From vision to reality: Building and scaling an international agency with Ritam Gandhi, Founder of Studio Graphene

In this podcast episode, Ritam Gandhi, the founder of Studio Graphene, a digital product agency with a unique hybrid model of in-house and outsourced teams, shares his decade-long journey of growing an international agency. The discussion covers various aspects of entrepreneurship, leadership, and team building. 

Hosted by Yiuwin Tsang, the episode provides valuable insights into the process of building and scaling an international agency and how you might go about navigating challenges and fostering a culture of innovation and excellence.

Listen to the episode now to learn more about: 

 - The importance of alignment, passion, and face-to-face interactions in a global work environment
 - The significance of human connection in fostering creativity and building effective working relationships
 - Why making leaders available for impromptu conversations is crucial for maintaining a sense of togetherness and empathy among team members
 - How to build a leadership team and trust others to handle tasks
 - The importance of hiring for attitude and alignment with company values over skill set
 - The importance of creating a sense of belonging among team members across different locations

About Ritam Gandhi

For a decade, Ritam worked as a consultant for the likes of Accenture and Bank of America and Merrill Lynch before, in 2014, going on to found Studio Graphene – an agency that specialises in developing blank canvas tech products. 

Working with many startups alongside some more established companies, the London-based agency plans, designs and builds amazing tech products for its clients. What’s more, Ritam and the team also use their experience and expertise to help leaders grow their businesses.

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 this week's episode of The Beautiful Business Podcast brought to you by The Wow Company. I'm your host, Yiuwin Tsang, and this week, we are joined by Ritam Gandhi. Ritam worked as a consultant for a decade for the likes of Accenture and Bank of America, Merrill Lynch. Going on to found Studio Graphene, a firm that specialises in developing amazing blank canvas tech products, working with many startups alongside innovation teams and more established companies. The London based agency plans, designs and builds outstanding tech products for its clients. What's more Ritam and the team also use their experience and expertise to help leaders grow that business from ideation to launch and beyond. In this episode, written when I talk about the challenges of growing a global agency, how to balance a cost, speed and quality equation, and how to achieve cultural alignment internationally. Let's jump straight in.

Yiuwin Tsang  

Let's talk about growing an international agency in order to bring ideas to life. Do you want to give us a bit of background to your journey so far? With Studio Graphene? How did it start? And where are you now?

