Scaling for success: Unleashing commercial performance and driving growth with Chieu Cao, Founder and CEO of Mintago, Co-founder of Perkbox

Welcome to another insightful episode of the Beautiful Business Podcast. This week our host Yiuwin Tsang welcomes Chieu Cao, Founder and CEO of Mintago and together they dive deep into the art and science of scaling the commercial performance of a business. They explore the key drivers of growth that propel businesses towards unparalleled success.

Chieu shares his experiences and wisdom, explaining why scaling is crucial for sustained success and how it differs from simply growing a business. We discuss the importance of scalability in creating a foundation that can handle increased demand, capitalise on market opportunities, and ultimately drive higher profitability.

Join us for this Beautiful Business podcast episode as we uncover the strategies, tactics, and mindset required to achieve remarkable growth and take your business to new heights.

About Chieu Cao:

Chieu Cao is the founder and CEO of Mintago. Mintago aim to help people be in control of their financial life by providing the tools to make better, more informed financial decisions. The holistic solution is employee-centric, inclusive and unbiased – ending the single cause of employee stress – their finances.

Prior to Mintago, Chieu was also the co-founder and CMO of Perkbox. Europe’s fastest-growing employee experience platform.  Prior to co-founding Perkbox, Chieu established himself as a tech marketing professional leading initiatives for brands including Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo.

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Krystal Hosting - the UK's premium sustainable web hosting provider

Transcript

Disclaimer: The following transcript is the output of an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.   Every possible effort has been made to transcribe accurately. However, neither Beautiful Business nor The Wow Company shall be liable for any inaccuracies, errors, or omissions.

Yiuwin Tsang  

Hello and welcome to the Beautiful Business Podcast. Beautiful Business is a community for leaders who believe there's a better way of doing business. We believe beautiful businesses are led by people who care, guided by a clear strategy and soulfully grown. Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the Beautiful Business Podcast. My name is Yiuwin Tsang, part of the Beautiful Business team. And this week, we were joined by to Chieu Cao is the founder and CEO of Mintago, a complete and inclusive employee financial wellbeing solution, what they do is help employees lead financially happy and healthy lives. He's also the Co-Founder of Perkbox, the global benefits and rewards platform that allows companies to care for connect and celebrate their employees no matter where they are, and what they want. She was also incredibly involved in the entrepreneurial community through his investments, mentorships and non exec board activities. His focus is primarily on businesses in the tech and social impact space. So let's talk about scaling the commercial performance of a business, given the current economic climate as well, it's quite a pertinent topic to speak about because, you know, when the economy's looking a bit tough, when there lots of headwinds, people talk a lot about headwinds. That's been one of the first things that come to mind as a business leader as well. Okay, what do we need to do to make sure that commercial forms is going? And if you're scaling a business, how do you scale it performs? How do you make sure you continue that growth? So let's start off if you could give us a quick rundown on your commercial growth experience. And perhaps if we speak specifically around your experiences around Perkbox and Mintago?

Chieu Cao  

Sure. So prior to starting Perkbox, my role was in marketing. So that's my subject matter expertise. I used to work at Amazon and Microsoft in that department. And so when I transitioned to being an entrepreneur working and growing perkbox them integral, really, that was an area that I sort of double down on, and really made sure that we are best in class and what we do. So I perkbox, we're a b2b business. So it's all around b2b marketing and sales. Obviously, it's very different for b2c. And I was all b2c When I was at Amazon, switch to b2b. So kind of understand both sides of the coin, they're different. But in summary at the product box is about generating leads cost, effectively, b2b leads SMEs that wanted to, you know, acquire perks and benefits for the employees and having the right infrastructure lead generation, a lot of that is driven by inbound leads. So that experience around inbound lead generation is very powerful, you get it right. But it's also quite risky if you get it wrong, because you're gonna end up spending a lot of money and use a budget and have a cost of acquisition that goes to the roof. So it requires a bit of experience, I think we're very fortunate to have that experience in the team to kind of grow that business. And we ended up spending hundreds of 1000s of pounds in media per month, generating 1000s of leads a month, this is coming from Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and having a sales team and b2b Sales Team closing those leads over the phone. That's, that's exciting. I think what I can also say is that your sales function and your marketing functions will vary as you get larger in. And there's almost like levelling up kind of capabilities, though, which I can go into, you can't jump steps necessarily. So that's the thing people don't understand is that you can only do certain things at a certain time. And certain kind of budget afford for immunizations, I can unpack that a bit more. But that's what I've learned through my growth at parent box. So with medical, we're actually in earliest stage. And so but I can see what's coming as well. But we're not there yet.

