On this podcast we talk to Shea Stanley In 2011, she founded Little Steps Asia, the leading website and weekly e-newsletter dedicated to delivering the inside scoop to parents on what to do, buy, and discover in Asia and beyond.
Little Steps Asia has been successfully running regionally with dedicated local sites in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bali, Jakarta, Macau, and Kuala Lumpur.
I talked to Shea about building her team, the right culture for international expansion, her use of tools, data and standard operating procedures for streamlined business management. So many invaluable and actionable takeaways you can use today!
On this podcast we talk to Shea Stanley In 2011, she founded Little Steps Asia, the leading website and weekly e-newsletter dedicated to delivering the inside scoop to parents on what to do, buy, and discover in Asia and beyond.
Little Steps Asia has been successfully running regionally with dedicated local sites in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bali, Jakarta, Macau, and Kuala Lumpur.
I talked to Shea about building her team, the right culture for international expansion, her use of tools, data and standard operating procedures for streamlined business management. So many invaluable and actionable takeaways you can use today!
So hello, and welcome to another episode of raise the bar, the podcast from next chapter ventures. We have a simple mission here to get female founders funded faster. You can learn more at NEXT CHAPTER raise.com. Get the tailored resources and coaching you need to find negotiate with and close the right investors for your business. I'm Nicole Denholder, the founder of next chapter arrays, and I'm so excited today to be talking to Shay Stanley from little steps and hearing about little steps and learning more about her business journey and also how she's gone and expanded internationally. You know, so many great stories that she has to share on this. So welcome Shay to the podcast. Well,
Shea Stanley:thanks for having me. This is this is quite fun. It's gonna be fun chatting with you.
Nicole Denholder:I know I know. And you know, I love chatting with you we meet at when events you know, there's so many things I could talk to you about, because your business is amazing. Your experiences are amazing. So why don't we kick off with if you could explain a bit about little steps and your, your journey with little steps and how that started and where you are?
Shea Stanley:Sure, yeah, so I've been out in Hong Kong now for 17 years, I have to count. It's been, it's been quite a journey. In the early days, I actually tried my foot in a lot of different entrepreneurial businesses, the one that stuck was little steps and little steps has been around for about 14 years, it started really out of inspiration because I was pregnant with my first child really looking for content on parenting, specifically to Hong Kong, specifically to Asia. And I couldn't, I couldn't find it digitally. So that's really where little steps is born. And over the years it has grown. We've rolled out Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Macau, so we're in six different cities now. So we operate on a local level in those cities, and also regional, but our audience is always parents has always been parents, and just taking that journey of the parenting. It's the parenting journey from pregnancy on up to teenagers, which is where my kids are now they're teenagers. So that's really showing you where little steps has grown.
Nicole Denholder:That's really grown with you and your family. Right? It
Shea Stanley:really is just when you think you know, everything may grow again, and you learn something new. Yeah,
Nicole Denholder:you know, I hold up, I need to know about this. So right, I'm gonna learn about it and make sure others learn about it. So I love that sharing element, because you're right for many of us, as we have our families grow, and there's so many different elements that comes to parenthood and families and what we want to do, right, so I love little steps, avid reader. So now you mentioned you're in multiple locations, you know, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, I mean, for many of us, thinking about international expansion of our business can be quite daunting. You know, you're like, where do I start? What do I need to do? What are the regulations? How much will it cost? What team you know, you can already seen my head exploding on the question someone could ask. So what prompted you to go into different markets? And you know, why those markets I suppose, as well,
Shea Stanley:sure. So actually, the plan was never to just be, you know, a simple mom blog in Hong Kong, it was always to expand. In fact, we launched Singapore about six months into little steps birth in Hong Kong. So it was quite, it was quite quick expansion. But one thing that we realized, and I think that's a question that we can all ask ourselves is, who is who is our audience? And how easy is it to replicate what you're doing in one market to the other. And what we found with the parent demographic is that parents, well, culturally, might be different in each each market. And while the experiences might be different in each market, at the core, parents, moms, dads, they're all looking for very similar things, whether it be you know, planning a birthday party, to finding a school, to where to travel, and things to the core of I want my kids safe, I want to make sure they're eating healthy foods, you know, those kind of core things that most parents are on the same page with. So in that sense, the audience while in different markets is quite the same. So that was one thing that we looked at. But yeah, in terms of rolling it out, we did have to do a lot of research market by market, Singapore was the Yeah, was the easiest one, I should say, to roll out first. nearby. A lot of similarities.