Ritam Gandhi  

So started about nine and a half years ago. And when I started working in Studio Graphene I still joked I was in another job. It was a side hustle in effects. And I was contracting and using those earnings from contracting work to fund payroll for the first couple of folks at Studio Graphene, who are ironically still here. So we always joke that technically they were employed by Studio Graphene before I realised, and the concept then was really wanted to be involved in helping entrepreneurs in the digital ecosystem and, and helping them bring their ideas to life. The premise there in terms of what drove that mission was we thought, there's a lot of opportunity for technology to be a force for good for digital innovation to be a force for good but talking about it and you know, doing strategy and PowerPoint around it didn't really solve the you needed to implement it, you needed products to make people's lives better. And generally, everyone I spoke to, who spoke about their ideas, but didn't do something about them said that it was either because they were scared of you know, taking the leap of faith and working on it. Or it was too expensive. You know, putting together a team employing a cross interdisciplinary team or hiring a nice agency was really expensive, or they were worried about the time it would take and the world moves so fast. And you know, if they did it on the side and spent a couple of years on the business, what if that needed disappeared, or someone else was working on it. And I thought, I really want to try and address those three challenges and build a team that makes it less scary for founders to mark on that mission makes it less expensive, and makes it a speedy. So that was where Studio Graphene started. You're fully London based. The premise was we will sit in London and we will be an interdisciplinary team, they will take accountability end to end for bringing your idea to life. So you can be a founder, you don't need to worry about additional product, you don't need to worry about defining requirements or creating the designs or doing engineering or deploying it. And fast forward a little bit on the journey, we realised that I remember that, you know, I come from a professional services background. So it worked at Accenture, capital, etc. And, you know, there is a subtle bit or maybe not so subtle, actually, you're taught that, you know, you need to find clients or money to pay for professional services, and working and targeting startup, early stage startup founders that goes against that advice. So there's definitely very challenging commercially. And what we realised very quickly was doing engineering work sitting in central London and competing with engineering work being done offshore nearshore whatever terminology you want to use, but basically in other countries where engineers are paid less than they paid in London, hence companies can charge less for it was really challenging. So we realised it wasn't scalable, working with startups who were conscious about how much they were paying for the work and sit in central London, two were divergent. So we started subcontracting some of the work to Eastern Europe to India, etc, predominantly to India with a very specific outsource provider that we partnered with. And over time, we realised that the cost and quality balance wasn't as good as we wanted. Essentially, the quality suffered by not having an in house I think is fair to say. And so we would bring in some of the work back in house and London and realise, well, the cost equation wasn't working. And I think we're working with startups and essentially a product agency for startups was we really had to work hard to achieve that cost and quality equation and the balance so you know, central London too expensive, but we could get the quality right, low cost location outsourced, cheaper, but couldn't get the quality right. And what we started to develop was this idea of a hybrid model where we realised a that things needed to be done in London, such as product management and design Because you need a lot of contextual knowledge, and B, we realised that engineering needed to be in house, but in a low cost location and bring that together. Sounds really simple. Except it wasn't. And it's taken us many years. So we started on this particular journey of kind of an in house international team about five and a half, six years ago, maybe now, and very gradually, most of that growth has come in the last three years. And it's been really challenging. And you know, I know we'll speak about it a bit more. But fast forward to where we are now, about 130 people in four locations. We have clients that are startups, corporates, ambitious businesses, professional services, partnerships, where we're helping them deliver high quality output for low cost. And recently, we've also started our own ventures. You know, we've talked about telson in the past, and we've talked about some of our own products. But we also embarking on our own ventures and reinvesting essentially the vast majority of our profits back into our business. 

Yiuwin Tsang  

So exciting. And goodness me what a journey you've been on Ritam with, and there's a few, there's lots to unpack in that actually. So I guess the process that you went through, first of all, I love the story that you use, your kind of contracting and revenue to start ups Studio Graphene as a side hustle. I think lots of founders kind of do it that way. And interestingly, had a conversation with a relatively early stage agency where they were effectively doing freelance work, we're building it through their limited company, in order to kind of build you know, that capital reserve and to kind of go that kind of way. But I've got all these questions that are kind of popping in my head first ones first, though, your background was working for the likes of Accenture, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and forgive me for saying this, but it's quite a jump from working in corporate, you know, in the financial services world into startups and not only just stars, but also that kind of purpose driven element of startups almost like democratising the opportunity for entrepreneurialism, you know, getting rid of some of those big barriers that lots of entrepreneurs kind of face, one of them being cost, the other one being, you know, expertise, so on and so forth. Where did that come from? How did you kind of bridge that? What happened there?

Ritam Gandhi  

I'm not sure if I've still bridged it. But it's, I think I went firstly, I was passionate about what we do at Studio Graphene and what we were doing, I'll be candid, and I'll say that I wasn't passionate, necessarily about what I was doing within large banks or large consultancies. But at the same time, I really respected everyone I worked with. And I think the big benefit of spending roughly a decade in working at very large institutions was that it did instil a sense of discipline and work ethic within me, it did give me exposure to understand how large scale organisation works, it did ensure that I was surrounded by very smart people who I could learn from. So it gave me a very strong foundation. But when I started serigraphy, I unpacked it by going back to first principles on everything. So I said, I will question everything, I will not do this, just because of central did it this way, or Bank of America did it this way? And I will just question it logically. And so it didn't mean that I went to the other extreme, I built an extremely autonomous organisation with practically no processes. And you know, you start to realise as you grow, you find a middle ground and a different stage, you'll find the middle ground, but it was two extremes, it was very different delivering for startups. Right. So I'll give you the classic story when I started to, you know, part of kind of large scale professional services delivery is that you ask your clients, what's your priority, but we speed, cost, or quality, right, pick one. And I remember sitting across the startup founder, you know, using my professional services, training pedigree, I was like, so let's start with what's your priority? Is it speed, quality, or cost? And the founder looked at me blank faced? And was that trick question? Obviously, all three, all three are equal priority, and you have to achieve all three. And I think that was a real wake up call for me. And we have really focused on all three. 

