Startup Life: Unscripted is a TNG Media newsletter, as part of The Nudge Group, where we feature candid conversations with startup operators about their career journeys and experiences. If you received this email as a forward, you can read all our past interviews and subscribe right here.

Embracing Change: Shilpa's Path from Design to Leading Operations in Tech

Welcome back to another edition of Startup Life: Unscripted! Today, we're exploring the world of construction tech with Shilpa Mohan, the Head of Ops at ProcurePro, construction’s #1 procurement software for head contractors.

Shilpa's eclectic background, from pharmacy to interior design, has led her to the forefront of startup innovation. Read on to find out how her unique career journey has shaped her role in a company that's redefining procurement in construction.

Key interview takeaways:

🔄 Career Path: Shilpa explains her unique journey from Pharmacy to Interior Design to Operations, showing how diverse experiences contribute to her role at ProcurePro.

🔧 Mixing Structure with Flexibility: How Shilpa balances the need for organisational structure with the flexibility required in a startup.

🤝 Cultivating a Strong Remote Culture: Shilpa's approach to building a positive remote work culture at ProcurePro.

💭 Tips for Startup Career Shifts: Shilpa's advice for those considering a move to the startup sector, focusing on trust in one's instincts and embracing new challenges.

Hey Shilpa, thanks for joining us today, it's great to have you here with us. Your career journey has certainly been a unique one, transitioning from Pharmacy to Interior Design, then on to Operations in the tech startup space. Can you talk us through what prompted these shifts and how your diverse background has influenced your approach at ProcurePro?

My thirst for knowledge has underpinned every career / academic move I've ever made. Science fascinated me when I was in School (It still does but I've shifted from loving Chemistry to Physics) and coming from an Indian family, you're almost societally pressured to achieve high grades and study a "good" degree, hence I undertook a Bachelors of Pharmacy.

I say societally pressured because my parents never pressured me to study anything I didn't want to study, but there was almost an inherent pressure in growing up Indian where you felt you had to “do the right thing” and make them proud. I couldn't picture myself wearing a lab coat day in and day out, standing behind a counter so I delved into the world of architecture and design and thrived there for 6 years before I felt like I'd reached a stalemate and wasn't learning much more.

Meanwhile, my passion for startups was growing ever larger, so when the opportunity came up at ProcurePro I had to make the leap. I knew the Construction World and I had faith in myself that I'd figure SaaS Operations out.

I truly believe that my whole life spent code-switching to different sides of my brain and different disciplines is the one of the key reasons I've been able to succeed in an Operations role, because no day is the same and you have to have the tenacity to learn every part of the business (finance, people, compliance, marketing, sales, customer success, product, etc).

You mentioned that you've always been passionate about startups, tech, and business, and that attending the Web Summit in Dublin sparked a desire for more in this realm. Can you share a bit about what it was about the startup environment that drew you in?

As weird as it is to say, I think I love a sense of discomfort, I tend to throw myself into situations I don't fully understand yet and have zero grasp of. Which would work for any new role you're jumping into or any new career, but it's a whole different ball game with startups because of the speed.

Every time it seems like you've figured something out, there's a new challenge to conquer and you're doing so at lightning speed. Even though I wasn't working in startups yet, I was still a part of a lot of startup circles like Web Summit (where I met people like Stewart Butterfield, Mike Krieger and Sean Rad), Blackbird Giants, and had a guilty pleasure of watching and reading anything startup/tech related. Volunteering at Web Summit in 2015 (because that’s the only way I could have afforded to go) gave me the opportunity to be surrounded by motivated people who were building really exciting businesses. However, back then I naively thought you had to have some form of a business background or engineering background to really thrive in startups, so I ignored the initial pull. 

The call to throw myself in the deep end, to a world of uncertainty and, as cliche as it sounds, 'dent the Universe' was too strong a calling to ignore. The very first conversation I had with our Founder & CEO, Alastair Blenkin, was all the convincing I needed.

In my entire working career I'd never come across someone who had that energy and zest for achieving something like he did, I wanted to be a part of it. There was also no one that really looked like me when I started discovering startups in the early 2010s (preceding people now like Yamini Rangan, Payal Kadakia, Anjali Sud etc), so I wanted to be a role model for other women of colour and be unconventional.

Can you talk about your experience of rapid growth at ProcurePro, both in terms of staff and ARR? What were some of the challenges and successes you encountered during this period of expansion?

I joined ProcurePro in January 2022, which was roughly 6 months since the product had been launched. We have more than doubled our headcount and have been  growing ARR at more than 300% YoY.

Our vision is to 'Set a new standard of innovation in construction' and one of our values is to 'help our customers succeed' because construction is one of the largest industries in the World and the 2nd least digitised industry in the World and has been in serious need of purpose built, well made and designed software, reliable customer support/service and an honest sales process. 

Having such a large vision was always going to come with our own set of challenges because we wanted to over invest time and money into building out every single department and its processes to be best in class, create alignment across departments, hire the right people and make sure every new team member that came onboard was not only educated in how the product works but also how construction works etc. 

