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
Overcoming Challenges in International Business Expansion with Matt DiMarsico
Matt DeMarcico drops a startling statistic right out of the gate: more than 80% of companies attempting international expansion fail because they don't adequately understand the markets they're entering. As a veteran with 25 years of experience scaling disruptive technology companies and navigating four acquisitions by foreign enterprises, Matt brings a treasure trove of insights about what makes cross-border business ventures succeed or collapse.
The conversation explores how cultural competence becomes the linchpin of international success. Management styles, customer expectations, and communication norms vary dramatically across borders, creating invisible hurdles that many businesses trip over in their rush to capture new markets. Matt shares how his work at USA Launching Pad helps foreign companies navigate the complex landscape of American business while avoiding the common pitfall of hiring a single "savior" salesperson expected to deliver an entire market.
We dive deep into thoughtful team building strategies for growing companies, exploring the delicate balance between aggressive hiring and sustainable growth. Matt offers practical wisdom about strategic recruitment, emphasizing self-awareness in leadership ("A players hire A players, B players hire C players"), the importance of complementary skill sets, and establishing proper metrics for expansion decisions. His experience working with both resource-rich enterprises and scrappy startups provides a nuanced perspective on building bench strength and developing internal talent. The episode concludes with Matt's vision for creating bi-directional global expansion frameworks that can help companies navigate any new geography successfully.
Ready to avoid the 80% failure rate and build a successful international growth strategy? Connect with Matt on LinkedIn or reach out to info@usalaunchingpad.com to learn more about expanding your business globally.
more than 80% of companies that look to expand internationally, and this is whether it's US going abroad or foreign companies coming into the US. They fail because they don't take the time to understand the dynamics of the market that they're going into well enough to be successful from a sales perspective.
Speaker 2:Welcome to scale like a CEO the podcast where we dive deep into the strategies and insights of successful business leaders. Today we have an incredible conversation lined up with Matt DeMarcico, an expert in international business expansion and scaling companies globally. Get ready for valuable insights on building successful cross-border operations and leading high-performing teams. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 3:Matt, thank you so much for joining me on Scale. Like a CEO, I would love to hear a little bit about your background and your business.
Speaker 1:Great to be here, justin. Appreciate it. I've spent the last quarter century building and scaling sales and marketing competencies for what I term disruptive tech companies. Now that definition's obviously changed over time, and what was once disruptive is now much more commonplace, but the tenets of the definition stay the same right, these are technologies that really do change the way we work, the way we interact with each other and the way the world runs. In that time, I've been very fortunate. I've had multiple visits and acquisitions. The unique part of that was four different times I've been acquired by foreign enterprises that have tasked me with bringing their portfolios into the US, so I've been able to build a really interesting playbook around internationalization and global expansion. That's now led me to what I do today, which is working at USA Launching Pad, where we help foreign companies expand into the US market.
Speaker 3:And so in that realm of the business you're in today, what's the biggest problem you see in that industry or in that segment that you're solving?
Speaker 1:What I see more than anything is there's always a desire to move quickly and oftentimes at the sake of understanding the market and understanding the customer well enough to be successful.
Speaker 1:More than 80% of companies that look to expand internationally and this is whether it's US going abroad or foreign companies coming into the US they fail because they don't take the time to understand the dynamics of the market that they're going into well enough to be successful from a sales perspective.
Speaker 1:Many companies look to hire the savior, the one salesperson that's gonna bring them the entry into the market and all the customers they need. You need to step back. You need to ask the right questions. You need to understand how people buy within whatever culture you're moving into, how they interpret your value proposition not the other way around and that then becomes the baseline and the foundation of how then you do everything else surrounding the sales function to make it successful how you build collateral, how you AP test messaging, how you find the right people to hire because you understand the ICP much better and the buyer personas and the vertical markets interpretation of what you do and so that generally is the biggest mistake is rush to get in without doing enough of the heavy lifting to understand the market dynamics.
Speaker 3:I think that cultural competence is so undervalued. Almost every business I've worked in had a global presence. There was one in particular a private equity firm in Singapore that had acquired a US based business but then was trying to run it just like they would run any of their other businesses. There was such a disconnect in the way that people were just experiencing their work and what they expected. It ended up not being successful and they divested the business. I've totally been through when that does not work well.
Speaker 1:You kind of nailed it Management styles are unique, culture to culture. Expectations are different, from both customers and internal resources, about how you engage, how much you communicate, what you communicate. Cultural understanding is a significant cornerstone of geographic expansion success.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if you look at your business today and as you've been growing, what are some of the challenges that you've faced in starting at one and continuing to build the team?