Yiuwin Tsang  

It's really interesting, you made the point about if you get your lead generation wrong, it could be a very expensive exercise to go through. Certainly, you know, when we first met, some of the clients that I worked with, at the time spent a huge amount of money on lead generation, and they would also generate a huge quantity of leads. But the conversions were so poor, their sales process after the lead generation mobile support, that dude no syncing loads of time loads of resources into trying to convert these leads. And when I say the sales process, it wasn't always the salesperson or the leads on giving the quality centre the sales effort isn't right. But what happens is you end up with a huge pile of leads that you have to get through, and you end up spending a load of time, effort and energy and money going through these leads. So I could see it kind of go both ways, you know, in terms of, you know, you might think, Oh, we've got absolutely loads of leads off the back of this activity that we've done, but that's not necessarily a good thing. It's still working out quite expensive in terms of that cost per acquisition. I'm intrigued you by what you said there about the stages of growth that your sales and your marketing function goes through as you scale your business. unpack that for us. What do you mean when you say that?

Chieu Cao  

Okay, so we were talking about b2b Business Marketing here b2b business marketing and sales. Typically the stages that you develop are when you first start a business you would lean on outbound sales now themselves is very capital efficient, you know, you get an SDR sales development rep or account exec the SDR are the people who generate the leads typically, we you know, reach out to social selling on LinkedIn, you know, calling or emailing the three main kinds of actions that you take the book a demo, putting the calendar and the the accounting SEC takes it from there and runs the demo and closes the lead. That's what that's very sort of basic vanilla approach to it. There lots of tools, knowledge that sits on top that helps facilitate that but at a high level, that's the function we have that meant to go we had that at brick box. Now what happens next is that depending on the organisation and depending on the types of leads general The size of the clients you target, the next stage would vary. For example, if you're targeting SMEs, you typically can generate leads at volume quicker, faster, and you will probably want to assign the value to these leads closer to the beginning of finance, for example, marketing would say, Hey, let me know generate, say 20 leads a month, a good lead is a lead that would attend a demo, for example. And that's sort of how you do it, because they feel that they can control quality lead to that stage. So we're talking about different stages of leads. Now, if you're talking to a much larger organisation, but lowering the sales time, you probably want to assign the qualification further down the funnel, meaning it's an opportunity, once they've done the demo, they realise it's a good prospect, they call it a prospect. And that's where you want to link marketing with sales is the market music driver lead all the way down the funnel to sales qualified opportunity, versus, you know, the mistakes before that. So that's the first area. So that's where we're talking about, like the outbound sales process. Now, if you have budget, and if you want to move on to the next level up event, and you want to generate inbound leads, there's a few ways to do that. So the two main areas are perkbox that we generate inbound, one would be sort of demand generation. So that's about creating content, thought leadership videos, what have you, and kind of sending that out. So people can read it or get it through SEO, and then book a demo through that, that's great, because that helps augment the outbound. So it's not there to replace that bone. Now, suddenly, you have you know, 100% Outbound, you get 90%, or by 10%, inbound, okay, so that's demand generation. And the other bit, if you had the right skill and the right budget, you can do lead generation through paid media. So that that opens up another domain, you know, that looks like you know, Google, PPC, Facebook, LinkedIn, depending on your product, and what sector you focus on, you pick the channels that work for you. I picked box, we were thinking about black boxes, we started doing that in 2014, when Facebook was really opening up their paid newsfeed. And that's the thing about marketing, right? When you see a new channel, and that's very cost effective, you tend to jump on it because you get the returns quite quickly right now. Because maybe tick tock, for example, you know, you see now listing ads on tick tock, and obviously, that's a different demographic from what we want. But it's a good example of like new channels that work and cost efficient. And that's the key word, you can spend money, but what's the cost a cost of acquisition? And so you learn from outbound to inbound, inbound, you're now talking about demand generation, or he's talking about paid media, get the right people run those campaigns, test the landing pages, see