Scale Like a CEO
Join host Justin Reinert as he sits down with founders who’ve navigated the jump from do-it-all entrepreneur to strategic CEO. Each episode uncovers the key milestones, hard-won insights, and practical tactics you need to build a high-performing leadership team, overcome decision fatigue, and scale your business with confidence. Tune in weekly for quick, actionable conversations designed to accelerate your path to CEO mastery.
Scale Like a CEO
Scaling Values Driven Leadership with Arun Vellanki
What does it take to build a team that thrives through industry shifts and global disruptions? Arun Vellanki, founder of CloudBridge Solutions, shares his remarkable journey from Boston startup to multinational operation with powerful insights on values-based leadership.
"My goal is to cultivate a team that makes decisions based on values, not just policies," Arun explains, revealing the philosophy that guided CloudBridge from its 2019 founding to its current team of 70 employees across the US, Canada, and India. His story demonstrates how focusing on relationships and strategic partnerships—rather than just vendor relationships—creates sustainable growth even during challenging times.
The conversation delves into one of the most difficult challenges entrepreneurs face: delegation. Arun candidly shares his struggle to let go of control, eventually discovering that empowering others with decision-making authority actually increased their engagement and accountability. His implementation of transparent dashboards and clear processes transformed what felt like a risk into an organizational strength. When COVID-19 forced clients to freeze hiring, Arun faced a pivotal decision: downsize or reinvent? His choice to diversify into life sciences and eventually AI solutions demonstrates the adaptability required for sustained growth.
Perhaps most valuable is Arun's unique approach to developing leaders. He envisions CloudBridge as a "leadership factory" where emotional intelligence and problem-solving abilities take precedence over technical skills. "Technology can be learned anytime," he notes, "but emotional intelligence and problem-solving skills are what we look for." This refreshing perspective challenges conventional thinking about talent development in technical fields. Whether you're building your first leadership team or scaling across borders, Arun's insights offer a blueprint for growth that balances ambition with values. Connect with him on LinkedIn to continue the conversation and discover how emotional intelligence might transform your own organization.
My goal is to cultivate a team that makes decisions based on values, not just policies, that will sustain the team for the long term.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Scale Like a CEO. Today, we're sitting down with Arun Vallanki, founder of a rapidly growing cloud-based IT and staffing company that's redefining how businesses build their technical teams, from starting in Boston in 2019 to expanding across multiple countries. Arun shares his fascinating journey of scaling while staying true to his values. You'll hear how he navigated the challenges of delegation, built a culture focused on emotional intelligence and adapted to major industry shifts, including COVID and AI. Whether you're interested in leadership development, strategic growth or building values-driven organizations, arun's insights on mentorship and problem solving will give you valuable perspective for your own business journey.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for joining us on Scale Like a CEO To get us started. I'd love just a 90-second intro of yourself and your business.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Justin, for having me here, my name is Arun Vellanki.
Speaker 1:Our company is CloudBridge Solutions, so we are based out of Boston and we have other locations in Canada and India, offshore and nearshore. We do complete IT consulting and IT staffing, and now we have been doing the AI solutions as well. So, being a Boston-born startup, we started in 2019. Currently, we have around 70 employees, so we target all IT and life sciences and engineering complete talent solutions where we help our all our clients with digital transformations, so we provide them the right talent at the right time. So yeah, basically how I got into this business. After working for many years in IT, I see there is a big disconnect between the talent and the clients, so that's how I got into it.
Speaker 3:I'm curious to hear a little bit about what makes you unique in the way that you help your clients.
Speaker 1:So basically, we focus on three things. We focus on the relationships at the same time, industry specialization. Being a Boston-based company, we do IT as well. We do focus on a lot of life sciences, so we help a lot of pharma and biotech companies. That's another specialization. We work with any client. We just don't become a vendor. We will be a strategic partner for them, Whether it's a biotech startup. They are building the teams. We work with a lot of government projects like different states and federal projects. We act like we'll be an extension for their internal teams. That is one of the unique ways we take pride in mentoring candidates. We help them grow their career as part of their growth. We also grow with them.
Speaker 3:That's great, and now you were a part of the founding team in 2019. And so I'd love to hear about what are some challenges that you encountered as you grew the team to where you're at today.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, so maybe the hardest part, so yeah, so, once as we saw growth, so as artists for the learning to let go, we need to trust others to carry the vision. So in the, basically in the initial days, I involved in every everything like sales, recruiting, operations, hr, legal but as I grow like I had to shift from doing to leading the teams. Initially, finding the right people took time. I had to carry forward our company culture and values. What is our vision, what is our purpose? It took a while to build a team, but now they're on their own. I just need to lead them.
