EP044 - How to manage IT infrastructure for distributed teams with Carlos Escuita at GroWrk
About the episode
This episode focuses on the ever-present infrastructure that allows all of us to work remotely. Carlos Escuita, CEO of GroWrk, shares great insights on how to build a globally distributed team and keep them connected with a secured IT infrastructure. Carlos also shares his experience and his tips on building his company fully remotely.
About the guest
Carlos Escutia is the founder and CEO of GroWrk Remote, a dynamic SaaS platform automating IT equipment procurement and asset management for global teams. With an impressive track record in entrepreneurship and finance, Carlos co-founded CasaOne, an Accel-backed furniture rental tech company. He served as its Head of Business and Operations, raising over $80 million USD in funding. Additionally, he co-founded DG Energy Capital, a private equity fund driving sustainable energy initiatives in Latin America.
Prior to this, Carlos excelled as an Investment Officer at FIS and an Investment Banker at Wells Fargo Securities. He holds an MBA in Finance and Entrepreneurship from New York University Stern School of Business and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM). With his passion for innovation and a diverse skill set, Carlos is committed to empowering remote teams and revolutionizing the future of work.
Connect with Carlos on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
-
Welcome everyone. In today's episode, I have Carlos Escutia the CEO of Growrk with us, welcome Carlos.
Thank you Peter. Thank you very much for the invitation!
Appreciate for taking the time from sunny San Diego.
Happy to be here.
Thanks for being here. Give me a little bit of a background on what you do. How did you end up working remotely? And how did you end up founding Growrk? And what Growrk does in general? Just to give some perspective and context for the audience.
Absolutely. First of all, we do provide solutions for distributed teams. That's our focus. But we are also a fully distributed team. We are close to 100 people and over 20 countries. So it's been an interesting journey so far and we're happy to chat more about that. But effectively my journey into working in remote environment really started quite a few years ago. Before this, I was the co founder of another company called Casa One out from San Francisco, it was a furniture rental platform backed by excellent partners and a bunch of well known investors. And as we started scaling that company, it just made sense for us to hire engineers outside of there. We could find a similar technical level to engineer in India or Latin America. And so for us it was driven by that, Hey we have access to this talent. Let's just start building engineering hubs in those countries, right? And it was just a natural progression. It worked very well. In fact the reason why we started. Real work really was out of the insights that I gather from that experience were I actually struggled with these issues of procuring, delivering the equipment and managing the assets and the devices that those team members that were not in an office. So that's what we saw an opportunity and along that during that time, I just noticed that a lot of companies, technology companies were doing exactly the same thing as we were. So that was the early days of remote, so to speak. Obviously the pandemic arrived and accelerated all this trend that we have been seeing from years to months, right? And we find ourselves in today's world where there has been a fundamental shift in the way people and organizations perceive how they can get work done, right? And yeah we basically have been building solutions that enable organizations to manage their IT infrastructure at a global scale easily, we are part of the same ecosystem as multiple organizations today that are enabling them, making it a lot easier for any company to start global from day one and scale globally.
Most services providers or consultants they usually started during or after the pandemic when everything was like, I don't know, really steep step above on scale when it comes to remote work. Only some people started before that.
We were before. We were before the pandemic about a year before the pandemic. It was just crazy.
And you probably saw a lot of Bay Area startups and companies, tech companies who had also a even maybe a hybrid model, not even a remote model when they took their equipment and stuff at home. And they had to manage these assets as well. So you pretty much connected to that, right? Because everything and anything that happened probably happened first in the Bay Area.
That's correct. Yeah. My experience was really startups were embracing remote, right? Again, it was driven by cost, right? A excessive cost in the Bay Area. You want your runway to be extended as much as possible. You have to do what you have to do. And what really has accelerated access to the flexibility to do remote work is the tools, right? The tools that now enable you to communicate and coordinate workflows synchronously. And so I think they've been growing side to side as more technology improvements come out, more flexibility there is to manage those workflows remotely.
Totally. So what you are doing, is it more like a hardware question or is it more like a software question or both? Let me explain. What I mean is so usually we, and when everyone is talking about remote work or hybrid work, they usually talk about the software and the knowledge management documentation, collaboration, communication, and so forth and so that and only a few people talk about the hardware. Which is equally important because especially if your startup or enterprise it doesn't really matter the size if they are working in a, shall I put it in a more secure manner? So they can just throw around laptops and stuff. So I wouldn't say a big issue or a big problem, but it's an equally important topic. So what are your focus?