if those leads qualify and move on. I perkbox, we're generating leads at such huge volumes. So we're talking hundreds of 1000 pounds a month. And what does that equate to in terms of the assets we were? No, we had agencies cranking out hundreds of ads, 100 ad combinations and just allowing the system to pick. So what's really interesting is that I transitioned from what I liked, in terms of ads look alike, to what the system wanted. And sometimes I just get so bored of seeing that one ad, because I've seen it, you know, as the market has seen, this ad is so boring to me. But it's not boring for the person that seen it the first time. And so you know, certain ads would just be like the Evergreen ones that always work right. And you know, you double down on that and you kind of let kind of run to it burns out in terms of saturation, and so on, so forth. So that's living up to like, you know, inbound, and you grow those two functions. Now you have good, inbound, outbound. So the good thing about having that is that you diversify your channels reduce the risk, you know, and that one thing when any other will take your business offline, if it doesn't work, I'm always paranoid about Inbound, because it's quite volatile. Because you're competing in a marketplace, the ads you put out there, what you pay for can be outbid by another advertiser. But very interestingly, now with the economic downturn, I'm anticipating a lot of cheap media and things that are available, because a lot of advertisers aren't doing well, they're going to reduce the media spend. So tough times quick, great businesses. And this is a good example of that. Where if you can ride through this economic downturn, how to greet people around you and kind of push through these functions and succeed. Good Times that easy if you can get past the tough times.

Yiuwin Tsang  

Definitely. And it happens. I was working in media during the recession in 2008. And it was tough, you know, because your advertisers, your big spenders, they dried up. So it meant that you had loads of inventory, not very many buyers demand to sue the floor, which means your prices go with them as well. So you're absolutely right. You know, tough times means there's opportunity basically, isn't there for the people who are in a position to take it. What would you say are the key drivers of growth of businesses that you've been involved in? What are the things that you kind of keep an eye on one of the things that you mentioned that you always paranoid about inbound? So clearly, there's stuff that you monitor within your organisation within your businesses? What are the things that you keep an eye on for growth?

Chieu Cao  

For me, it boils down to having the right metrics, it needs to be numbers driven, data driven. That's the only way that can relieve any kind of anxiety you may have is that you can see in the dashboard, what's going in what's coming out, what are the metrics were like for example, you can look at your pipeline values. You know how many demos we get Seeing how many leads, what's the coded value? What's the conversion rate from like demo to sales. And so you almost like a driver with a dashboard, you just keep monitoring that. And the more comfortable you are with that, the more comfortable your team is, with those metrics, the more controllable the organisation would be. And another way to represent this will be on a funnel basis as well. So the answer to that is like, it's really about having good clear metrics that you define your functions and everyone to kind of get bought into that, as a leader, you don't want to get too much into the weeds, because then, you know, you allow your team that creativity to kind of find the right outcomes and the right kind of channels to do. So another thing that I heard was quite powerful is from a management point of view is to create a company where you're tightly aligned, but loosely correlated. So what does that mean? Meaning in terms of the vision and the goals, you're very, like, here's what we're trying to do in terms of correlation. And when things happen, how they happen, keep it loose, allow them to that freedom to kind of move around, as long as they're aligned with the vision. So that's another way to kind of look at this and these problems, like whatever ads you use, whatever channels, here's the budget, get stick within the budget, stick within the cost of acquisition, go run with it, see what you can find out. But if you hit those metres, those boundaries, those guardrails, then you know where to stop, or at least come to me, let's talk about it. That's how you run a business. And you empower that. Because if you don't get past that phase of, like I said before, in terms of delegating alone, your talented team to take the reins, you never grow, you never get away from just that small business that you are in control of. And that's where the fun happens as well, when when things start happening without you knowing. And that's the best thing about being a leader that you have realising and seeing that in the people around you're growing the business because they can, and they have to, and having that kind of system in place allows you for that.