Nicole Denholder:I love how you say you started with that target audience, right? You know, what's driving them, like, it's actually be front and center of every action we take as a business.
Shea Stanley:Right, and also just seeing what the opportunity is, you know, in some of the markets, you might find a lot more congestion, you know, a lot more competition, while other markets like kale, for example, was wide open for us at the time. So you know, market by market, you can do research and find out where the opportunity is with those specific audiences as well.
Nicole Denholder:Yeah, you know, how did you go about either not just doing the research, but in terms of either building the team to support that or understanding the costs that would be involved, is obviously have to do some form of Investment before you're getting that return locally, I mean, how did you approach that in terms of any of the specific markets?
Shea Stanley:Sure. So little steps. You know, we were we were bootstrap companies, we did not have much money when we were going out. In fact, I remember some of the hotels that we stayed in early days. But I think money aside, I think there are a lot of different ways to expand. And I think I think it can be very overwhelming when you're looking at these individual markets. But I think there are a lot of different ways that you can enter the markets tiptoe in jump in, you know, depending on what your strategy is, the way we did it was, of course, finding, finding what that audience is, we did go over there, we didn't do the research, we looked at the data. And our first step was always to build content, because with content came the SEO that we needed to build the numbers before we invested a lot in that market. So we needed to build pageviews for little steps before we hired anybody say extensively in Singapore for sales. So that's how we did it. We we always build content. First, we build the SEO, and then we bring in kind of a big launch marketing initiative for the PR side of things. And then we start building the team up, but we built the team up very slowly, as well as using a combination of, you know, outsourcing, what do we need locally? What do we need as local expertise? And what can we outsource using our Hong Kong team, for example, mixed with Upwork, and Fiverr? And those kinds of things? Because there are cost efficient ways to build a team in the local markets.
Nicole Denholder:Yep. Yep. So you found that there was a bit of a because now you've gone into so many, a little bit of a process that you were able to kind of live and learn from each one and say, Okay, now I know how to kind of approach the second one, for example. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then I know we talked about you had some partnerships or so that, you know, indicated market entry. Obviously, that helped you choose where to go. It
Shea Stanley:did. In fact, that also helped us launch into Singapore. So we were very strategic, it worked really well for us. So in so in Singapore, again, we are six months after launch. So little steps was a no name. As far as everyone's concerned. Even in Hong Kong, we were just getting started. So what we did is we partnered up with a bigger name, which was luck city guides at the time, they had a lot of similarities. But what they didn't have was the family demographic. So what they wanted was what we had, what we wanted, was to write on their brand. And so it was a really nice partnership. And what we did is we we actually launched a Singapore guide for lob city guides for the family demographic, which sold really well. And we were able to get in the doors of a lot of people that we couldn't get in just by writing on their name into Singapore. And then we did a joint launch party in Singapore. And that really got our name out quickly, a lot quicker than if we tried to just do it by ourselves. And then from that partnership, we went into Bali, similar concept while he's a lot smaller, but it was you know, the the formula worked in Singapore. So we applied that to Bali with luck city guides. And then from there, we launched Jakarta on our own. So at that time we had an Epstein so yeah, a key partner to ride into market really is a great, great way to start off with them.
