countries would report into the GM of Emerging Countries and therefore would have a strong leader representing them and their different needs. It was important that they were not lost in the overall Group.
To help drive consistent performance across the Group, we established the Group Performance Team. This team had specialist skills including consumer marketing and industry sales and marketing and these skills were avaiable to country in the Group to help them address issues that they were facing in their local markets by bring external knowledge and consulting to bear on the problem. This approach worked extremely well and helped a number of countries rapidly address issues that would have taken months of trial and error to resolve.
We also took that approach of centralising (were appropriate) the technology of the business. The key areas that were rapidly centralised were internal tools including finance, CRM, HR systems etc. It was important to ensure that no matter what office you were in, we were able to have a similar way of doing business. The next step in the centralisation of technology was to look at how we moved all countries to a common platform (the REA Group platform) and how we reduced the number of data centres. The reason for this was to improve reliability, increase speed to market and to reduce the cost of technology management. (I will talk about this more in a future post).
The last challenge in leading a global business was how do you drive a consistent culture across the group. This is definitely worth a separate post.
The net result of this approach was that we put in place a structure that allowed us to grow and manage a global business and as a result, the REA Group was a leading global player in the online real estate industry.
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Hi Simon,
Let’s consider the Group Performance Team as some kind of consultant whose mission is to help, guide, and make sure that acquired values and proven concepts are applied.
Looking at it like that, here are my questions:
1) How do you effectively prioritize the consultant’s work? What missions/countries does he treat first?
2) How do you adjust prioritization in a rapidly changing environment?
3) Does it make sense to have an australian centric consultant when his mission is to take care of everything but australia? Wouldn’t a team of local consultants be better ?
Thanks!