Yiuwin Tsang  

100% It's a wonderful feeling, isn't it when you've got that team, and you shouldn't be surprised, but sometimes you can't help but just think, Oh, my goodness, what a great job they've done, you know, without my input or without my input. And it is an incredibly rewarding feeling from a business perspective beyond the commercial gains, and all the rest of it is seeing that it's a human element, right. It's, you know, seeing people when they do well being able to praise them and the satisfaction that they get from their roles through doing the rules well, and as you say, our job is to I love that concept of guardrails, never hit the guardrails and give me a shout or you know, setting those boundaries is really lovely analogy. But as you said, it comes back down to culture. We'll touch on a second because it'd be really interesting know your thoughts in terms of scaling your workforce at that kind of pace. And I imagined these guardrails. These are the guidelines, you know, the framework that you give people so that they can still correlate, but they still aligned. But before we move on to that, in terms of the tools that you've used, I'm always learning from YouTube in terms of the tools and not just what tools are out there. But how to, you know, make them work for your business, what have been the most powerful tools, as you've seen as being key for commercial growth for commercial performance,

Chieu Cao  

its tools, but also people, so let's just kind of unpack the two here. Right? So from Indigo, and that's also for print books, as well, you know, I've noticed the points of growth due to great hires, you know, they're like all step changes, they hire great manager, what have you, and you obviously see a tremendous amount of change. So for us, right now, we're experiencing, you know, tremendous growth, I meant to go and add products as well. But with medical, because I'm involved with on a daily basis, we've got a great sales team. So what does that mean, there's a culture of learning, you know, very disciplined in terms of every stage of the pipeline. And so once we have that overlay the tools to make it go faster. So for example, what are the tools we use, right, so at the top of the funnel, in terms of lead generation, we have STRS. And so we use tools like automation for for LinkedIn messages or in other sort of emailing messages. So we use drip or fire, which is basically the loads of the few types of tools are quite cheap, actually, it's like 50 bucks, 20 bucks a month, prelicensing tested out, right. So what happens is that it helps you automate, you know, LinkedIn, messages, emails, you know, you have data that you can really kind of go in through LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, and really segment the audience. And each sales development rep gets a portion every month or every week kind of thing in this go after, and hunt through that list. So that's top to stage. And then next stage would be obviously we have you couple that with data. So we use Apollo, communism, great data sources. And up on top of that, I think having data especially b2b marketing is really in sales is really important that you know, who you're targeting, and you pacing yourself and don't burn through your data. That's the other thing. You know, that's that boils down to like sales efficiency. So you know, what are we doing, how much it's costing us to get to where we want to do? So data is key part of that. So we use those data sources. Then we use the next stage of the funnel for that that would be we use Gong, so do ng dial. It's a software, it's expensive, but you can get some deals out there. But basically, what it does is it records all your calls, transcribes it pulls out keywords, you can create notifications for every video, every demo, if the agent says something or doesn't say something, as a manager, you can get those notifications and that's how they do training. And so look we've had and also the amount of time you speak versus the prospects speak. So you want to get that sort of, you know, 6040 7030, you know, good balance of you speaking a bit more, but not 90% of time, right, you need to allow them to engage. So these are powerful metrics, that powerful tools, I mean, the overlays a good system of training that the measure hasn't placed. And so that's gone. And then we use HubSpot CRM. So I really encourage you to really learn how to optimise whatever CRM you have, that's your bread and butter, like how to make sure the different stages are well, kind of tuned, and data is passed through. And if you don't get that, right, or don't preach the infrastructure, you will pay later as you scale. Because that will break down. And I remember at product box, we had Salesforce, and the implementation had to be redone a couple of times, and it was painful. You know, at one point we allowed everyone to, but it allowed everyone to create their own fields, which is a bad idea. And so, you know, the dropdown became like 100 different sort of choices, like okay, this is not gonna work gotta have like, 10. So who created all these and the President's clarify left, so you're stuck with it, Frankenstein of infrastructure. So that's really where it takes, you know, having the right team leader who understands how to manage coach people using technology, and also thoroughly most importantly, you have the right infrastructure and GRI across the organisation, this is how you want to scale. And that means understand what data is important to capture, how to display that and how to kind of create the infrastructure within the CRM, and you do not want to change the plumbing later on, lay down the foundation, the plumbing, and allow that to scale and think creatively. So what if we do multi country or multi product? What does that look like, right? We're multi year, you know, licences, all these things add to the infrastructure. But if you have some planning ahead and create a foundation, whatever you build on top, it's gonna allow you to scale much, much faster. So I can't stress enough how important that is.