Nicole Denholder:Yeah, I love how you, I think that's really important, because we all think we've got to do everything alone. Right? And that's not necessarily the case. And actually, the more we can work, because in that instance, right, you know, there's benefits to both of you, you know, they're opening up their own demographic, as you said, you're jumping on to their kind of their brand. And obviously, they've always been a great brand in Asia from launch. So that's brilliant to share. And, you know, in terms of setting up companies, I mean, did you find that you're able to run some of these remotely? Were you having to set up local companies? I mean, how did you approach just the structural aspect of international expansion?
Shea Stanley:Yeah, so we have done a lot of AV testing in that area. It is obviously, really important to understand each of the markets to understand what is required is there are NPF, what is the part time salaries, you know, these kind of things when you're hiring, but from setting up the businesses, there's a lot of different ways that you can do it. Now we have done for example, in Singapore, we wrote on just labeling freelancers, as freelancers for a long time when Singapore started changing. During COVID, we did open up our official little steps business, which is required to set up a bank account in Singapore. So depending on your needs, like your E commerce business, for example, in Singapore, you might need that local bank account, little steps, we could still run things through the Hong Kong bank, which we did even with the Singapore company set up. So what we found is that as Singapore kept changing that company we needed to help sponsor pieces for or, you know, we needed that to move the growth of our company. But but it was eight years of not having an official Singapore company, we everything through the Hong Kong company for the first eight years of the Singapore lifecycle, but that is going to be obviously depending on what you're selling and what you're doing in the market. Yeah, yeah, go.
Nicole Denholder:Yeah. So it's kind of like looking at all the different options available to you and what you have to change as you grow. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it is it's
Shea Stanley:always I do agree with that. I think the fact is that regulations change, you know, in terms of employee laws change. So even if you feel you've set it up 18 months later, that scenario could have changed. So staying on top of that, it takes a bit of work as well. So it was a great example of it, because it is the trickiest one I find in Asia right now.
Nicole Denholder:Yeah. But I think some, I mean, what did you think was either one of the biggest challenges and biggest successes when you're expanding into these different markets? I mean, what do you look back on and think about?
Shea Stanley:successes, I would definitely say the partnerships that we put in place, whether it be luck, city guides, or the big launch parties that we would do in partner with all the local brands in the family space, and each of the markets. So it was the network and the partners that we brought in to help us move quite quickly in those markets. In terms of the challenges there, there were obviously lots of challenges. When launching, I think one of the big ones was just the lack of money, you know, you really had to, you know, we were queens of barter. So you know, we would say hey, we give you advertising, if you get let us have this venue per party. So we did a lot of that, because we just simply didn't have the funds. So I think that we got very creative. So success and challenge. It really taught us that, you know, a lot of people have different needs, and a lot of people have different things that they can offer and different things they want from you. So the bartering really helped us when funds were quite limited.
Nicole Denholder:I like how you brought that up around that creativity and that bartering because I think we sometimes forget, we can ask for things we can be, and we can explore in our conversations, you know, different options, it doesn't always have to be on the you know, on that cost basis, right? Like there is definitely different options there. You know, some might be more strategic, some might be one off, and that's okay. But to really think about it. So I think that would really help people to understand. You don't hear the word bartering enough. I know.
Shea Stanley:It's probably a fancier term for it these days, but it is you have needs I have needs let's work something out together.
Nicole Denholder:Right. Yeah, you know, and it's all about holding it, you know, we're all lifting the same ship. Right. So, which is great. And I mean, you've mentioned team a couple of times. So I'd love to just understand, you know, as you've gone into different locations, being what tools have helped you manage the team in different locations? You know, do you set KPIs, how do you manage performance with them? Sure.