Speaker 1:You know, there's a saying and we can debate whether it's true or not, but there's a saying that A players hire A players and B players hire C players. And one of the things for me is leaders need to be self-aware. For me is leaders need to be self-aware. They need to understand where their superpowers lie, what are their competencies and where they need to augment with a team around them to really get results From a sales and marketing perspective. I've been doing that for a very long time. I recognize that I don't have the I'm a little ADD, right. So you know I need someone with a little more discipline than myself in that area to make sure that the deliverables get done in a way that leads to the successful growth of the company and being specific in prioritizing those hires one at a time, especially as a small team I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1:I've had the fortunate experience in my career to be acquired by very large companies where time, money and resources were flowing at a higher capacity than with a smaller company.
Speaker 1:If you need five people, you get five people.
Speaker 1:As a smaller company, if you're gonna hire five people, they need to be really, really good at delivering the things that the company needs at that point, at that time, to move to the next level, and for us a lot of that was we needed data scientists early on to build the internal software platform that enabled us to provide the services that we provided in a way that translated, both visually and from an informational perspective, to our customers.
Speaker 1:Right I, this is where you have to trust a bit of your instinct in hiring a role that you don't specifically do yourself and do well. So how do you interview a data scientist? How do you evaluate their work in a way that gives you an understanding of whether they're competent or not not? And then, when they join the team, how do you make sure you're managing them in a way that both stimulates them and gives them enough care to feel understood, heard and productive? Those two things, I think, are the cornerstones of building the team knowing where your competencies are less proficient and augmenting with those, and then really prioritizing what the organization needs at that time to meet your next growth objective company called Big Machines, which was Goddard Abel's first company that he founded.
Speaker 3:You might recognize Goddard from the CEO of.
Speaker 3:G2, the software review company, and so I remember when I was hired by Goddard, he would say you know, we've been building this business and every time I hire someone, I'm hiring somebody better than myself and better than the last, and it was something to that effect. Right, he was always like I just want to keep up leveling. We're just going to keep getting better. You know, I'm not the best person we're going to have on board, and I think that awareness that I'm not going to be an expert at everything and so I need to hire people that are the experts. I think that's great and it's interesting because I also talked to some founders that will say I actually want to do the job before I hire for the role, so I understand what the job is and so I can do it. And I think some things you can do that with, but others, like data science, if you didn't study it, you're never going to be an amazing data scientist, so just go find one.
Speaker 1:And if you ever dabbled in data science, there's a lot of cleansing of tables. When you are knee deep in a table of columns and rows, that can make your eyes blur. You do need a specific type of person that has the discipline to be able to do that, and I agree, I believe you need to have an understanding of the role. But being able to do it adds unnecessary boundaries around what I can hire. Having worked in enterprise organizations, the specificity in skill sets is so broad and varied to think that you'd be able to do it yourself is a little naive. Yeah, that's how I interpret it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it can be challenging for sure. I'm curious within your team. One of the conversations I've been having with someone recently is I think two years ago. Everybody recognizes that we saw that investors were putting lots of money into companies and they were hiring ahead of probably what they needed to, and now we've seen a lot of layoffs because of that. I'm curious as you're growing your business, how do you get that right? How do you know that you're hiring people that you can likely keep? I know there's no guarantees, right, your marketplace could go sideways and you've got to make some hard decisions. But if you're scaling appropriately in a market that's working, how do you know when you can keep hiring?
Speaker 1:There's a straight line answer to revenue and cashflow, but I do think there's some alignment to what type of company you are and if you are funded. I have been in meetings where I've had companies that were funded back by VCs and they said if I wanted the money in the bank, I would have put it in the bank, spend the money Even when you're trying to sort of manage burn rate and being considerate on your hires when you need to. Sometimes there are other external factors that are forcing your hand to hire more quickly than you'd like. I'm giving entrepreneurs a little bit of a pass there because I've been in those meetings and sometimes you just hire because that's what you're supposed to do when you get venture capital money to try to scale and grow as quickly as you can. That said, I think the prudent thing to do is go back to those metrics revenue, cash flow and a really good handle on pipeline. When you understand your sales metrics, your conversion rates and you understand all of those dimensions that lead to revenue well enough, you can make projections and then hire in advance to actually be able to support the growth. That has been for me, especially given my background in sales and marketing, that understanding of the dynamics of the pipeline. Every company has unique dynamics.