Yiuwin Tsang  

I just want to take a quick minute to say thanks to our trusted partners, Crystal hosting. Crystal is a B Corp powered by 100% renewable energy, and has a goal of planting 1 billion trees by 2030. Crystal services super fast and super reliable. And they're genuinely really nice. People were super picky over who we work with as partners, our beautiful business, and we're delighted to count crystal as one of them. But to the podcast, solid advice, I think I've gone through a similar experience with you with the Salesforce rebuild is so painful, and it's really expensive as well, in order to get the people in to do that. So as you write absolutely right. And again, it comes back to that self discipline and giving yourself as the leaders of the businesses the chance to kind of think about these sorts of things, as you say, be creative, and really kind of Horizon scan, you know, what would the business look like in three years, five years, 10 years time? What does the CRM system that we need to support that kind of vision need to look like? And as he said, It's not kind of like get it built right now. But it's getting the foundations in place, you know, that functionality, if we might need that functionality in two and a half years. And we need to make sure that we build in towards that direction, even if we don't buy the plugins straightaway and things like this. You've mentioned a few times in there, too, about people having good people and hiring the right kind of people in one question I've got when you are scaling your workforce at that kind of pace. And I guess particularly with a sales team, or a commercial performance team, you know, those types of roles can be quite transient, you know, some people kind of come to kind of go and think that there's all of these factors combined means that building and maintaining that culture that we spoken about that's so important can be really tricky. And and I guess one of the challenges that have come through through the pandemic is when you are in a hybrid situation where you've got remote workers and things like that, how do you maintain that culture? Because you speak so passionately about it? How do you maintain that culture? How do you maintain that identity, but also allowing, I suppose that yourself the opportunity to spot any potential problems that might be arising or even some of the opportunities to celebrate that might arise? As you say, when we're in the office of sat next to each other, somebody does a great job, you know, or you get somebody comes in looking a little bit, not themselves. And again, you can pick up on that and you can go, but how do you do it when you're working remotely? Especially when you're scaling so quickly?