Shea Stanley:So So basically, I set the team up in local versus the international team. And when I say the international team, it's really a global team. Our writers are all over the world, our videographers in Ukraine slash Bali, you know, a lot of digital nomads on the team. So on the on the local side and mixing it with the international side, timezones, you know, if you put those on the side, because that's always a nightmare, we use Slack to really bring the team together, which many of you know is the WhatsApp for businesses. But what's great about Slack is that there's a lot of automations that you can put in to the slack. So there's a lot of connectivity. For example, you can link up Google Analytics to Slack, you can link up HubSpot, which is another big tool that we that we work with, you can use Zapier and connect in to you know, communicate with the team versus, you know, you know, with with other topics as well, we use Slack, for example, to any type of deal that comes through is automated through the slack app, everybody on the team knows that a new deal came through, we can all celebrate which Britt builds a lot of culture, but it also pushes it to the next person in the workflow. So it pushes it to a writer pushes it to the marketing team to an ad on the website. So you can automate a lot of this kind of global communication, instead of having to log into a lot of things you can do a lot through slack.
Nicole Denholder:Okay, that's great to know. I mean, so what you're doing is you're setting up that once someone's finished, it just moves on to the next person. And there's this process that's happening, which, as you mentioned, avoids the timezone issue, right? That it just kicks in, effectively.
Shea Stanley:And it avoids the oversupply of email, which we all know if anybody knows me, they know that I'm like, terrible on the email. But yeah, Slack WhatsApp, you get the best?
Nicole Denholder:Well, and they're efficient tools as well, right, which is what you want in a business when you've got multiple people, multiple locations, multiple work streams, you have to be tight and sickly, you work on a lot of deadline driven work, right? So you really do have to make sure people stay on top of what they're doing. That's right, exactly. And how do you particularly for a core team, because I know you have like probably people that are project base or different roles that might come and go. And in terms of the core team, have you focused on trying to build a culture or connectivity, even if they're in different locations? I mean, how do you approach that?
Shea Stanley:One that one thing that I'm very fortunate for is that most of the people on the team are parents. So there is that kind of core passion to build Little steps, just from a personal point of view, the way we connect with everybody is I do have the team meetings, which is a complete hybrid team meeting, because my philosophy is always work for you're inspired and most convenient, especially if you're running around mom or dad. But yes, we do have our weekly team meetings, which are Wednesday, you can log in through the slack, or you can come into the office, I'm there for those that want to meet with me. And then outside of that, everything runs through again, it's that slack app. So with the automation, but also somebody in Singapore needs to talk to somebody in Hong Kong, it's very quickly and I've got it organized by city, but also by department as well. So if you need to touch base with marketing team, you can video team you can. So it's just a it's a quick way rather than lots and lots of
Nicole Denholder:emails. Yep. Yep. I think we're now talking to one of one of my favorite things, which is standard operating procedures, SOPs, right. And they're so important to your business, even if you're starting out. Documenting procedures, I think is what helps that automation, particularly things that you're doing regularly. It's better onboarding people quickly, particularly if there's changes in team or new locations, because you can just pick up and go, This is how we function. Here's how we do things. I mean, that sounds like that's been quite critical to you as well. Right?
Shea Stanley:Exactly. And I think to a lot of what we do is something that we're trying to teach like when you're when you're looking at the world guidelines, you know, it is on repeat, let's say that the biggest tools that we use, there is loom for videos. So I record lots of loom videos. And then I take those live videos. And again, in slack up at the top, you can actually add bookmarks. So for example, if it's the marketing team, I've got the loom onboarding videos just right at the top that they can access anytime. And then if somebody forgets, oh, wait, I'm supposed to be doing this this week. I don't know how those videos are just a touch away, depending on which which channel you're on in Slack. So again, it's it's a mix of content with communication. Yes, yeah.
Nicole Denholder:I love that. I love that. So give him one of the in one of my former lives as a project manager, I'm very driven on our really good skill set. People are very clear on roles and responsibilities and processes in that because actually, then you just can make things move fast, but also that communication is very clear. And the clear communication people, you know, feel better in their jobs, you know, they know what's expected of them. They know when things are due. You know, you I think that that really starts contributing to a great team culture, which it sounds like you're building there.