Yiuwin Tsang  

Fabulous, and that journey of focusing on those three things you mentioned, when you start off with the outsource partner, in order to kind of balance the cost part of that equation. But then you quickly discovered that the quality part of that equation was harder to maintain. What were the signals? And what were the warning signs that you spotted? That motivated you to look at this hybrid model or to pursue the hybrid model?

Ritam Gandhi  

I realised while it comes from a sense of control, and being able to control things, quality comes from a sense of alignment, and also quality comes from a sense of passion? Right? And so having, working with an in house team, you know, we can go into payroll versus contract transaction, but essentially working with a consistent team that allows you a sense of control. It also allows you to build a sense of alignment, because you're bringing them on board and they're on the job. Any. And you can also align them alongside your mission and what you stand for what you're trying to do and why you're trying to do it, which allows for passion, right? So it makes them want to deliver quality. And I think like a classic example of control is, if we recruit ourselves, rather than outsource the work, we can choose works on it, and we can ensure they're aligned with the quality standards with our values, etc. So that's an example of control, right? I can go on and on about like our systems and processes alignment as an example, we all travelled quite a lot before COVID. And we try to meet each other because you then create alignment between the teams, right? And passion comes from really celebrating our wins together explaining what was good and what was not good together. So I think it's that whole idea of feeling like one team, even in different geographic locations and behaving like one team, rather than feeling like they're sweeter graphene and another company through which we get the work done.

Yiuwin Tsang  

And I guess having that word control, I guess, is the most accurate, but it's having a connection, I guess, in terms of the people in the recruitment process. And I guess the communication, and the messaging, the way that you engage with the teams is that consistency across the whole team, irrespective of the location.

Ritam Gandhi  

Yeah. And, you know, we live in a world where a lot of us work from home, work remotely, etc. But I believe that relationships are built face to face, right, I think you can then communicate virtually. But out of all the relationships that you have, I'm sure the ones that have been accelerated in terms of how close you feel to a person is because you've had a face to face interaction once in your life, right? And so we facilitated that travel. So people met face to face and these were our learnings, right? We didn't know this. But someone went and met the engineers they were working with and came back and he saw their project was going really well. And they were already happy. And so we were like, Oh, this matters. So we were learning things as we were going along with it. But yeah, absolutely. I think that sense of togetherness is so important, right? Because it creates empathy for each other.

Yiuwin Tsang  

And you continued this facilitation of travel and face to face host COVID as well as pre COVID.

Ritam Gandhi  

Absolutely. So I think the vast majority of our Senior Product Managers went to Delhi in April, after an overnight flight, they went out that night with the whole team. And yeah, so COVID, in some ways, was a bit of a spanner in the works, I guess, for a couple of years I've travelled is limited, I think, you know, when COVID had, I can't remember the exact numbers. But we had some, like 13 or 14 flights that were active and booked, we had four or five people who weren't in there, kind of country of origin, out of 60. So we will pick interesting travel, it's taken a while to get back into the swing of things in terms of travel. But yeah, we are doing it, it really helped because that we managed to meet three COVID. So I'm glad a lot of that had gotten out of the way. And I think it carried us through COVID. But yeah, that was a challenge. Definitely.

Yiuwin Tsang  

I bet. It's really interesting that you've seen the value of pre COVID, lots of people didn't really realise it until the kind of post COVID kind of well. But the interesting thing that came out of COVID was, as you say, with remote working with zoom in, in all the other tools enable kind of distance connections, that human connection is still so important. And it's impossible to replicate. I mean, you know, it's like you and I, you know, whenever I'm popping up in London, or drop a quick message to use it, see if you're around because it's obviously there's pleasure of each other company. But there is something which you can't replicate through a video screen as much as zoom. And these tools will make the world a little bit smaller, there's still a barrier. 

