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You know, pulling together a team and helping them all feel like they really are a part of your organization is a difficult job as it is.  But it’s even more difficult when you’re trying to do it on a global scale.

Our guest today, Dmitriy Peregudov is doing that with giftbasketsoverseas.com.  He has a team where they are servicing over 200 countries worldwide with the goal to build international personal and corporate relationships through gifting.

And today’s conversation – he’s going to share with us how he has really handled that challenge of assembling a global team.  He’s also going to share with us their core values and what giftbasketsoverseas.com really delivers to customers – how they use offsite meetings to develop relational connections.  And let me just give you a little tip on that on the front end, they go to a different country every single time they do an offsite meeting.  It’s very interesting.

And then finally, he shares two things that you really need to focus on as a business leader to have success.  We will link to giftbasketsoverseas.com on our show notes but you can also find them by just typing it in your search engine.  We are really, really thrilled to have Dmitriy Peregudov today on the podcast.

Take a listen to the episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Gift Baskets Overseas
• Joey Coleman’s Book | Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days

 

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Transcript

People of influence know that their voice matters, and they work to make it matter more.  I’m Andrea Wenburg, and this is the Voice of Influence podcast.

You know, pulling together a team and helping them all feel like they really are a part of your organization is a difficult job as it is, but it’s even more difficult when you’re trying to do it on a global scale.

Our guest today, Dmitriy Peregudov, is doing that with giftbasketsoverseas.com.  He has a team where they are servicing over 200 countries worldwide with the goal to build international personal and corporate relationships through gifting.

In today’s conversation, he’s going to share with us how he has really handled that challenge of assembling a global team.  He’s also going to share with us their core values and what giftbasketsoverseas.com really delivers to customers, how they use offsite meetings to develop relational connections – and let me just give you a little tip on that on the front end, they go to a different country every single time they do an offsite meeting.  It’s very interesting.

And then finally, he shares two things that you really need to focus on as a business leader to have success.  We will link to giftbasketsoverseas.com in our show notes, but you can also find them by just typing it in your search engine.  We are really, really thrilled to have Dmitriy Peregudov today on the podcast.

Here is our interview:

Andrea:  All right, Dmitriy, it is great to have you here on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Thanks for having me.  This is Dmitriy Peregudov, CEO of giftbasketsoverseas.com.

Andrea:  Awesome!  And Dmitriy, I’m curious; first of all, what is giftbasketoverseas.com?

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Sure.  So, giftbasketsoverseas.com is the company that delivers baskets worldwide.  That’s just how the name calls it. The service area we have is around 200 countries worldwide and we work with both personal and corporate gifts for our customers in the US and overseas.

Andrea:  And as I was doing my research to learn more about your company, Dmitriy, I saw that one of the key things that’s important for people to know about Gift Baskets Overseas is that your gift baskets don’t have to go through customs.  You’re actually providing gifts from the country that they’re sending it to.

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Absolutely.  That’s one of the important parts of our business model.  We do focus on local gift delivery so that it sends quickly and reliably without crossing the border, and so that recipient would never have to pay taxes or duties fees.

Andrea:  So, where did this all start for you?  How did you get going with Gift Baskets Overseas?  Were you already in the tech space or where were you when you first started this business and why did you start?

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Yeah.  Well, actually, personally, you know, a software engineer at the time and had a lot of opportunities to send gifts to other countries.  And I, myself, an immigrant from Russia, and I’ve got a chance to connect with my folks there as well as friends in other countries. So, I’ve got a lot of cases where I need to send gifts, and I found that to be quite difficult and cumbersome.  And so, you know, one of those experiences led me to say, “Well, I’m gonna try that, you know, in several countries and see what happens.” So, my tech experience allowed me to, you know, come up with the first website, and you know, we’ve started doing it in a few countries at first and that kinda led us to the expansion.

Andrea:  And you’ve been going for how long?

Dmitry Peregudov:  Well, the first website was started back in 2002.  That’s been more of like a flower business and flower delivery space, and the gift basket itself, that space was sort of, you know, we’ve entered into that in 2007.

Andrea:  What amazes me is how you were able to build a team in 200 countries.  What was that like, you know, just sort of reaching out to people, finding people, bringing them on board?  Tell us a little bit about that.