Chieu Cao  

So before I answer that question, it's one point I want to make about this hiring people and scaling. When you run a company, you want to scale quickly. They're really just two limiting factors, that you should be really really concerned obsess about first managing your cast, you burn the runway, how much money you have in the bank, right? How you spend your money. And the other is recruitment, hiring the best people unlocks, growth, unlocks, creativity, unlocks a better culture. So and I've had this conversation in the past with other colleagues and partners, and sometimes we worry about, you know, performance of people, and letting them go. And then we dig a bit deeper and realise, you know what, we're not worried about these people. We'll worry about finding a replacement. We're worried that we can't find the right people to replace. That's the real worry. And so I think that's for me, was a lightbulb moment. It's like okay, how do we become the employer of choice? How do we attract the very best talent? And do we have that people lining up to join us? It's much easier to hail a key country better because we can find better. I mean, in a way, you know, you want to optimise for the organisation. And that's how I know is that you need to think it's like, you know, you need to level up, everyone needs to level up in the most supportive and collaborative way. But it's like in school, right, you need to get good grades, you have to study Yeah, the other students gonna get the higher grades, and it'll be a highly ranked thing, kind of healthy, competitive nature. But what drives that that's recruitment, and being good at recruiting, being good at identifying talent, if you can't recruit, nurture them, make sure they're grown and become that talent that you want, or find that talent that you want. So two options, right. And so that's that the second point around managing culture in the remote world, it's, it's hard, it really, I think, the hardest time for me was that transition from right beginning of COVID, where I knew few these people in person. And then also it became a relationship. That was hard, because that was the transition from like, I'm used to seeing you at the office, what's going on now, you know, but once you start hiring people remotely and building that sort of remote first culture, it's actually easier you've learned, I've learned over the years last few years to kind of have regular stand ups in the morning and always over communicate, I think that's something really important use of emojis, use a lot of that just going to pad the text with a bit of emojis, it really helps encouraging people to celebrate more on Slack, whatever medium you use, and just normalise that. And that's really the best translation of what we have from a terrestrial to a digital world. But you need to set the example you need to say, hey, look, it's not spam, you clean the culture there. So let's carry on, you know, posting to the feed and credit channel for these types of things in channels for that thing, that's the only way to kind of overcome that. But that's the way of the future, you have to be good at remote management and have the tools in place. But a lot of people initially saw the dark side of having remote culture, you know, distributed workforces where you have no idea what they're doing, you know, you just have to trust people in but then again, it forces you to be a better manager. To my point, again, great management, you know, Phil lives on this thinking that I believe in where people are highly aligned with the goals and loosely correlated with the actions so they can do what they need to do. As long as you're hitting the goals and metrics, you should be alright. And you know, if you're putting those guardrails, so they deviate beyond what is acceptable, you have the framework in which to address that. And then you get better at managing that bit of your world as a manager, you know, setting the goals, the vision, making it really clear, and allowing them to do what they need to do. So if you don't have that structure, you can't be a great manager. That's where the friction comes in. And you start thinking, what did you spend, you know, last hour doing this and that the other, it's like, that becomes a downward spiral, sometimes. So you are to kind of get out of that sometimes managers,

Yiuwin Tsang  

fabulous, that's such good advice you and in terms of hiring really good people are very much going to take your point, if you're the employer of choice, if you kind of you know, have the right kind of culture, and you've got the right kind of employee experience. You want to create that desire applications from potential employees and things like this. Do you have any advice when it comes to recruiting and make sure you get the best people? What lessons have you learned in that space?