Ritam Gandhi  

They say 80% of communication is body language, right? So another stat that you might love is that out of 130 people in Studio Graphene, I am the only person who comes in five days a week, there's no one else, all 129 people come in, far less so. And the reason is, I want to make myself available. I would argue it's also partially that I have a one and a half year old son and I live in a small Central African apartment. But I want to be available. I want to be able to have you know, just this morning, I've had three or four random conversations that have triggered things. Because I have, you know, Thursdays tend to be popular days when people come in. And so I do think we've learned that we can be in different geographies, we can be in different places. We don't need to be in five days a week, but never meeting each other. It's also not good.

Yiuwin Tsang  

Yeah, I guess very interesting return from your perspective, I guess from a leadership perspective of a big organisation 130 Having that availability and being accessible is important not just for you, I guess just in terms of getting inspiration and seeing how people are doing and getting these ideas and getting that kind of buzz but also for them as well for your team as well to know that they can bump into things speak with you and you know that the opposite was you and I that we were speaking before where you lose that spontaneity through zoom calls and things like this, you know, you might have a spot for an idea, or just that little kind of like flick Because well wonder, you know, what if we did this? And then you think, right, let's see when return was available? Yeah, make sure we accept by the time it comes around, it's like, all this stuff has happened. And this sudden the other side return, don't worry about it. Yeah. So I think it's interesting, if you can kind of almost build in, I think, five days a week is pretty hardcore. But for other, you know, listeners who run this types of organisations, you know, don't forget about making yourself available, I guess, is the key. 

Ritam Gandhi  

So we have folks who I won't see for a couple of months. And I think one of the things we've done to address exactly what you've described around, you know, bit of relationship building and conversations brainstorming, is we've invested in socials, right. So there are folks who never see each other in a working environment, but we'll come to the social. So every couple of months, we'll do a social and there'll be nice event, we'll go for a nice meal, or we'll do something fun, like virtual clay pigeon shooting something. And I think that's really helped. Because you don't know when you have an idea, you don't know when something pops up in your head, I should have asked this person about this. But you need to have that line of communication. And I think for me personally, on that journey, I've realised that I've started to lose a line of communication with people who are newer and a bit, you know, to be candid, a bit more junior, because if someone's, you know, joins, and they report to me, I'll speak to them. If someone's been around for a long time to the rest of their seniority, I'll speak to them or they will speak to me, right, because they've had that they feel it's an open line of communication because of the past. But I do really feel a bit disconnected personally, from someone who is new and doesn't report to me, and I'm sure they do, too. And it's probably a personal goal that I have to figure it out, because we're still not 1000 people, right? We're not 1000s of people, everyone should feel comfortable speaking to me, I should feel comfortable speaking to everyone, and we should have some sort of line of communication. But I have struggled, as we've grown during that, especially in COVID, I spend, even now I spend most of 95% of my time in London. So you know, the team here has a lot of access to me, and I speak to them a lot. But in Portugal, in India, and here or in Switzerland, it's like, I've had very limited interaction so that I really want to figure it out. 

Yiuwin Tsang  

And there's no easy answer to that, though, I guess. But certainly from, as you say, without hopping on a plane and getting out there, it's harder to do. And I guess was one of the challenges of growing an international agency that is going to get a head round, but they still give yourself to harder time to eat. I mean, they consider you one of the most approachable people that I know. And the fact that it's on your mind, I think says a lot, you know that you realise that it's important, and you are trying to work out how you can crack that nut but you can't. You know, as I said, like any good problem, there's no easy solutions is that, you know, there is no such thing.