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Sure.  So, you know, we’ve got an internal team that we call A team – the people who work for the company directly and represent the company with customers.  That’s customer service team as well as order processing teams, marketing, and so on. That’s internal team. We have around seventy people today, and that group has been found through personal connections as well as some external reaching out to the right people.  But, yeah, building a global team does come with challenges.

I think you asked about also, you know, deliveries network that we have, and that’s where 200 countries come into play.  So, yeah, that is sort of an external team where we have, you know, other companies or other individual entrepreneurs who are looking to serve a certain area for gift baskets and flowers.  And so, those are certainly also found through online connection. Today, we have a lot of choices so we need to just make sure we choose the right ones. So it’s mostly true, you know, do just some checking, and trying the particular provider ourselves that we end up selecting the best ones and working with them.

Andrea:  Okay, so your internal team, are they all in Massachusetts?  Is that where you’re located?

Dmitriy Peregudov:   Yeah, the headquarters is in Massachusetts, but the team is actually all over the world.  Internal basically means that they work for the company itself representing the brand. You know, a lot of them are initially freelancers who enjoy the work environment of remote employment and wanted to get a position to something more purposeful where they have a specific client or specific company they are working for.  So that’s where it kind of began, where we started hiring freelancers to help. And then they ended up, you know, staying or focusing on us as being the main place to work or the only place to work, I would say.

And some of them are from the US, others are from Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, and so and so.  We have a team globally now sort of residing in almost all the continents of the world and in many countries.

Andrea:  Hmm.  So, I read that your company was on the Inc. 5000 list of Fastest-Growing Companies here in the first few years of starting your company.  What were some of the really hard things that you encountered when you were first starting? What was, like, personally difficult for you?

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Sure.  So, I think working with people, in general, is not easy when you have people that are from different cultures and backgrounds.  And those who value different things in their culture – that creates certain challenges, you know. And I, myself, being from Russia and from Europe originally and sort of growing up and professionally in the US, I got to have that mix where I could understand, you know, Western values combined with some of the Eastern European and European values.  So, that helped me a bit, but you know, a lot of other people who were from neither of these two areas were different.

And also, you know, even values aside, just people are all unique, and we all have to have our own stories to tell.  So that presented some challenges, especially working remotely when you haven’t personally met someone. We had a number of people who worked with us, and we never actually met them in person.  So that presented its own challenges, where you have no opportunity to have a coffee break with someone or you don’t just go for a little chat so that in itself had some challenges in the beginning.

Andrea:  Yeah.  You mentioned the challenges of having to work with people – and getting to work – but the challenges of working with people on that global scale and from different cultures.  What were some of the things that you did – tricks or principles that you lived by and still do, maybe – to help you bridge that gap and to understand different cultures and help them to acclimate to the culture of your company?

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Sure.  That’s a great question.  Well, one of the things we’ve done is getting to know the person on a personal level and trying to learn over time what it is that drives them.  And I think that helps a lot to understand whether they’d be a fit to the team. In the beginning, we didn’t really have any formal process to bring someone on board.  We just kind of looked at the skill sets, and if they worked out, we just said, “All right, you know, we’re going to give you a try.” And we’ve got some limited experience with that, limited success with that where we had, you know, maybe two out of three people ended up being alright and a fit, I would say.  And one out of three was really not a good thing and disastrous, I would say.

So, we were spending a lot of time in training these people and bringing them onboard and wasting about 35% of the effort, and that was a lot.  Also, it took a toll on some of the trainers where you had people really coming in to train the newcomers, and they were wasting lot of their time, and that was demotivational for the next time.

So, we ended up being much more rigorous and figuring out what it is that makes a right person for the team, you know, besides the skills.  And today – and for a number of years now – we’ve hired on our core values as opposed to on the skills. So that helped. While them being… flexibility that the person, you know, values.  They value flexibility. We value flexibility. We want them to be flexible with us in many ways, you know. In exchange, we offer them flexibility for working from home, working from any location.  If they were to be… you know, they want to go spend vacation or spend some time working elsewhere, they can.