Yeah it's a critical component. It's equipment, but we do also software, right? And in reality, the issue that we're tackling here is that as you might expect with distributed work, the risk for Data breaches increases as well. Typically, whenever you were in a hub in a centralized location, everything was in one place. You can basically secure your set up firewalls and all types of security considerations to minimize. Those risks however, when everybody is working from everywhere, there are other considerations and other vulnerabilities that you need to be able to manage. And so Growrk is part of that solution. We provide a comprehensive solution. As a matter of fact, we provide equipment, procurement, asset management, endpoint management, security solutions, retrievals, all of that through an easy to use platform, right? And but the ultimate solution that we provide is precisely that: how do you enable organizations to operate in a secure, efficient environment, no matter where those endpoints are connected anywhere in the world?
Your customers coming with a pain point or they just or they just have no solution yet for any kind of procurement and item management or they burned themselves with the previous problem?
Yes. Oh, it depends. It depends on the type of organization. Normally younger companies, they're still trying to figure it out. They don't have a mobile device management solution in place. They don't have, they haven't even thought about this, a lot of companies really start handling this internally. They either procure equipment company owned equipment in the country where they're headquarter, and then they ship it out to the country where the new team members is joining. Or they have to find a vendor in any of the countries where they're hiring team members, right? And then they have to go through the process of managing procurement, delivering on time, troubleshooting, helpdesk, all the considerations that you normally, they would normally be a second thought in traditional office environments, because you had an IT team that was on site, basically handling any of the issues that may come up. When a team is fully distributed, you don't have that support, you don't have that infrastructure. And so that's exactly what we have been building over the last few years. It's a global infrastructure that enables an organization to provide the same or superior level of asset management and services that the team members might need to ensure that they minimize any downtime due to equipment delivery delay for troubleshooting, et cetera. And on top of that again, is the security management component, which is critical. As as an annotation skills. So all of those aspects of equipment management are managed through an easy to use platform.
It totally makes 100 percent sense why a larger organization or enterprise would do that because they are doing it anyway, by the way, the only difference right now is that people are working around the globe remotely sometimes, even if they are hybrid. But and FYI, most of the audience of this podcast is working in scale ups and medium sized businesses. And you're right, most of them, they don't even think about why this is so important. So why a company should think about investing into some kind of solution like that. And more importantly, when do you think it's The right moment. I wouldn't say like when they reach a hundred people or something, but something around that.
I know. The first thing is that there's a better way to do this, right? There are a lot of companies that have this bring your own device policy when they're just getting started and that works fine where you're just getting started, but there's going to come a point where you need to be compliant with some sort of security framework, like SOC2 or ISO. And you will realize that you have vulnerabilities and in order for you to be able to manage better your security risks, you have to provide equipment that is company owned, right? And so when you start working through that process, you'll realize what a headache that is, right? So it's very simple, really. What I would say is as soon as possible, just look into this. And the other thing, too, is that from a cost standpoint we've got into a point where the efficiencies are so high and the savings can be pretty evident, right? In terms of how much would you spend if you did this on your own or your team versus working with a service like ours, right? You would save time and money and headaches for sure. So as soon as possible that's the recommendation.
Totally. And let me share an experience that I had or like multiple times I had usually the point when these companies invest into solutions like this is when they have investment. Because by having a new investment or round or seed or whatever, usually the investors require some sort of compliance, any kind of certification around their product development and stuff. And the problem that I saw personally is that most companies trying to wing that on their own. So they DIY something together. Which means it's not, it's compliant, but it's pretty much a chaos in terms of operations. Plus obviously, for this is obvious, but they cannot save that amount of budget if they would turn into a service provider. So I get that. I understand it.
Yeah. And if you're a B2B business, you have no choice. Yes. Your customers will demand this one. So it's just, it's very simple.
You mentioned that you also have a team of almost a hundred people and you are having that team fully, remotely.
That's correct. Yeah.
Tell me about.