Ritam Gandhi  

I do think the solution is as you said, jump on a plane spend. And I think the reason I see that solution in sight. And I think one of the hardest things is growing, growing internationally, growing bootstrapped. So as an example, it wasn't like I could create a management team and say, he folks, you're the managers, and I can spend time on making sure I'm spending more time and being more accessible to the rest of the team. Because I didn't have the funding for it, right. So until a few years ago, we didn't have someone who was in charge of finance, we didn't have someone who was in charge of those, we didn't have someone in charge of marketing, we didn't have him someone in charge of CES, it was all kind of me, I guess, to some extent, and gradually, you know, we first got marketing covered, then we got finance covered. We got, you know, CES and then we got growth. And and it's been I think, as a leadership team comes together, it is giving me a bit more bandwidth to focus on being approachable. So it's, I think my learning is that you have to be patient, you can't tackle everything concurrently, you have to look at what's the most pressing area and also look at your ability and capacity to tackle IQ, but different things at different stages. 

Yiuwin Tsang  

Yeah, it's a similar sort of story. We speak to lots of founders where they go through this kind of growth, and they gradually let go of, you know, LEGO, The Lego is what it's often said, Yeah, you know, let other people play with your Lego and bring other people in to create these things, build these things, and to see what they can do, as you say, freeing up your kind of bandwidth so you can go off and do the other things. 

Ritam Gandhi  

No, you're absolutely right. Right. It is your baby at the end of the day. And it's been really interesting letting go internationally again, because you're not always in front of someone to discuss the thing you're letting go of. And I feel like the three things you let go of one is poor, find relationships, like go people relationships, and let go of processor work that you're doing. The easiest I found is a third, I found really easy to let go of work, right. I don't think there are tasks I would do every day that since we've had RFT on board. I have not done them once in years, right? So I find it very easy to let go and trust people and step away. So that's been easy. I think clients I think the better off if they don't have to come to me because You know, sometimes I might not pick up the phone as quickly because I'm in a meeting, etc. But I feel like, that's probably a bit more mutual. And also definitely, from a client perspective, you know, they're used to having worked with me when we were five people, you know, most of our work has come through referral to existing clients. So it's hard, right? It's just mutually hard. And I'd say maybe a little bit harder for the clients because they haven't been inside the business and seen the growth. The people side is where now I'm most keen to kind of go back in and because you know, we're a people business. So I want to understand what people feel what they want to work on, what they think their areas of improvements are. So that's definitely an agenda we're focusing on. Today. It is interesting, what you're letting go of, right?

Yiuwin Tsang  

 Yeah, it's very interesting. It sounds like you've gone from like, in a very close knit five people kind of team you on the team, and you know, you are the people. And he's gone, and you've grown at such a rate. And now you kind of come back to like, I need get back in again.

Ritam Gandhi  

I think you're absolutely right. That's a very good description. It's a very accurate description. Yeah, it's like, it is full circle, it's things have changed back in now.

Yiuwin Tsang  

So interesting. I just want to go back to I guess, your journey to getting up to 130. And I sent to you in the notes, you know, we've known each other for a long while, I really do admire your logic, or the way that your brain works. And the way that you kind of verbalise your thinking is fabulous. And then when you commit to something, you go for it. But when you grow, there's always going to be a bit of risk a bit of risk taking. And I guess being able to measure means that you can kind of like make a calculation on that risk. But what were those kind of points of your journey that stand out for you a time where you thought, Okay, I need to make a decision here, or we need to expand or we need to pull back or whatever it is, were there any kind of key points for you in terms of growing that headcount?