So, a lot of those things we offer, you know, in exchange, we request that they are flexible with us.  And we have number of things we want from the person; such as some hours that we want covered in addition to the normal times.  And maybe sometimes when there is a hot season, we want them to stay, you know, and doing a double shift or things like that. There are a lot of things that we require that also would call for flexibility.

And the other one that the business, big one, is ownership, and I think ownership is a huge thing with us.  And a lot of companies realized that over time that ownership of having someone drive themselves to achieve certain results is super important.  With us, we don’t have a boss, you know, standing behind someone’s chair and tapping their shoulder to say, “Hey, how’s it going,” you know. So, we don’t have that, just kind of typical office environment isn’t there.  So, we rely on these people to be self-starters and to be at least carrying their weight or more. So that’s super important for us as well.

Andrea:  How do you know if somebody is a self-starter if they’re going to take ownership when you’re first interviewing them and you’re talking to them about the possibility of working for you?

Dmitriy Peregudov:  That’s a great question.  We don’t really know, and no one ever knows.  But I think having an understanding in general if this format of work works out and if the person has done something in their personal life that shows an ownership or a certain degree of independency in their own lives – that someone, for example, who immigrated to another country and had done things on their own there, so starting up from the ground – that kind of one slice of a person that might work for us.

It works out in our favor because skillsets sometimes where you have multilingual people who have, you know, two or more languages under their belt, that sort of shows.  And some of them would be immigrants, you know, naturally because they have known their own mother tongue and then they’ve immigrated to another country and they’ve learned – let’s say, someone came to Mexico and learned Spanish there and they might have picked up English on the way as well.  So that would a trilingual person, you know, working in Mexico who actually originally lived in Belgium or Russia. So that may be a good candidate for us.

And other things like, you know, what other ownership criteria, you know, are the people who are not afraid for opportunities.  You know, someone who’s talking to us, a company that doesn’t have an office; like, really doesn’t have a central location where people go to work, you know – and a lot of people today would find that… even today in the world where a lot of companies operate under that model – they would think, “Well, that’s kind of fishy.  That’s not…” So, we want the person to be opportunistic and taking a leap of faith, and you know, trusting someone. So, we want that opportunism as well in a person, and opportunism sometimes comes hand in hand with ownership as well. 

Andrea:  So, what are your other core values?  You mentioned flexibility and ownership. Do you mind sharing others with us?

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Sure.  So, customer focus is another big one for us.  From the very beginning, we realized how much customer experience matters.  Our customers, why they do business with us, in many ways, we are not the cheapest in service and yet, we’re often chosen against many other companies in the space because we do what we do very well.  And even when some issues may happen in the field, we always cover our customers and we make sure at the end that they are satisfied.

So, we realized that after, you know… my personal experiences were quite negative when I was starting the company with the experience of using some other companies was negative and also understanding how much the deficiency exists in the space of, you know, flower and gift delivery today.  If that was true back in 2002 and 2007, and it’s still true today, where a lot of companies out there exist and being created every day, but those who really can deliver on the customer promise – there’s only handful of those, and that I’m proud to say we’re one of those who are able to deliver on that.

Andrea:  Well, you don’t stick around as long as you have and service as many countries as you do without good customer service because that’s pretty much all it is.  Your product, of course, is important as well, but I mean, my goodness, yeah. I would think that you would hear if something didn’t turn out like somebody expected.

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Absolutely.  In fact, we realized that we’re not in service of delivering, you know, gift baskets or flowers – we’re actually in service of delivering emotions and connections.  So that really bring us to sort of the importance of a customer interaction and that’s far above just survivability. I mean, surviving in space, that is important and that’s where some people say, “Well, I’m gonna focus on the customer so that I’m better than others.”  But once you realize that, you know, you’re not really selling gifts, you’re selling relationships; you’re selling an opportunity for someone to build a relationship or to improve it. So, once you realize that that’s what you’re selling then, you know, the only thing that really matters is the customer experience with that.

Andrea:  Hmm, well, that’s such a deeper purpose than being here to make money.  And I’m sure that that’s the case for the people that work for the company as well.  I’m guessing that you communicate that with them; that you’re here to help facilitate or help build connections and help with relationships.  And that probably means something to them.