We're close to 20 countries. It's been a very interesting journey as you might expect. An organization that is scaling and scaling rapidly. The needs that you have changed as you scale in other words, when you first started the skill set and the profile of the team members were very unique, right? Many of your audience members listeners may know, you do everything, right? Everybody does everything. That's just how it works, right? As you start scaling, you need to start specializing. You need to start bringing different team members that will help you scale these processes and develop new processes that adapt to the new requirements of the organization and your customers. And so that's exactly where we find ourselves today where we're in the scaling mode where we're building this as specialized areas within the company and for us, it's been as many of the companies I have adopted and embraced remote work or hybrid work fully, or hybrid is really the access to talent, right? And to be frank, and this is something that I think needs to be discussed more often. The big driver of organizations is yes, of course, you will have access to a wider pool of talent, right? But there's a significant cost consideration, right? And so that is what drives a lot of the decisions. One of the reasons we at Growrk have a very disciplined how we manage our costs as we scale and we've been able to be very capital efficient by having a fully distributed team from day one and been profitably growing for more than a year. Unlike other organizations that decided to raise tens of millions of dollars, my experience already with my previous company raised close to 80 million. So I know the pressure that exists around raising that much capital. When you're just getting started and you're just trying to figure it out, product market fit, and sometimes it just ends up being a lot of waste, right? So I wanted to do things differently this time around and from day one we've been focused on running a profitable operation and that's exactly what we have been doing. We're not making those mistakes. We have the capital the business is generating. Fuels or growth. We've been very disciplined around that. And one of the key elements to help us get there is adopting the remote hiring.
Can you share some operational tips or examples on how you, because you are the CEO of the company, by the way so you obviously see everything. Around a hundred people and with 20 countries that's a lot. So even if most of your people are in or from South America or maybe some Asia or sometimes Europe because that's where the costs are lower compared to the U. S. And the Valley. So I'm just guessing, obviously. Even if most of the people are from there, so you don't really need to manage the time zones, but you still need to manage those people operational wise. So can you share some great tips or examples that audiences can learn from?
Yeah, absolutely. I think the way works best for an organization to operate 24 7. It's asynchronism, right? And in order for that to make work, to make that work. And I think everybody who's been running has experience managing remote teams knows this, but documentation, it's key, right? It's basically How you manage to get things done, how you manage to supervise, ensure that we're getting to we're hitting the targets. In the beginning it's a lot harder because you don't have any offices I do scale and as you know this, a lot of processes just need to continue evolving. Things that worked in the beginning will not work anymore. At the scale that we are and will not work in the future, even if they're working right now. So we have adopted that mindset. It's very important for us. And I share this to my team pretty often because there are a lot of team members that don't have the experience of working at a scale up, right? They might be coming from the likes of Amazon, Google, they are used to very clean kind of processes. Exactly. So what I tell them here is look, here, things are going to be changing fast every few months. So get used to that idea. It's fine. It's all right. It's you have to be comfortable with change. That's the first thing. The second and most important kind of critical aspect, I would say, of managing a remote team is that you realize that the supervision of such team members are usually does not exist here, right? And so what that means for us as a company is that first of all, me as the leader of this organization, I have to start from a point of trusting everybody about everything from day one, right? So in other words, I trust you a hundred percent, it's for you to lose that trust, right? But not the other way around, which is the big problem that you have these days when many years I'm trying to bring their team members an office. It's just a trust issue. That's a reality.
I'm nodding my head so loudly here, by the way.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So it's that, right? It's Hey, if I don't see you sitting in front of your laptop, I have no way of knowing whether you working or not, which is ridiculous, right? And so that in itself is a big problem. So the reality is that a company that is fully distributed like us it's just focused on results, right? Either you deliver, you don't, and communication, either you communicate your needs and whatever is required to get done, or you have issues around communication and we're more than happy to assist you. But there's a point where as I tell everybody at Growrk is every team member needs to be a driver, not a passenger, right? And so ultimately, this is decentralized leadership. You're a leader of your own. You are the CEO of your company. That's what I tell every single team member here. You own a piece of the company. So you look at it as that, right? You're the owner of this organization and as such, you have to operate it in that way, there's nobody supervising you. You're responsible for getting your job done and communicating with other team members if you need assistance to solve any roadblocks that may be presented, right? But that's the basis, I would say. It's documentation and decentralized leadership. That's really what it is, right? You trust your team members to do what's right to continue evolving the processes that you have. Obviously bringing capable Competent individuals on board is critical, and this is the same thing everywhere. I would argue that one of the advantages of a decentralized company versus an in office company is that there's really no room for you to hide inefficiencies, right? Here, you can see transparently whether you are getting the job done or you're doing whatever it takes to solve an issue, whether, and whereas in an office you may show up and you may be sitting in front of your laptop, but you might be browsing the internet or playing some games or just wasting your time and there's no way for you to accurately measure what your productivity is. So that's a big advantage that distributed organizations have.