Speaker 1:I worked for a company and one of the most interesting things about the pipeline was we found over time that only 8% what we shipped was actually turned on in the first 12 months. It's a very interesting number, right. If you shipped 100 widgets, eight would be used. Now, over time, all of the inventory got used. But when you're thinking about the impact to revenue, understanding that was really critical to understanding the impact to shorter term revenue and being able to make the right call on hires and hiring. And in a small company, you'll know this, you can always use more staff. It's just people. You know there's so much to do. People wear multiple hats. But, being considerate, to back to our original point, right, what is going to make the most impact to your growth objectives and how are you going to afford it in the long term are key.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think those two things are important. I think the revenue thing, being able to track that, that being a straight line, but then knowing, all right, so if I'm going to hire one more person, what's the impact that they're going to have on revenue and the growth of the business? I've seen so many times. I can't even think of a business that I was in. We would close a deal and everybody knew like, oh, we just closed this deal and we know how much revenue. There is Time to go talk to the CEO and get a piece of that, like I want to hire this, I want to buy this. There were some interesting decisions that were made around how you're lobbying for that and I think you've got to really have a solid plan in place of understanding impact on those decisions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think some products, some services and solutions are a little more straightforward. Right, you're a SaaS product, you sell licenses, you know what it's. Sometimes you even get the license, the fees, in advance Awesome, right. And then you can allocate differently. But, to your point, every organization is going to be vying for a little piece of that. You look at implementation and customer success they're going to be vying for a little piece of that. You look at implementation and customer success they're going to be the first ones hit by this big deal that you closed. They're like ah, how are we going to do this? We need more people. And you just roll that through the rest of the organization.
Speaker 1:As a leader, you really do have to step back and say what aligns with my growth objectives, what's going to make the most impact in the organization to meet those objectives? And that's where you need to hire. Sometimes it's all hands on deck. Sometimes you've got a smaller team and everybody's got to do a little bit to assist when the whale comes in. I've had CEOs in my past who have done what I'll consider the grunt work just to get things done, because you had deadlines to meet and you had customers expecting things and everybody's hands had to be getting dirty at that point. Yeah for sure.
Speaker 3:So one more thing that I want to talk about, then, is now let's say you've got your team, you're building your team and things are growing and you can't be the only one leading the shift. You've got to start to build your bench of leaders leading the shift. You've got to start to build your bench of leaders. How have you gone about that, or how are you going about it currently, to identify and grow those leaders?
Speaker 1:So, not unlike most of us, a trusted network and personal references really do go a long way, right? Oftentimes you've got to go to the market to find people. A strong interviewing skill set is key in really being able to identify the qualities in an individual that work. Now there's the hard skills right, you know I'll go back to sales and marketing. You've sold things right. But then there's soft skills. There's communication skills, there's empathy right, and, as a salesperson, these are things that I've learned over time are very important in the sales process.
Speaker 1:There's discipline to sales and how you interview and qualify for that. Especially when you're talking about a leader, you have to be able to identify the qualities of that leader that are not only going to fit your culture, because every company has a bit of a unique culture. If there's a mismatch of culture fit, I don't care how good of a resource you are. You're going to be challenged being able to ensure that there's enough care and feeding early on to develop the resource to be independent and competent, because anybody that's going to come in is going to need a decent amount of exposure and support to be able to do the right things in the job. Ideally for me, when you get that flywheel going. Developing internal is the best way to go. I mean, build a bench, train and support, enable, from a sales perspective, enablement, enablement, enablement, training and development continually. That really does then help to build a bench. That then you can avoid I've got to spend a few months ramping up on the people, the processes and the tools that you're using.
Speaker 1:For a small company you don't have the bench. You generally have to go outside being able to step back in the same way that I talked about earlier. Companies. Understand the culture and the geographies that they're going into. Understand what you want from the role, what you need in the roles that you're hiring, and be very simplistic in writing those characteristics down. Everybody's got ChatGPT these days. Go to ChatGPT and ask you know how should I evaluate this characteristic in an interview? And ask the questions, and that's really the best way I've found to do it.
Speaker 3:Great and I really like what you talk about with developing internal talent. I think that's where you know they're going to fit. They've got the background that they need to continue to scale. So when you can do that, it's so critical. So one final question you know what's your vision for USA Launching Pad as you grow into the future.
Speaker 1:There's the ultimate goal of bi-directional competency. We've built great partnerships with global companies to provide our framework and our methodology not only to foreign companies coming into the US, but any company going to any new geography, and so the tech market is huge. There's a lot of focus in multiple countries around the world to support their startup ecosystem, and our ultimate goal is to be engaged globally, doing exactly what we do today for foreign companies entering the US.
Speaker 3:Great Well, matt. Thank you so much for joining me. If people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way?
Speaker 1:You can find me on LinkedIn, Matt DeMarcico, or info at usalaunchingpadcom. I'll make sure I engage, and thank you, justin, this is always a pleasure doing these types of things.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I enjoyed the conversation. Bye now.