Ritam Gandhi  

Yeah, I think, look, I think I have to make risky decisions every week. And there are a few things that determine what risk I can take and what risk I can't take. So when I started the business, you know, some of before actually took the leap of faith and are starting, someone said, you know, you're free to fail. And that really helped me and I think, you know, the fact that I've had a lot of stakeholders supporting me, whether it's a team, etc, who supported and given me the authority almost to make mistakes has helped. But I think growth and innovation without risk is impossible. So you have to take risks. And I think what I have preferred doing is taking small bit frequent risks rather than big, bold, irreversible risks. So that's example even the way I sort of transitioned to going full time within Xero Rafi was I was contracting five days a week when we got our first hire and started them and four days a week, I mean, three days a week that I mean, two days a week, that one, and then I was I think it took me a year to transition over a year, right? I was like, okay, I can I'm doing this, then I was half a day away, and contracting, right. So but everything we do, we kind of we try and take smaller risks. And the big thing I've realised around risk is it's you have a hypothesis, right? So you say that it's a bit like building products, you say, if I build this feature, users will use it and they find it useful. You want to in as lower cost, and as a shorter timeframe, prove or disprove that hypothesis. And so that's kind of how we handle our decision making is through constant validation is doing this Good Will the team wanted. The one area that I'm very conscious of is the hardest area, which I find Taking risk is around people and anything that might jeopardise them, right. But everything else I find very easy to take risks around. So that's my only kind of struggle, sometimes in terms of risk in terms of how it impacts the team. But a lot of other things, you know, I really believe in risk, I think you can't grow. And the only thing other than that, that I try and constantly do is what can we do to mitigate that risk by actively but aside from that very low risk, and especially so 

Yiuwin Tsang  

That's got to be how you do it with time. And clearly the formula is working 130 international company, you know, running your own kind of investments as well and reinvesting back into the business. It's a formula, which is clearly paying dividends. You mentioned that a lot of the growth in terms of the team growth has come in the last three years. What's driven that what's kind of like prompted or is this a kind of tipped you into making the decisions to you know, press on the higher button?

Ritam Gandhi  

Yeah, I think we obviously think of product market fit in the startup community in a digital ecosystem. But there is also services market fit, right. I think there's products and services, many ways of similar things, you're providing utility to a customer and the capability to provide end to end ownership of digital product delivery from Product Management design through to engineering to a high standard at a sensible cost at sensible speed. grew a lot as the market grew in the demand and market for that grew and during COVID So you know, 2021 2020, maybe even a bit in 2020. So we've seen spurts Right? And, but really it's been that services market fit or product market fit around, providing that interdisciplinary team and being able to really deliver on an outcome, end to end take accountability. So not to say that we're just engineering product, or just design is the end to NPS. And once we got that, really, we could demonstrate that and we had credentials to demonstrate it. That's what's led to a lot of growth and a lot of our growth, we can it hasn't been on the engineering side, right? Because that's where the depth of delivery is. So that's been a big area of growth. But it's that realisation that answering the question, right at the beginning for a client, which is what your priority is, speed, quality, or cost, all three is being able to really optimise for that that's what's led to the growth of yours. 

Yiuwin Tsang  

And in terms of planning that in terms of building the team and recruiting the team, we talked about how important it is to own that kind of recruitment process, know the quality that you're bringing in the people that you're bringing in and the human side of it as well, that in itself takes time, especially if you're going to do it diligently. And you have high standards as well. How did you approach that kind of chicken and egg kind of problem? So you've got the demand, you build the team? Or do you build the team in expectation of the demand? I mean, how did you kind of work it? 

Ritam Gandhi  

Yeah, so there is a little bit of build a team and expectation of demand and seeing the demand. But I did have two challenges, the demand also goes downwards. So beginning of 2023, end of 2022, you know, maybe 30%. So roughly 35 People interior graphene had no client work. But we hung on we said, you know, as long as you perform, as long as you're committed, we will be committed to you. So once we have someone who's good, and has, I wouldn't even say the right skill set, but the right attitude, more so than skill set, we as a business are very committed to them in return. So that's one thing. One is I think retention is really important, and being committed, that addresses recruitment in some ways. But then recruiting has been interesting with early days, I interviewed everyone, I hired everyone. But obviously as we scaled I couldn't do it. And I didn't want to do it because it went against me having this autonomy principle, right. So I don't want to say Oh, I have to prove every hire etc. There are many people who have joined who have never met before they've joined. But I think if you hire the right people, and you make them realise what is important to you, then they hire the right people subsequently, and they will make mistakes. And as we die and you get it wrong, and you move on. So you know, generally I found NCFE either the person is joins and we all have knowledge, including the person is Miss hire, and it's very quick exit or it's the here for a few years, right? So it tends to go one of two extremes. Like I think my biggest learning around hiring and growth is being very clear about what's important to you. A job description can be two pages long, but there are probably three or four things that are really important to you, right. And being clear about those principles and values. And aligning on those is more important than skill set. I think people can pick up scale. And it's been aligning more on principles, values, attitude and skill set. That's been the big change for us. 