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Yes.  Indeed, it does.  And you know, one of the slices there is that when we do bring someone over, another important part is, “What is compensation like,” and then people do ask that question.  Obviously, that’s important for someone working to be compensated fairly. In the beginning, especially early on, we didn’t have a lot of funds available for compensating newcomers.  And we generally hired from, you know, very fresh out of school or someone who had related experience in what we do. And so, the offering salaries were generally on the lower side.

So, oftentimes, people would join us, not because they want a high pay or not because they want to have a high personal achievement record.  Sort of like, we deterred individually. So, we deter those who want to make career out of it necessarily. So, people who came in, they really sort of care about what we do and wanted to be part of it.  So that really sort of took away that… those hunters who came for the money. So that helped us as well, I think.

Andrea:  I can see how immigrants would be able to relate to this problem of wanting to connect overseas and being able to maintain those relationships in meaningful ways even with gifts and things like that.  I love that there are so much continuity in the values. You mentioned flexibility, ownership, and customer focus. Are there others?

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Sure.  So, besides those, we worked on finding other values, searching the keys for what they are because we really didn’t want to make any of those up.  You know, a lot of companies say, “Well, we have those values, and we’ll just put them on a poster.”

Andrea:  Yeah.

Dmitriy Peregudov:  For a number of years, we haven’t had any values formally decided on.  But lately, you know, about four years ago, our management team got together in one of the offsite meetings.  We do those every year, which I should tell you more about later. But that [was] really the time where we kind of reflected on who we are, and what is it we do, and we’ve understood that we value diversity.

And diversity is a big thing, right?  Diversity of customer base – we have all kinds of customers.  We have corporate and personal. We have, you know, those who prefer to order all out of the form, and those who prefer to talk to the Chatbot.  We have those who just want to order by email and those who just go to the website. So, we have, like, all kinds of different customers. So, flexibility is important for us to offer to our customers, and they’ll come from different countries, so different languages, different cultures, you know, religions, sexual orientations.

So, we try to go for gifts to all those groups and being as more flexible for all the different niche groups.  So, niche customer base is, you know, what comes with that flexibility. And internally, we’re also very flexible and diverse within the team.  So, we have people from all over the world working for us, and also, they have different religions and all that comes with it. So when it all comes together with the trips we take, you know, people from all over the place come together once a year to one new country.

So, every year, we pick a country, and we take our team there.  And that’s where we brainstorm. We learn about each other. We put little green dots in Google to faces.  You know, how _____.  So, we tried to kind of go away from that and say, “Well, now this green dot becomes a real person, a real face.”  And we learned about each other in those corporate outings. They are sort of semiformal, semi-fun, so we really educate each other in an informal environment and that’s really the focus of those meetings.

This year, we’re planning to go to Portugal and to Columbia as well because that kind of seems the places we haven’t been to yet.  We’ve got 200 countries on the map, so I’m not sure if we’re going to make it, but…

Andrea:  You’re going to need quarterly meetings instead of…

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Yeah.  This year, we have _____, so we’re making two meetings.  Usually, we do one. But this year, we’ve got exceptionally a good Christmas where we’ve got a lot of _____ during the season.  So, we decided that we can afford two meetings this year, and we’re going to send people to two countries this time.

Andrea:  Hmm.  So, who all do you have attend that meeting?

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Well, generally, it’s the management team is a core of that.  And in addition to it, you know, every year we have newcomers who join the team, and they don’t know about the company enough to really fully drink our Kool-Aid.  So, we need to kind of get them accustomed, sort of get them to learn about the company and about people more. So, those newcomers are first in line to be invited.  Of course, once we believe that they are a good fit. Usually after two or three months, you kinda know that’s a right fit. But generally, when we hire for the holiday then after the holiday, we’ve get to keep some of the people who were hired seasonally.  So that’s the time in spring when we get to keep people for good.

And if they feel like that’s a right fit for them, you know, a lot of them also realize that they may have enjoyed Christmas season, but they also have, you know, really burned out.  And those who were burned out after one season, they’re not really a fit because that means it’s probably not their type of work. It’s not their cup of tea to continue. So, we end up inviting newcomers, you know, most of the management team and also some of the people who also are sort of core team.

