Building a team in a complex and highly competitive industry like digital freight is both a test of resilience and an opportunity for growth. In this episode of our series CEO Confidences: The Challenging Art of Building Great Teams, Mathieu Mattei, cofounder and CFO of Ovrsea, shares the lessons he learned from his entrepreneurial journey, from navigating a highly technical industry to the adjustments necessary to grow, face market downturns, and pave the road to profitability.
Here are the key takeaways:
1. Starting from Scratch: Learning by Doing
In the early days of Ovrsea, Mathieu and his cofounders entered an unfamiliar sector. To understand its intricacies, they immersed themselves in hands-on learning, even taking internships to learn the ropes. This groundwork laid a strong foundation for future growth, enabling the team to build expertise directly tied to concrete industry challenges.
2. Building a Business-Focused Talent Acquisition Team
From the beginning, Mathieu took charge of recruitment, ensuring that early hires were aligned with Ovrsea’s mission and values. He notably built the Talent Acquisition Management (TAM) team. Mathieu emphasizes that a TAM team must demonstrate a strong business sense and be perfectly aligned with the company’s objectives. One key piece of advice is to have a TAM team capable of effectively filtering profiles and adopting the same standards as managers to ensure both cultural and technical alignment.
3. Learning from Early Mistakes in Recruitment
At the time, he made one of his biggest recruitment mistakes by hiring a candidate who was seeking a Director of Human Resources role rather than a TAM role. The individual ended up resigning after a few months. This mismatch slowed their momentum, highlighting the need for a clear definition of roles and ensuring alignment between a candidate’s career goals and the company’s immediate needs.
4. Adapting to Hyper-Growth and Talent war
Between 2019 and 2022, Ovrsea’s rapid expansion called for fast hiring to keep up with growth. This period tested the agility of the recruitment team, which had to constantly refine its approach to attract top talent in a highly competitive market. This intense phase of scaling emphasized the importance of balancing speed with quality in the hiring process. From Mathieu’s perspective, this is the time when partnering with an executive search firm is most valuable.
5. Balancing Present and Future Needs in Hiring
One challenge that Ovrsea faced was finding the right balance between hiring for current needs and planning for future growth. While it’s tempting to look for candidates who can handle both, Mathieu emphasizes the importance of first hiring talent who can solve today’s problems. This approach minimizes the risk of over-hiring and ensures that new team members can deliver quickly on objectives.
6. Recruiting Profiles more expert than you
One of the pivotal moments in Ovrsea’s journey was the hiring of their first VP of Finance, a senior role that helped structure the entire finance function and significantly impacted the business. Recruiting someone more experienced in a field than yourself can be challenging, and Mathieu learned that it requires setting aside ego and demonstrating the unique value you bring to the table. By focusing on how he could support and provide insightful feedback to such senior hires, Mathieu was able to successfully attract top-tier talent who could elevate Ovrsea’s capabilities.
7. Assessing Cultural Fit to prevent mishires
Ovrsea has a strong culture of writing and continuous learning. To ensure alignment with these values, the recruitment team provides candidates with extensive resources to learn about the company and its industry. This is particularly important in an industry that is not appealing to everyone due to its heavy technical aspects and complexity. During interviews, they assess how thoroughly candidates have engaged with these materials, measuring the depth of their research and understanding. This process allows the team to identify candidates who demonstrate curiosity and commitment to learning, ensuring that new hires will contribute positively to the company culture and thrive in the company.
8. Handling Downsizing
In 2022, as the market shifted, Ovrsea faced the difficult task of reducing its team size. Mathieu stresses the difficulty of planning the downsizing and defining the exact number of people to be laid off to ensure the company’s survival while saving as many jobs as possible. On a personal note, this experience was challenging. The layoffs were followed by a series of resignations, a natural phenomenon in times like these. By consistently aligning the team around shared goals, such as profitability and launching new products, he ensured that each remaining member saw the big picture and understood their role in achieving it. This focus on the future helped drive resilience and engagement within the team.
9. Listening and Applying Feedback to Attract Top Talent
Mathieu highlights the importance of listening to candidate feedback, especially during selective recruitment processes. In one instance, the management team managed to close a top talent by taking extra steps to understand and address her concerns after she initially declined the offer. This commitment to feedback not only helped recruit a valuable employee but also fostered a culture of openness and continuous improvement in recruitment.
Conclusion
Mathieu’s experience provides a clear look into the realities of building a team—from the hands-on learning required to understand a complex field before making the first hires, to the challenges of hiring in high volumes while maintaining high standards during rapid growth, and then adjusting through market shifts. His journey demonstrates the importance of aligning recruitment closely with business goals and ensuring cultural fit to build a winning team.