Building a team in a complex, capital-intensive industry like transportation is a resilient challenge. In this episode of our CEO Confidences: The Challenging Art of Building Great Teams series, Mathieu Mattei, co-founder and CFO ofOvrsea, shares the lessons learned from his entrepreneurial adventure, from discovering a highly technical sector to making the adjustments needed to scale, cope with market reversals and pave the way to profitability.
Here are the main findings:
1. Starting from scratch: learning in the field
In the early days of Ovrsea, Mathieu and his co-founders plunged into a sector they knew nothing about. To understand its subtleties, they opted for hands-on learning, even going so far as to undertake internships in the ninth grade to discover the inner workings of the industry. This groundwork laid a solid foundation for future growth, and enabled the team to develop a keen understanding of the industry's challenges.
2. Build a business-focused recruitment team
From the outset, Mathieu took charge of recruitment, ensuring that the first recruits were in line with Ovrsea's mission and values. In particular, he set up the TAM(Talent Acquisition Management) team. According to him, a TAM team must have an excellent business sense and a perfect grasp of the company's global objectives. His advice: have a TAM team capable of effectively filtering profiles and adopting the same exacting standards as managers in terms of both cultural alignment and skills.
3. Learn from recruitment mistakes
At the time, Mathieu made one of his biggest recruitment mistakes, hiring someone who was looking for a Human Resources Director role rather than a TAM role. This person ended up resigning after a few months. This poor recruitment stunted their growth, underlining the need to clearly define role content and ensure that the candidate's career objectives are aligned with the company's immediate needs.
4. Adapting to hypergrowth and competition for talent
Between 2019 and 2022, Ovrsea's rapid growth meant that a large volume of staff had to be recruited quickly to keep pace. This period tested the agility of the TAM team, which had to constantly adjust its approach to attract the best talent in a highly competitive market. This scaling phase demonstrated the importance of finding the right balance between speed and quality in the recruitment process. According to Mathieu, this is when working with a headhunting firm really comes into its own.
5.Recruit for today rather than tomorrow
One of Mathieu's lessons has been to prioritize recruiting for today's needs over those of the future. Although it's tempting to look for candidates capable of managing both, Mathieu insists on the importance of first recruiting talent capable of solving today's problems. This approach limits the risk of over-recruitment and enables new recruits to quickly contribute to the company's objectives, especially in highly technical functions such as Finance, Data or Dev.
6. Recruit better than you are
One of the key moments in building the exec team at Ovrsea was the recruitment of the first VP Finance, a senior position that helped structure the entire finance function and had a major impact on the company. Recruiting someone more experienced than you in a field is never easy, and Mathieu has learned that you have to put your ego aside and show the unique value you can bring to the candidate. By focusing on how he could support and provide constructive feedback to these senior recruits, Mathieu was able to successfully attract top talent to Ovrsea.
7. The importance of cultural fit
Ovrsea has a strong culture of writing and learning. To ensure this alignment, the recruitment team provides candidates with numerous resources to familiarize themselves with the company and its sector, and to test their curiosity. This is all the more important in an industry that can be off-puttingly technical and complex. During interviews, the team assesses candidates' commitment by measuring the extent of their research. This process identifies candidates who are curious to learn, ensuring that new recruits will contribute positively to the company's culture and flourish within it.
8. Managing downsizing
In 2022, faced with a downturn in the market, Ovrsea had to reduce the size of its team. Mathieu explains how difficult it was to plan this downsizing plan and define precisely the number of positions to be eliminated to ensure the company's survival while preserving as many jobs as possible. This experience was also difficult on a personal level, and the redundancies were followed by a wave of resignations, a natural phenomenon in this type of context. By constantly keeping the team aligned with future projects, such as achieving profitability and launching new products, he ensured that each remaining member understood the importance of his or her role in realizing the vision. This commitment to the future has helped to build resilience and commitment within the team.
9. Listen to and apply feedback to attract top talent
Mathieu emphasizes the importance of listening to candidates' feedback, particularly in selective recruitment processes. In one case, the co-founders' team succeeded in attracting a top talent by taking the time to understand and address her doubts after she had initially declined the offer. This commitment to feedback not only resulted in the recruitment of a valuable employee, but also established by example a culture of transparency and continuous improvement within the recruitment team.
Conclusion
Mathieu's experience shows the reality of team building - from the on-the-job training needed to understand a complex sector before making the first hires, to the challenges of mass recruitment while maintaining high standards, and then the adjustments needed in times of market downturn. Her journey demonstrates the importance of closely aligning recruitment with corporate objectives, ensuring a culture fit, and listening to candidates throughout the process to know how to challenge oneself.