Asia Startup Pulse

How to Recruit and Manage A Strong Startup Team with Lucas Englehardt, Serial Entrepreneur with Successful Exits

Episode Summary

There is no such a thing as a solo entrepreneur and the fast growth of startups requires strong teams to execute. Based on our experience, not having the right team is one of the top reasons why startups fail. This leads to the frequently asked questions: How to attract the right candidates? How to keep team morale high when things are not following the plan? And how to help talent develop to work efficiently? Today we talk with serial entrepreneur Lucas Englehardt, who founded O2O food delivery startup Waimaichaoren in 2012. After successfully scaling the business to 18 cities, he finally exited the company to Delivery Hero in 2016. Having managed a company with 400 employees, Lucas will talk about his secrets in people management, especially for sales teams. Besides the best practices, he will also shared some of the hard learn lessons, such as hiring someone who did not fit in the team culture. As an early explorer in the food delivery space in China as a foreigner, Lucas also took us back to the early days when he just got into the industry and describe the creative strategies used to acquire clients. He will go deeper to explain how he found the need to change the team mindset about "Experimentation", "Copying" and "Failing fast”.

Episode Notes

02:00 How Lucas got into food delivery in the early days

06:30 Customer acquisition for online service

08:50 Offline flyers was a weapon for Waimaichaorenn

11:20  How to increase the conversion rate of online and offline campaigns

18:40 Leading the team in China as a foreigner

22:10 How to attract the best talents

27:03 Motivate employees to work from offline to online during the virus outbreak

31:10 Lessons learnt after hiring someone who did not fit the team culture

36:04 What keeps Lucas busy now and what is xixilab

Many thanks to our host Oscar Ramos; our guest Lucas Englehardt; producer Eva Shi; editors David and Geep; organizer Chinaccelerator; and sponsors People Squared and Himalaya. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com

Share, subscribe, review, enjoy!

Follow us on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/the-china-startup-pulse/

Email us: team@chinastartuppulse.com