This is so interesting that you said this because most of the leaders actually think the backwards. So they think that in remote, because you're not in the office, it's easier to hide, but it's actually the exactly opposite.
It's all a function of how are you measuring, how are you setting up goals and how are you measuring reaching those goals, right? Those targets, those KPIs, OKRs? If you have that clarity, and it starts from management, really, if you have that clear at an organizational level, you should be able to measure that up consistently, and you should be able to determine whether a team member is performing or not. If you have that clearly, then why do you need to see someone where they're doing their job? I don't care whether you're at the beach or... Your home or you're in an office. It's the same thing that you work wherever you want. Just make sure that you're hitting the target.
Totally. Totally. Totally. We fix the management stuff here, but how do you fix the employee stuff? So meaning I wouldn't say it's extremely hard, but it's like a challenge to find people who are A, adaptable so like comfortable with the change and also can address the change. B, they also show ownership of their work. So they know that they are the ones who are responsible of doing the job. In terms of, and again, I'm not a recruiter, but and probably you aren't a recruiter either but still might have some insights on how can you find these people.
Yeah. Look, my experience has been that, especially the caliber of people that we have on board, I will assume that this would extend to anybody who is interested in obtaining a remote job, right? But there's a responsibility around it. There's an acknowledgement of, Hey, I love working remotely. I love the flexibility of not having to commute. I love the flexibility to travel to X destination and work from there as long as I want, then or stay home with my kids, which we have several moms and all of those benefits they don't go unnoticed, right? So what I have noticed is that our team members will go above and beyond whatever needs to get done simply because they understand it is a privilege to be able to be working remotely, right? And I have not experienced a team member that struggles. The struggles that I have seen are more around communication or adopting this writing documentation culture. But that's just in the early stages, especially if you've never done this before. Once you set up the cadence and team members get used to it, everything starts operating smoothly. But from a motivational standpoint, my experience has been that team members are grateful and understand the privilege that they have of working remotely. And they go above and beyond.
This is so interesting that you said this because it's exactly what I think and I think I have this feeling because originally I'm from Eastern Europe and most of my friends and peers trying to immigrate to the West because obviously you can make better money. But when you hire people from here. Pay above the wage a little bit more because the company that you are working for makes Western income and Western revenue. So you are. Able to afford a little bit of higher salary than the local salaries on that country. I think it's interesting to see that these people, they are so thankful. And they have so much gratitude towards working remotely because they actually do understand that this is a privilege. And not everyone wants to emigrate or move from our country. They have family there. They have a life there. They have peers, their friends, their everything. They're comfortable there. And if they are able to work for a company that allows them to stay put in a sense, but still make the money I think that's truly a privilege.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And look you're really talking about the bottom line here, right? It's just, this is same thing that we discussed with our team, right? Why do we do what we do? Ultimately, obviously, we're here to make money. That's the scorecard, right? But ultimately, our mission is exactly what you described. How do you enable access to opportunities? To team members that do people that otherwise they wouldn't know, right? And so by building the solutions that companies require, to enable the hiring and management of those distributed employees, we are in fact supporting that development, right? And what does that mean at a social level? It means more socio economical movement, right? You described this pretty well. Instead of you having to immigrate, as historically has been the case to the US, to Europe to try to get a job at one of the big companies, you don't have to leave your village now, as long as you have internet access, right? And so imagine where that is, right? And you have access to higher wages salary you bring that economic impact into the region where you're from. And so that mobility it's something that definitely will increase the quality of living anywhere, anyone, anywhere, if you have the right skill sets, right? And so I think that unlocking that part of really the coolest thing about what we do here is knowing that whenever we deliver a device in the middle of nowhere, in places where we're truly remote, which is insane, we're delivering equipment in places like Madagascar, for example, right? And so you will think, wow, who works in Madagascar? But it's amazing that's happening. And so those are the sort of things that we get to see here on a daily basis and it makes us incredibly proud that we're enabling this change.