I'd say there were definitely more successes than challenges, because any challenge was just an opportunity to come out on top. Building new departments and processes for each department wasn't an easy feat, but when we hear customers say — "On that first phone call, I thought what Phil (one of our Sales team) was saying was too good to be true. Turns out it worked exactly how Phil said it would” and "I wish every software that I used had the level of customer satisfaction that I'm getting from ProcurePro. ProcurePro is one of the best software support experiences that I've had" — it shows us that the hard yards are 1000% worth it. 

The hardest part of growth will always be the people side of any business (this is what I also consistently hear from people that have scaled really large businesses), being a part of the early team of ~10 all in Australia/NZ to now having closer to 40 around the World creates its own sets of challenges. I’m hyper conscious of how to maintain close knit connections amongst the team, create best practice management principles, hire the right people, onboarding them efficiently and where we need to be going next with career progression, L&D etc. It’s important to us so that’s why we’re on the cusp of looking for our first People & Culture hire. 

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As Head of Ops, how do you balance the need for structure and process with the agility and innovation often associated with startups, particularly during a period of rapid growth?

As Head of Ops, learning to let go was a really important skill to learn. Build a structure/process quickly and be completely ok with it either failing or not suiting the team at the next stage of growth.

When you grow rapidly the first things to break are processes, everything you put in place for a team of say 10 won't work for a team of 20 and so on. Constant iteration is needed to make sure our teams are supported with the best possible tools and processes. 

One of the key balancing techniques to the structure vs agility equation has been to build a culture of fast feedback/fast praise. We never succumbed to the 'move fast and break things' movement, because yes we move extremely fast but we also build with care and structure in place, our customers deserve working software and a team they can rely on.

You have an impressive involvement in the startup community outside of your work at ProcurePro, such as being an AirTree Pioneers Community Advisor and a SXSW Sydney tech/startup advisor. How do these roles complement your work at ProcurePro?

Being involved in the broader startup ecosystem does three things for me. 

1. 
   It helps me learn and grow. It's much easier learning through osmosis i.e. having conversations with people who have a myriad of experiences across startups than having to climb hills by yourself. I also help run a monthly Ops dinner for a group of startup operators, where we lay out any challenges and brainstorm solutions. 

2. It opens doors to people I would've normally never have met or talked to. If we need advice on a particular direction we're thinking of going in, the strong connections that I've started building have always helped with advice. 

3. It helps with recruitment. Recruitment can be one of the hardest things any startup does, but being an active member of the startup community helps introduce you to people that you may never come across with just a job ad on LinkedIn. 

How do you build a strong culture and ProcurePro has chosen to be remote-first, how does the team thrive and communicate across different regions without a physical office?

Our team satisfaction score at the end of last year was 95% and won My Startup Gig’s Top Startup Employer 2023 award, where My Startup Gig ran an internal survey where our eNPS was actually 100%. It  comes down to the fact that the Founders and everyone across the business is open about everything and we leave our egos at the door because we're one team regardless of which department you're in.

We have 'ways of working' docs that lay out our management and communication principles, dedicated times for non-work catch ups every week, in-person socials and off-sites where we just spend time with each other and an underlying culture of transparency and respect. We try to over communicate, you essentially need to in any workplace, but more so in a remote environment.

I actually think we should write a book on remote working one day, because it shocked me how good the culture was when I first joined and how we've maintained the standard even after doubling headcount. Our founders decided to be remote even before COVID was a thing, so that enabled us to create a strong remote culture from the get go. There's often a misconception that you need to be face-to-face or hybrid to really work, but it can work being fully remote, and we hope to continue to prove so.

We don't see culture as a separate area we need to work on, we see it as part and parcel of everything we do and how we treat each other, so it's always front of mind for us. 

The company is planning to expand to the UK soon. What are your strategies for navigating this new market, particularly in your role as Head of Ops?

We have actually already expanded into the UK. We have a co-founding team that moved over there, we’ve hired foundation team members and now have UK ARR as well. 

It took a lot of prep and research, but also a bit of throwing ourselves into a new market headfirst! The Ops team had tons of conversations with people who have done it before, the best way to learn. So many people have done it before, so why reinvent the wheel? We also surrounded ourselves with trusted accountants and lawyers in the UK.

Part of my role in our expansion has been to understand the local employment laws, tax implications, setting up our financial systems to allow for multi-currencies, hiring and onboarding. The  fun business stuff, I genuinely mean fun because I find all of this fascinating.

PeopleOps and managing business finances for APAC and EMEA regions will fall on my shoulders for the near future until we build out the team further in the UK. 

Finally, for our readers who are considering a career shift into the startup world, given your own unconventional journey, what advice would you give them?

If your gut feeling is to do something, just do it. I wholeheartedly believe you can succeed at anything if you put in the work, so worrying that something may or may not work out isn't a way of thinking I like subscribing to. 

A personal challenge for me was financial literacy in SaaS and business. I don't have finance/accounting backgrounds, we knew that for the business to be successful, our financial management needed to be strong and we needed to know our numbers cold.

Our CEO and I put in the reps every single morning for months to understand accounting, SaaS metrics, financial modelling etc. essentially fast tracking a uni degree. Which enabled us to build a seamless accounting/finance process that has helped us put off needing to hire a specialist in finance for the time being.

There will be things that you have never done before and it'll feel like you have to scale a mountain, but anything is actually possible.

From the Startup Life team

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