Industry: Tech
Location: Melbourne, Australia
The rapidly growing Melbourne based regtech startup, FrankieOne, understands the importance of its people when it comes to growth.
In September 2021, the company made a strategic hire in Sarah Dobson, wooing her away from KPMG where she had worked for six years as a Manager and then Associate Director, focusing on transformation and advisory projects. To put it simply, she’s a People Person.
FrankieOne is a cloud native, end to end platform which provides a single connection to the global identity and fraud ecosystem. The company helps banks and fintechs manage their compliance requirements seamlessly. And this rocketship is going places, with big players like Westpac, Afterpay and Shopify all on their customer list.
It’s not surprising Sarah jumped ship to become People Experience Manager at FrankieOne given their exponential growth trajectory. The company had 12 team members in December 2020 which exploded to 50 in December 2021 and now boasts 85 and counting.
People Problems = Mintable Solutions
It would be incorrect to say Sarah had big shoes to fill when she joined Frankie. It would be more accurate to say she had to cobble the shoes together.
“When I joined Frankie, there was very little in place. We needed to create an entire function,” she says.
And create an entire function, she did. Sarah got to work analyzing all of the needs the company had from a People & Culture perspective. Seeing the rapid growth in new hires she also saw the inevitable (and exciting) promotion of new managers within the organization, with little to no management experience.
“As we’ve grown, we have more and more new managers from a host of different backgrounds- from engineering to product to sales. We needed to find a way to empower them to manage people effectively when they potentially haven’t done that before” she says.
Sarah goes on to note that seventy percent of a team member’s engagement can be determined by their direct manager, making training managers key to any talent strategy.
Why The Mintable?
The Mintable’s programs are designed to offer not just corporate training to managers, but community and ongoing resources to support them throughout their journey into management.
“It was important to us that our people would be in the course with people from similar positions from other companies. If you only conduct training internally, people can be shy or reserved and building people’s external networks is important.” says Sarah.
Another catalyst for selecting the Mintable was the curriculum itself which according to Sarah, aligned perfectly with FrankieOne’s objectives.
The Impact of The Mintable
One of the biggest hurdles companies face when introducing a third-party program to their new managers is resistance to spending what precious little time they have on training.
“There’s always the question of whether they have time as they are running so fast. But this was the first time Frankie had invested in outsourcing learning and development and our managers recognised that we were making an investment in them, which was really well received,” says Sarah.
After going through the program, the feedback from the managers was almost 100% across the board, which was supported by focus groups Frankie conducted to cross-check those results internally. Given the resoundingly positive reception of the program with its managers, FrankieOne is placing another cohort of 10 managers in The Mintable’s next program.
Sarah says “it’s about making sure this is the management rite of passage at FrankieOne. New managers know The Mintable is the initial investment we make in them as they go into the role.”
Advice to other People Leaders?
Given Sarah’s wealth of experience at both KPMG and now a rapidly scaling startup, there are few people better placed to share their wisdom on people management. When it comes to managing the talent strategy for a scaling business, her primary advice is to enable managers.
“As the organization gets bigger, you can’t be all things to all people. You have to empower and enable your managers to enable you. They’re the ones having the regular 1:1s and engaging our people, so unless you’ve enabled them you can’t enable your talent strategy” she says.
Sarah also notes the importance of trusting your partners, especially when it comes to managing your company’s most valuable asset: its people.
Her parting words: “It’s lovely to work with people that share a common vision, common style and common value. We get that with The Mintable.”
The feeling is mutual.
To set up a program for your team, book time to talk to us today.