Betting on Talent: Neo’s Rise to Becoming a Billion-Dollar Company

In May, Neo Financial announced that their latest fundraising round brought them to over $1 billion dollars in valuation, making it one of the fastest companies in Canada to hit the milestone of unicorn valuation.

This achievement happened fast, but it didn’t happen overnight.

The Harvest Builders team was there at the beginning, when Neo Financial was just a few people at the Calgary Public Library with lots of big ideas and ambition, but it wasn’t long before Neo was growing.

After building the team that scaled SkipTheDishes to over 3000 employees, I saw the opportunity to take the previous lessons in building a world-class team and apply them to the next generation of disruptive ventures. I joined Harvest Builders as part of the founding team and we hit the ground running with Neo. We worked side by side with their founding team at their offices, which at the time were in a co-working space. There were no departments yet — Andrew Chau, Neo’s co-founder and CEO, was sitting next to a UX designer — but we all had the same goal of reimagining financial services for Canadians. Growth happened quickly, and soon we were taking meetings in our tiny office kitchenette, bursting at the seams.

In January 2020, when Neo Financial moved into its own office space in East Village, it began to feel like a real company. You could see the growth week after week, as we were hiring faster than we could assemble desks. We could have hired someone to do it for us, but each week, everyone was shoulder to shoulder with new hires, building office furniture on the floor of a space we were soon outgrowing. It wasn’t long before Neo, previously making do with just a few desks, had evolved into tech campuses in the downtown cores of both Winnipeg and Calgary.

It’s been an adventure to partner with Neo from the beginning, a unique experience that has not only driven Neo’s growth but enabled our own. Growing Neo’s team to over 650 people in just 3 years comes down to Neo aligning with the principles core to the talent management strategy we follow whenever we hire for a company.

Partnership

Neo Financial’s success is Harvest’s success because this is a partnership. We embedded ourselves within Neo — more than just building desks with them, we gained a deep understanding of the company and its values. Integrating with Neo allowed us to become collaborators who could offer insights about who to hire, when, and how. Being an actual part of the Neo team and sharing the work is what allowed us to drive growth.

Prioritize Hiring

Lots of companies say that they don’t have enough time to hire people, but at Harvest and Neo, hiring is the number one priority. Competing priorities will always exist, but we make time to hire because existing bottlenecks will always be worsened if you don’t take the time to find the people you need to make your vision into a reality. When your mission is as ambitious as reimagining the way that people manage their money, you need people to make it happen. Hiring is the solution. By prioritizing interviewing and active workforce planning, Neo has always been building the team it will need tomorrow.

Passion

Neo reaching $1 billion in valuation and growing to over 1 million customers couldn’t have happened without its team of smart and talented people, but its hypergrowth also comes down to everyone being an advocate for Neo. At early-stage companies like Neo, the biggest perk is the opportunity to build something from the ground up, and the passion for this opportunity is embodied in a team that represents and hires imaginative people. With everyone at Neo playing a part in the hiring process by championing the people they want to work with, recruitment is everyone’s job.

Pick Your People

It’s easy to glamourize a startup in the way TV does, with glitzy, cool offices (which Neo has, by the way) — but the rawness and excitement of a startup like Neo attracts people at different stages of the business. More than just looking at a person’s credentials, at Harvest we know talent development strategies are built on communicating an opportunity. We have learned the art of picking the right person for the right time. Developing talent and effective teams comes down to asking if an action gets us to a better place for tomorrow. We hire people to grow into a company’s growth — something that all of Neo’s investors have noted makes the company’s rise remarkable.

Harvest Builders has been proud to partner with Neo Financial and celebrates this enormous milestone with them. Our tried and true approach for building teams is what has helped propel this unprecedented growth and pushed Neo Financial to join the ranks of game-changing Canadian unicorn companies, challenging and changing the market to build a better financial service for all Canadians.

Until the next milestone,

Arlin Dueck

Executive Director of Talent, Harvest Builders