Chieu Cao  

I think leadership is really important, you know, at least from my experience, you know, perkbox admin tool, they look at who the founders are, what they do, are they authentic? You know, is it a culture that connects with them? So share as much as you can. This interview is really important as it can be used as a hiring tool word, it's a look, what does he care about? What does he talk about? How does he relate to people? What are the values, you know, people relate to other people. And I think the more authentic, the more transparent you are, as a company, the easier it is to attract the right talent. So that's really what I advise now, obviously, with social media, Glassdoor, there are lots of ways in which people can lift the lid and see what is it that's happening, and why are people leaving? Why people coming? So I think the only way to kind of survive that is to be authentic. You can't fake it, really, but sometimes people don't celebrate enough. So I'd say look, if you have good times, Team outings, take photo share that you know, these are things that do happen, you know, don't forget to celebrate this like in your own life. And yeah, birthdays, take photos, otherwise, you don't see them in the future. So that's that, I think, really, there's no real silver bullet. It's about kind of displaying what you have celebrating success. We use LinkedIn a lot in terms of showcasing what we do. So some employees love culture and gravitate to coach as a key decision others more technical is Haylock. How's the company doing? You know, Team growth? What did they talk about? You know, what are the topics they can index high on obviously have that as well, we use LinkedIn for both are we celebrate new joiners, we talked about, you know, we just found 50 million pounds of pensions, for example, it's a big win, got some great clients, great brands as a customer. So all these things are great, and that builds that sort of picture of the business. You keep doing that. Really, there's nothing more than that. And lastly, you know, great people, no other great people. So leverage the network that you have within your industry as you grow up with it becomes more and more valuable salespeople very, very socially cohesive. So you know, when one salesperson finds a great job, one gig and he makes a lot of money. I'm sure he'll tell his all his mates from the past employees. I find a good one here. We're gonna make a lot of commission come over, things like that and happened as well.

Yiuwin Tsang  

100%. And I guess that I've taken that position as the employer choice and celebrating those things are so important. And also thinking about it from all the different elements that a potential candidate might go from in terms of your recruitment process. And I suppose it comes back to that question about remote. You mentioned that hiring remotely now means that, you know, my kind of hybrid culture is a bit more commonplace. But were there any kind of lessons that you learned in terms of the actual hiring in terms of the interviewing and things like that? Was there anything that you kind of picked up over the last couple of years that you find it worked really well,

Chieu Cao  

nothing really different, you just have to kind of translate that into videos. Sometimes it's actually easier because you can share screen you can show the platform, you know, you can interact that rather than having in person, you may not have that sort of natural kind of inclination to kind of demo the product, you can do that online. You can do recordings, you can do a lot of great things that you can do now that it's remote. So don't always see as a bad thing. For most of what we do, it's actually a positive, because we're leveraging technology to allow us to screen to record to optimise our pipeline. So hiring is like a sales function, you pipeline talent, you you know, send that leads to see what's out there. So it's no different from sales. So we optimise our sales funnel, you optimise our hiring funnel. So right now it means that we actually have a pipeline of candidates ready to join as we scale already. So that's a great feeling, right? Because the people are waiting in the wings, because they're keen to join. But like I said, use the tools that you have for sale. So that's a good, you know, advice to record. And then Istanbul clients work. And obviously, you have the basic questions you ask the different functions that you have. And they'll come into play in terms of Lazio technical interview, or a culture interview, like understand who does what had too many overlaps. And then you have the hiring committee come together and agree.

Yiuwin Tsang  

Sounds good. The only thing that made me just go there was a hiring committee, there's always somebody isn't there that doesn't quite connect is just trying to get out of juice. I just want to ask you one more question. When you reflect back on your success of perkbox. And the growth of mint ago, if you had to isolate one thing that you thought make the biggest difference to the commercial growth of these organisations, what do you think it would be?

Chieu Cao  

It's simple, it's people have the right people in the right people can only do great things if you have the right management. So you get the right people and then you make sure that you are you're doing great people a disservice if you're not being great manager. That's really the other way to think about it. So it's up to you and to level up and prove your management as a leader who you communication because you found great people, it needs to coexist. You can't have one without the other to have great company.

Yiuwin Tsang  

Thank you very much to Chieu Cao for joining us sharing his experiences in founding, starting and growing perkbox and Mintago. Thank you for joining us for this week's Beautiful Business podcast. Beautiful Business as a community for leaders who believe there's a better way to do business. Join us next time for more interesting discussion on how businesses can bring about change, helping communities building a fairer society and safeguarding the planet. You can also join in the discussion at www.beautifulbusiness.uk