Speaker 3:That's great. As I talk with other founders who are building their businesses, that's definitely one of the biggest challenges Delegation and trusting others to do that work. As you got to a point where you're able to let go of some of those things and delegate, what are some of the strategies you use to navigate through that?
Speaker 1:Can you repeat your question?
Speaker 3:one more time. So, as you got to a point where you were able to delegate to others in the organization, what are some strategies that helped you navigate that transition?
Speaker 1:That's a good question. It was very tough initially at the beginning. You feel like no one else will do it your way, right, so? But I learned that, like letting others own, the decision-making process actually increased their engagement and their accountability Okay, when they're working as part of the team. It took a while, but slowly we built the internal process dashboards to track progress and it allowed transparency to all the other team members. So, as a leader, what I'm doing okay. So slowly the delegation became the strength. It's not a risk. Yeah, it took a while. We clearly established the processes and we have all the dashboards to track the KPI metrics. Okay, for each individual, what is the company doing for last quarter, what we did and what we're going to do in coming next three quarters? So that way, yeah, so, yeah, so that way yeah, we became.
Speaker 1:yeah, we came so slowly, so everybody became good at accountability.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so what I'm hearing was part of it required a lot of definition of process and then data to measure the effectiveness of those processes or the outcomes of those processes. That's true Just to me. Yeah, that's great, I'm curious. It can also be challenging. It's great when you've got the processes in place and people can follow those processes, but I'm sure there's a lot of other things. So tell me about when you've become maybe overwhelmed with decision-making and taking care of those other things, and how have you overcome that overwhelm of decision-making?
Speaker 1:Okay, I think that was maybe, yeah so, yeah. So one of the things like maybe so during COVID, yeah, so during COVID and maybe after COVID, so once we are recovering, okay, so a lot of clients completely stopped hiring, okay, so everything is frozen, okay, so everybody started seeing the revenue dips, okay. So then I need to decide, like, whether we need to downsize or double down on the reinvention. Okay, so, it was very well, we made that time. So we don't know which one, which path, will work so slowly, yeah, so I talked with my advisors, our mentors, okay, so they asked us to diversify, as we have all the processes, people in the place.
Speaker 1:So then two, three years back, we focused completely on IT. Then we started diversifying the life sciences. That decision helped us definitely, so that helped us. Yeah, decision helped us definitely, so that helped us. Yeah, so life sciences is giving, yeah, good, good amount of share in our revenues now, okay, at the same time, from last one year, we're building our ai teams where they're working on complete a solutions. Now we're focusing more into education, healthcare and life sciences sector. So targeting these, these three sectors mainly yeah, so that's coming out very good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's great, and so you've been growing since then, and there's also a point where you've got to start building your own layers of management as you grow as organizations do that kind of internally and organically. I'm curious to hear about how you've approached that.
Speaker 1:So the leadership. So basically, I want CloudBridge to be a leadership factory where the new leaders will produce, like all our employees should grow into the next level, the latest leaders, not just employees. So we are investing in completely on our mentorship, leadership training and cross-functional teams training. So we do have quarterly meetings to develop their interpersonal and technical skills. My goal is to cultivate a team that makes decisions based on values, not just policies. That will sustain the team for the long term. If you only focus on the numbers policies, it won't sustain. So we're building a team, so we're cultivating the team to focus on that, so they can. We're enabling them to take the decision based on the value set.
Speaker 3:That's great, that's values-based cultures can be so powerful. I'm curious how do you go about selecting the future leaders, Like you know, kind of assessing who's ready to step into that next role?
Speaker 1:Okay, that's a very good question. When we look for basic things, they're more into emotional intelligence, okay, and the curiosity, so how they're like handling the situations when there are issues coming, so how they dealt with it okay. So those are the things Okay Matter most okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And yeah, so whenever we hire any person, we give more importance to solving skills than the technology. So technology, they can learn it anytime. But all these emotional intelligence and the problems yeah, problems, falling skills these are the things we look for. Even in my recent LinkedIn post, I mentioned about this. A lot of people commented on that and engaged in that post.
Speaker 3:I love that focus. In so many organizations it's undervalued the role that emotional intelligence plays in success of individuals, and then also that problem solving piece being able to navigate through problems can be a lot more important than a critical failure point for people, even though they might know the technical skills of the job, if they're not able to navigate problems, that can really sideline people. Yeah Well, arun, thank you so much for joining me today. If people want to get in touch with you, what's a good way for them to reach out?
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely, linkedin is the best. That's the best way.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So just Google LinkedIn, I'm available or go to our website, broadbogsacom. There is a form. They fill it, our team will send it to me and we will respond to them. It can be any potential partner or any client or someone exploring for a career change. Yes, we are here.
Speaker 3:Great, yeah, great, and I'll make sure I post some links in the show notes. Arun, thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed the conversation, thank you.
Speaker 1:Justin, thank you very much. It was very good.