Technology has proven to be a great equalizer in the global workforce. Not only has it allowed thousands of new small businesses to boom within the United States, but it’s also helped talented engineers in developing countries join a global workforce and increase their income capacity. Here in the United States, companies are using offshore talent benefit by gaining a different perspective and strong intellectual capital. Growth Acceleration Partners (GAP) is one such company that’s benefiting from the work of engineers in developing countries and passing on those benefits to their clients.
According to Joyce Durst, one of GAP’s cofounders and a 30-year veteran in the technology space, GAP focuses on building a variety of applications for companies around the world. “Simply put, we help bring people’s software dreams to life. We work with companies of all sizes, across multiple industries to help make their vision a reality in the marketplace. Our focus is on cloud mobile, QA, and analytics. We help companies build applications that change the world.” For Joyce, GAP co-founder Brett Bachman, and their partner Paul Brownell, the company’s success is all about the team. “GAP invests very heavily in each and every one of its employees. We only hire people we believe will have a tento twenty-year career with us. We’re looking for people that want to learn every day, who want to grow, and who want to have fun. After hiring them, we do everything we can to help them reach their potential,” Joyce says.
GAP’s employment model focuses on what they call nearshore outsourcing. They began by hiring four employees out of Costa Rica, and have since expanded to have more than 300 employees in Costa Rica and Colombia. With big projects under their belt, including an interactive marketing game for Dell and cornering the market as the largest software outsourcing company in Costa Rica for web application framework model Ruby on Rails, they have proven that the nearshore outsourcing model can work While they’ve mastered this model, Joyce explains that there are some challenges they still deal with. “The biggest challenge is how many miles the partners can travel in a particular year. Each of the partners spends at least one week every month in either Costa Rica or Colombia. Paul is responsible for Colombia, so he spends a lot more time there than I do, but I go at least once a quarter. I go to Costa Rica every month. Paul goes probably every other month. So, we have one of the partners in one of the countries almost every single week That’s how you get the company culture started.”
When it comes to managing that many employees, Paul says it’s all about education. “The primary tool that we use is engaging management as a learning experience. Our goal is to help them learn the things that they need to be successful. We bring our experience and share with them what we know, or point them to other resources that can feed what they need. It’s especially challenging as we grow, and as fast as we’ve grown, because it’s very different today than it was last year and last year was far different than the year before that.” As Joyce adds, the management and employees aren’t the only ones doing the learning. “Each of the three partners has been in the business of software for more than 30 years, but the majority of our employees are not 30 years old yet. So, we have to remember on a day-to-day basis that for many of them, when we ask them to lead or be a manager, it’s the very first time they’ve done that. Or we may ask them for a business plan, and they have no idea what we’re talking about.
I think for us to be successful, we have to remember where we were when we were 27. We have to think about who coached us, how we learned, what books we read, and so on. I think for any entrepreneur trying to grow a company, as it begins to scale, remember not to make assumptions that everyone who works for you knows what you know. Break the information down into small, manageable chunks, and then they will grab it and hold onto it and run with it.”
There’s a deeper reason behind all this learning, which is that the founders consider GAP to be the employees’ company. “Whatever the employees want GAP to be is what it’s going to be,” Joyce says. “We want to make sure they have as much support, resources, and education as possible so that it’s something great. There will be a whole bunch of code written today, and Paul and I aren’t going to write any of it. So, we fully understand that the people who write the software for our clients, who test the software, who hire the employees, and who do sales and marketing are not us. This isn’t a manufacturing company; it’s a people company. At the end of every day, all of the assets of the company go home and have dinner with their families. If we have done a good job, the next day they all come back”
Paul, who joined the company in 2009, further explains the ways they make GAP the employees’ company. “We’re constantly engaging with the team to seek their ideas about how to make it a better company. One of the core tenets at the heart of building a company that we want to work for is: if there’s something around the company that you don’t like, and you have the ability to, speak up. If you have an idea about something cool that you’d like to do, bring it forward and know that you could actually see it happen.”
Even the company’s charitable focus has an eye toward employees. Joyce explains, “We have a program called GAP Giving, through which we donate to at least one charity every month in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Austin. In addition, we really want to support the causes that the individual employees are passionate about so we have a matching program that matches up to $1,000 in charitable donations made by a GAP U.S. employee.”
You might be wondering why GAP decided to make Austin their headquarters when their employees are in Colombia and Costa Rica. In addition to living in Austin, the partners also enjoy the energy of the city as well as the cachet of being from Austin. “There isn’t a better place in the entire United States to have a tech company than Austin, Texas,” Joyce says. “It’s the energy, the innovation, the entrepreneurship at every level, the non-profits-everyone is doing cool, amazing things in this city. And no matter where you go in the United States, as soon as you tell people you’re from Austin, they all have something positive to say.” Paul adds,” Austin is so collaborative that forming those relationships is just a natural part of what we do. Our business grew completely from word-of-mouth. As more people got to know us, they referred us to even more people. There’s no better place to do that kind of referral-network-based business than Austin, because of the deep relationships and networks here.”
If the trials of nearshore employee management and massive growth don’t seem like enough, consider the challenges that having three partners could bring to GAP. As Inc. reported in 2015, multiple founders can be vital to growing customers faster, but with three partners you have to balance multiple ambitions and visions. Joyce explains how GAP handles this, “We have a shared vision, so it can’t be just one of our visions, it has to be our vision. We have everyone attend strategy meetings for an hour every couple of weeks, and we talk about our key goals and strategies. In that regard, there are no titles in this company. It’s all about pursuing a mission that we all own.”
No matter how customer- and employee-focused a company is, it will still run into hard times, as GAP did in 2008. While the country reeled from the Great Recession, GAP felt the ripple effect of the hits their clients took. “Most of GAP’s difficulties have been from trying to help our clients get through hardships that they’re encountering. 2008 was a very tough year in Austin. We had clients that lost their investors and had to close down. We had clients that were bought in a hostile takeover. Those things create hardships for GAP because we become a hybrid part of our customers’ companies.” Joyce explained further how the effects of these hardships aren’t just financial but also emotional, “We are very passionate about what our clients do, and if we see people on the other side of the table being laid off, it causes great stress and angst. We’ll try to get them placed at other companies.”
One thing they’ve learned, after starting GAP and moving the company forward, is that when starting a business, it’s not enough to want to have the title of CEO. You have to fill a need. “If you want to start a new business,” says Joyce, “make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Make sure that you are solving a compelling problem that someone else has, and that compelling problem is worth enough that someone will want to pay you for a solution.” There’s more to it than that, however. As Joyce explains, solving a compelling problem is just the first step. “Have a business plan. Make sure you’ve thought through how you are going to do sales and marketing. Figure out whether you can produce something that people pay you for and then launch the business or if you need to raise money to get it off the ground.”
As Paul notes, it takes effort every day to keep pushing your company forward, “Day to day it takes perseverance. There are all kinds of speed bumps and roadblocks. You have to constantly, doggedly pursue your goal. Every time GAP has run into any new challenge, whether it’s a client business challenge or some big technical hurdle that we’ve never encountered before, what carries us through is our inner strength and determination to succeed. We have a favorite quote around here, which is by Nelson Mandela. He said, ‘I never lose. I either win or learn.’ We’re happy about learning around here, so some days you’re going to win, some days you’re just going to spend a lot of the day learning. That’s okay.”
To learn more about the nearshore model, or see case studies of success, check out www.growthaccelerationpartners.com.
