Episode 129: Tap Into the Talent of the World, with Mark Sears

After doing tech startups in Canada and the US for about 10 years, Mark Sears lived in Nepal for 6 years building CloudFactory. He is driven daily by his passion for technology, business and people. Mark lived in Durham, NC the last 3 years to help grow sales and marketing and now is building out CloudFactory’s global HQ in Reading, UK. Mark’s better half is his beautiful wife Laurel and together they have a lot of fun seeing the world through the eyes of their children Noah and Maya.

He started his career as a software developer with Sun Microsystems before finding his groove in the world of startups. Moving into technology evangelism and product management roles he helped a 5 person startup grow to 130 employees across 4 international offices after raising $48 million in venture capital. Mark then raised angel investment, launched and managed his own startup company for 6 years before coming to Nepal and starting the CloudFactory adventure.

It isn’t enough to have full-time employees that live in the same location you do anymore. You need to have access to the best talent in the world, and it’s highly likely that those people don’t live within 30 miles of your office.

Luckily, there are a lot of options to fill out your business. When you have an important project come along that requires a specific skill to complete, you don’t need to hire a full-time employee to do that work. You can work with a consultant, contractor, freelancer, agency, or a variety of other options to help get that work done, and they don’t have to live in the same city you do.

This idea of how to supplement your business using outside talent is one of the topics I talked to my guest Mark Sears about.

Mark loves this strategy because it allows your in-house team to focus on the core parts of your business while allowing you to leverage on-demand talent at a high level with really expensive experts but only using them when you need them.

Mark says leveraging talent in this way is going to become critical in the years to come.

“It’s a huge competitive advantage when you can learn to tap into the talent of the world…when you can build a culture that allows people to really interact and collaborate with your organization no matter where they sit in the world. Those are competitive advantages that are pretty much going to be table steaks in the coming years.”

So, next time you’re thinking about hiring someone new because you need some extra capacity, think “how would I do this if I’d never done it any other way before.” If you typically resort to hiring full-time people in your area, that’s not going to suit you well in the long run.

That was one of the nuggets from my conversation with Mark Sears that stood out the most to me. Please let me know which stood out the most to you.

Thank you for listening today! I appreciate your time so very much.

Ways to contact Mark: Website: www.cloudfactory.com Twitter: @marktsears Email: mark@cloudfactory.com