From ride-hailing to a business with 4 verticals: Bolt’s journey through the time
We were in 2018 when the Estonian brand (known back then as Taxify) assembled its team in Portugal, taking ride-hailing a step further in Lisbon. But how did Bolt manage to grow and establish a solid presence across other services and Portuguese cities? And how important are People in the business strategy? Get to know it all with David Ferreira da Silva, Regional Manager at Bolt.
As someone who has been part of the Portuguese team since the beginning, what do you think were the key factors for Bolt’s success?
In retrospect, we were about 200 people back in 2018 and were focused on ride-hailing services. Fast forward to today, we have 4 business verticals and 3000+ people, so we’re talking about a growth 10+ times. We’re a scale-up that has been scaling up very well, and I believe it has been due to some key factors:
A good balance between Global HQ guidelines and flexibility to adapt to local needs: we had strong Headquarter’s guidelines and support for our work, but at the same time, we always had — and still have — flexibility to adapt according to local needs.
Focusing on hiring people with strong drive and willingness to learn, and giving them the freedom and ownership, has allowed us not only to boost creativity but also to make Bolt an agile company.
Another important factor of success is the culture that I would define as being the perfect balance between excellence and friendliness. Coming from the consultancy world, where excellence is highly linked to pressure (and sometimes toxic culture), it was quite a nice surprise for me to enter Bolt and experience a reality where we have high standards of excellence, but at the same time a very friendly environment in which everyone feels safe. And the consequence of this, is to have a horizontal hierarchy that promotes everyone (from interns to C-levels) to challenge others and contribute with impact in a variety of topics. After these years in Bolt it is clear to me that a friendly environment is the best to get people motivated and involved with the company and performing at their best, as well as sticking with the company long-term.
Based on your experience, what was the advice you would give to companies that are just getting started?
I would say people are the factor with higher impact on the success of the company.
Especially, if we’re talking about a small company, there is a huge difference, in terms of impact, between hiring the right person vs. not. To put this in perspective: if your team has five people, one person represents a fifth of the company, which is a very large portion of the work force. So, my advice would definitely be to put a high effort and focus on hiring effectibvely, as it will make a big difference in terms of impact.
Hiring the right people (right fit, strong drive and motivation, etc.) and investing in them is going to have a huge impact on several dimensions of the company such as output of the team, culture, team environment and motivation.
Another key factor of success is to manage the focus of the team effectively. In a startup, there is always a never ending list of things to cover. Focusing on the ones that have more impact (and consistently reevaluating the prioritization of the focus) is key to maximize the impact in the most efficient way.
How has this Bolt challenge changed the old you?
When I started to work at Bolt, I was a machine, in the sense that I had a strong focus on operations and business, but was not sensitive to the people management dimension. The reason for this was of course lack of experience in managing teams but also the fact that I came from the consultancy world, in which managing people is very different from the “real world” companies: excellence and high performance are most of the times a given, profiles are in general very similar and most of the people have a strong focus and give high priority to their professional careers and therefore put an abnormal (sometimes even unhealthy) effort and dedication to work.
After some time at Bolt I realized that most of the people are not like that, have different priorities and that managing a team in a way that keeps it motivated and is sustainable long-term, needs us managers to consciously work on this and dedicate a lot of time and effort.
So the major change I experienced since joining Bolt, was to develop this human dimension of managing real people and keeping them motivated, for example by developing skills like empathy and communication, start to consciously think and act on managing people, identifying team members’ potential and helping them develop themselves. Making this effort of working on this human dimension in a conscious manner is quite difficult, takes time and commitment, and I realized that this is one of the toughest (but also crucial) things to excel as a leader.