Shea Stanley:Yeah, well, it's taken. It's taken a while. But I do think technology is a core. I haven't talked a lot about HubSpot. But that's on the sales side. It's incredibly, you know, tracks everything back to the markets. So I know exactly how much you know how many sales have been coming through Singapore or Malaysia, comparing that year by year that can get quite lost in your accounting reports. So you know, a tool like HubSpot, where you can take live inventory on a week by week, month by month basis. It also points me in the right direction in terms of where we need to be investing more or less.
Nicole Denholder:Yep, I see that some something we talk a lot about in our challenges, or our boot camps is what are you doing with the data that you've got to make business decisions? Because I do think that everyone talks about data in a way that's exciting lots of data, but most people actually don't know how to find it or analyze it to help them turn, you know, either really great data and amplify that and go, you know, what this is working? How do we do more of that? I think we often look at data as a negative, but actually, how do we find the positives amplify or find the challenges that we know that's a problem, right, in terms of either the sales and marketing or the way that people are delivering as a problem?
Shea Stanley:You know, you're absolutely right. I think all of these tools that we're using gathered data, whether it's, you know, MailChimp for email, HubSpot for sales, you know, even things like zero, if you're doing your invoicing and your accounting through zero, what I think is the most important is building those dashboards. So that it's, I don't want to say it's dumbed down for us. But it's also simplified for the team to understand that data, and they can do it, it's not hard to do it, just take somebody to sit down, or outsource it to build those dashboards. Because once the dashboards are set up, then the data is so easy to understand and use.
Nicole Denholder:Yeah, because it makes it easy also, to find the red flags be EXIF. If anyone looks at a version of Google Analytics, you know, there is a lot of data in there, but not all of its relevant. And you can spend a lot of time so I love that actually, that you're building dashboards, just pulling out. What do we need to know, you know, what's mission critical in the business? I mean, you can always dig further but yeah, yeah. And sharing that with the team. Okay, that all sounds fantastic. I mean, I think you've probably inspired a lot of people to think about, okay, how do I take my business further? Where do I take it to and it sounds like tech would help as well. So I love all those really practical tips. Thank you very much. But before we finish, I would you know, is there any other tip or insight that you would say A to a founder who is listening to this thinking, I really do want to expand the business, you know, I just either I'm overwhelmed, I'm daunted. I'm just not sure what would you say? So
Shea Stanley:I would say, look at what you have to spend, because that's a scary thing for us, right? So if we don't have money, and we're trying to expand, that's a scary thing. If we do have money, be strategic with that money. But I think yeah, look at the finances first and see how that how that's looking. And also take inventory on what you have in terms of time in terms of the team's time, those kinds of things, and then let that determine how much and how fast you can move into the market. So that will point you in the direction of do I need a partner to make this thing happen? Should I do half on Upwork? And half of it local? Should I not even have a local team at all, and move by me visiting this country every three weeks? You know, sometimes that's a cheaper, more efficient way to do it. So there's a lot of different ways of doing it. I think we can get overwhelmed with the concept of moving to a new city, but there's so many different ways to make it happen. Yeah, and
Nicole Denholder:I suppose also, what's your short term versus medium KPIs? Right? Like, what do you just need to get in place to get going versus we can often get lost with will, you know, I want this when I get there. But there's a few steps that have to happen. Few KPIs have to be met before you go down that path. Right.
Shea Stanley:Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
Nicole Denholder:thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today for sharing your insights. I feel like there's so many things that I would love to talk to you about. Because a enjoy talking to love little steps and really inspired and impressed with the growth you've had with business. So thank you for sharing all your information with us today.
Shea Stanley:Absolutely. I love to share. It's how we got moving to so thanks for having me. We'll see you soon.
Nicole Denholder:To connect with next chapter, follow us on social visit the platform at NEXT CHAPTER res.com And subscribe to the podcast for more great stories to inspire, empower, and celebrate female entrepreneurs.