What was the weirdest place?
I would say Madagascar. I never been to, so I don't, maybe I'm underestimated, but I would never think that it's a place where you would find technical talent.
You can.
Yeah.
Lovely. And since you are working with companies who are managing remote assets IT assets. I wouldn't say that you can see the whole picture on how companies are adapting to remote, but you probably have a better sense than anybody else on how this growth is going. What do you see? Because obviously if the growth is happening, Pretty much your company is growing. Do you think that there is a growth so more companies are adopting remote or do you think we reached a stagnation or something, which the paper says?
No. It continues to grow, right? It's very amusing for me to to see all these headlines that companies you know, Oh, zoom and Amazon, they're dragging their employees back to the office and remote work is over all that, right? But we are in the trenches. We see what's happening, right? We talk to every single major company we serve, and we work with some of the largest rapidly growing technology companies, and we see the acceleration in remote hiring, right? And so that's just not stopping whatsoever. This will continue to accelerate over the next few years. In fact, every single survey that you see out there that's exactly what it shows. The way you would describe this is the Nike logo growth curve, which is something that someone mentioned in, I read somewhere recently, and it's exactly how you should look at how remote or distributed work is growing, right? You had this initial kind of spike during the pandemic and then leveling down after the pandemic and now a consistent growth curve. So that's exactly what's happening now. And so now again, it's driven by multiple things, but especially in the last year or so, it was driven by cost savings. Hey we have customers that have downsized team members in high cost regions and simultaneously developed the nuances in lower cost in our regions such as Brazil or India so that's just happening. It's just the nature of distributor work. Going forward it's gonna continue to be this issue, the costs, but also just gaining access to the right talent and the speed that you need, right? What's the point of having job openings in the U. S. when you can't find the people that you need, right? And you need work that needs to get done, right? So by opening up to hiring remotely that pool automatically expands and you can find very talented individuals out there. So once you overcome that initial fear that a lot of managers have, especially here in a developed company and provisionally work in an office, you realize, oh my God, why I didn't do this before and that's a factor I received here.
Yeah. I wanted to share two things quickly. First on the news, usually what I see is the leader of the company who's, have a commentary for that media but the numbers, when you actually see them like the statistics and how people are working tells a completely different story. That's one and second is super important to say because I also see this from the trenches as you've said that a lot of companies are just downsizing the employed talent shall we say? But they're still retaining those same people in contract and they are working remotely. So we don't see that usually in the news, but you know The basic headline is not changing. The employed headcount is changing. But they actually retained through contract and they usually work remotely. Still I've seen so many examples in like major corporations. So it's so interesting to see. So I agree with you.
Sure. For sure. A hundred percent.
Oh where can people find you?
For sure. You can always learn more about what we do here at growrk.com. And obviously you can find me on LinkedIn at any point. Twitter as well available, but yeah, look I think going back to what I was saying earlier Sometimes we look at other folks that are in the space as competitors, right? In a way, and my approach to this is no, the problem that we're looking to solve here is not small. And so the more people we have specializing in their own areas to facilitate and make it easier for a company to scale globally, the better, right? In other words the tide is raising all the boats, right? And so if we focused on enabling the rising of that tide, everything is fine. And there's a lot of work and there are a lot of complex issues that need to still need to be figured out so that we can make a truly a seamless experience to work remotely, right? And it you said this in one of your posts I read recently. It's not that you're hybrid or you're in office or you're remote. It's are you flexible or you're not flexible. The future work is flexible. It has to be flexible. That's what the market demands. That's what people demand. And organizations have to adapt to ensure that they continue to be effective with that flexibility, right?
There is a tear in my eye. Seriously, this is exactly why I do the podcast and all the content that I do, because we are all in the same boat. And if you grow, it probably helps growing others. And if the agenda grows, then it means that the need will grow. Adaptation will grow and it will be a win for everybody. Thank you. Seriously. Thank you for your time. I hope the sun will shine out in San Diego.
It always come out. For sure. That's the beauty of living here. But Peter, thank you very much for the invitation as well.
My pleasure. Thank you.