So, generally each trip is between seventeen and twenty-two people or so.  It’s a small group. We usually rent, like, a big villa or we rent a small hotel all for us.  And we do stuff like educational topics – everyone brings a topic to present. And also, we have sometimes some professionals who join to present certain topics.  And we meet our partners in each country. That’s a big thing as well. So, we have those who delivers for us in that country, they join us for the trip. We learn about them.  They learn about us. That kind of builds those relationships as well.

Andrea:  Hmm.  I love this.  I’m just kind of jotting notes as you’re talking about it and I’m thinking about how powerful that is for really building the team for them to be able to feel like they’re really a part of it.

Dmitriy Peregudov:  It’s very important.

Andrea:  Yeah.  You said educational topics – do you ever do strategic planning in these meetings or is that saved for a different time?

Dmitriy Peregudov:  We do.  To some degree, we would have strategic meetings during the year as well.  Those [are] kind of done usually after the season when we kind of look back and see what worked, what didn’t – and we continue on.  Now, strategy is certainly becoming more and more important, so those meetings are quite important. Each meeting has a theme of its own.  Like last year, we had a theme of Never Lose A Customer Again, and that’s a book by Joey Coleman.  It’s kind of a book that we decided that we will make our bible for a year or two.

The idea of that book is, you know, several strategies of how do you centralize all the processes you have around the customer – how do you make customer focus your core competency, and what do you do to never lose a customer again.

And so there’s a process in the book that defines a hundred-day process on how not to lose a customer.  So, we’ve started making changes in the company that would make us less likely to lose a customer. Of course, in reality, people do get lost is an issue for a lot of companies.  But we are not an exception in saying that, you know, it’s so much more expensive to attract a new customer, and it’s so much easier to keep an existing one happy.  So, once you start shifting your marketing dollars and your effort of the team to saving a customer, then you start realizing that you were wasting all these money to attract new-coming customers and you were really missing out on the golden opportunity of keeping your existing ones happy.

Andrea:  Yes.  It’s so much more expensive to acquire new customers, so it makes a lot of sense to spend a lot more time and effort focusing on the customers that you already have.

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Exactly.  And in fact, it’s actually part of the business that we have.  Especially with corporate customers where a lot of our corporate clients have realized that for them to keep a relationship with their own customers up and keep loyalty of their customers and grow their relationships with their customer base is through gifting.  So, what we do for them is, in a lot of ways, what we do for ourselves. So, you know, also realizing customer loyalty and keeping customers happy and also building the relationships by sending gifts, that’s what a lot of our customers understand.

You know, Christmas and year-round, they create birthday programs for their clients, for their customers and for their employees as well, so building loyalty with both employees and customers is in a lot of ways part of the strategy for other customers we service.

Andrea:  Yes, of course.  That makes complete sense.  Dmitriy, this has been a really interesting conversation.  I’m curious; when you think about the listener who’s out there wanting to lead a purposeful team, wanting to have a voice of influence, do you have any parting words for them?  Any last piece of advice that you’d want to offer?

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Sure.  The technical and financial parts of any business owner or a CEO is oftentimes calls us to look at the numbers.  And I think numbers are important, no matter what other things we have to look at. But I think the numbers will come together well and profitability will be realized if you start focusing on the right things.  I think that’s what I would suggest, you know, focusing on the customer and looking at how to make it right for the customer or how to design the business around your customer – making that work will make your numbers work.  And shifting more of your focus to the existing customers who have chosen you once and who have much higher chance of choosing you again really is a key to our success.

And as for the team, explain out to the team and letting them have a piece of ownership of particular area, no matter how small having someone to be heard.(26:54)  In our case, it’s very important that everyone who is part of the team has a chance to voice their concerns.  And we listen to our team very closely, and management team does not ignore those words. So that really makes everyone feel like they actually own part of that company and part of the process.  So, I think on the team side, I recommend letting people be heard. And on the customer side focus on that and make sure that you take care of those existing customers.

Andrea:  Great words of wisdom from Dmitriy.  Thank you so much for taking time to be a voice of influence for our listeners today.

Dmitriy Peregudov:  Thank you, Andrea.  Thanks for having me.