Yiuwin Tsang  

I remember years and years ago, I used to rent a flat in Bristol and Clifton and the guy that owned the flat used to work for John charcoal.com, which is a big mortgage broker. He was probably the wealthiest man I've ever met really humble really lovely. But yeah, ridiculous. Ridiculous. And I've rented the basement of his heart he bought like all the flats of this massive townhouse amazing, but back in one house, but he was lovely. And I remember chatting with him before and he's and it was just as I was kind of getting onto the management ladder of things. And he said to me, when you fire when you build us talk about the Ask principle and his attitude, skills and knowledge. And he said there was a secret a hiding behind the first one called application as well. But he said that, you know, when it comes to skills and knowledge, you can train that, you know, you can train that in. But what's really hard to train in is somebody's attitude. And how well they apply themselves is really difficult to kind of train in. So hiring on attitude, hiring on application, Trumps that kind of skills and knowledge bit but it's not easy, though, is it? You know, it's as they say it's hard. You measure that? How do you measure someone's attitude? It's not an easy characteristic to measure against. 

Ritam Gandhi  

Yeah, but it's probably the thing that you feel strongest about as a hunch as a Yeah, it's really interesting where like, as a team, we rarely have misalignment on let's say three or four of us have interviewed someone we rarely miss align on judging their attitudes will rarely say I disagree with you in terms of your judgement or this person's attitude. Yeah, that's completely subjective. 

Yiuwin Tsang  

But they're in I think, lies, you know, key answer there, in that you've got to come across a wonderful phrase of the day, we can expand your cognitive network, have other people there who can also feed into that decision. So it's not just on you to kind of like pick up on the hunch and all the rest of it is to kind of get other people in on that decision as well, which really helps. Absolutely. I've got one more kind of a more practical kind of question, I guess, just in terms of the International setup of studio graphene. So for listeners who are looking at, you know, international offices or you know, having teams overseas and things like this, what have you found has worked structurally for having such a dispersed team? 

Ritam Gandhi  

I think one is a certain level of scale does help. Because it creates, you know, it's very hard to have two or three people in another location whilst you have 25 people in one location, right, you want to have a certain scale is it allows you to create a structure, it allows you to have a lead, etc. But I think structurally, the most important thing is to facilitate integration, right? And right from the day zero, so to travel through columns, through teams working together on projects, I think that's really important. I think the other big lesson for me that I've learned is having specialists in those regions advise you on the legal compliance accounting framework, etc. It's, you know, it's a very easy thing that's overlooked, you think, hey, how does it matter? But, you know, one of the things I've learned is we're actually quite lucky that in the UK, you know, by a long stretch, the UK from a compliance and ease of doing business compared to Portugal in India is much, much, much easier, right? So I think structurally getting that right. And I think, structurally not getting that right on day zero. For me, I've made my team life a little harder, and I think be much more proactive, structurally, just getting it right, set up your company correctly, make sure your compliance is perfect, make sure and the thing is we did all of this. So we dotted the I's and cross the T's. But I think we could have done it more efficiently had I not sort of not gone through without the right advice at the beginning. So I think I think that's important structurally. Yeah. Other than that, at a practical level, if I had to just give one takeaway to make everyone feel integrated, it's not something that you know, on paper, it's just a feeling like make everyone feel like they're part of one thing rather than two or three different things based on the number of locations you have.

Yiuwin Tsang  

A big thank you to Ritam Gandhi from Studio Graphene for sharing his knowledge and experiences. And a big thank you to you, our listeners for listening to this week's Beautiful Business Podcast.