Abhiraj Bhal UrbanClap CEO & Founder (Now Urban Company) Behind the scenes with Kalari Capital

it’s my pleasure to invite & interview Abhiraj Bhal UrbanClap CEO & Founder (now known as Urban Company).

Introduction — Abhiraj Bhal is the Urban Company CEO and Co-founder (formerly UrbanClap). Abhiraj Bhal, Varun Khaitan & Raghav Chandra together co-founded Urban Company in November 2014.

UrbanClap was renamed Urban Company in early 2020. Urban Company is a home services marketplace that bridges the gap between professional and trained service providers and consumers who seek high-quality services from the comforts of their homes.

Urban Company has established a global presence in Australia, UAE, Singapore along with several cities in India.

Currently, it is Asia’s largest home services marketplace.

—

Hello everyone

Host — Abhiraj thanks for taking the time

Host — The word culture is bandied around all the time what does it take to build a great culture. I was just checking glass door ratings and everybody dreads that.

But Urbanclap/Urban Company has phenomenal ratings so you’ve done something right by everyone what goes into building a great culture for you?

Abhiraj Bhal UrbanClap CEO & Founder:

I think the first is a concept called ownership which is a very core culture pillar for Urban Company.

We like to organize our company in a way that every individual in the company is the owner of something some piece of work some workstream.

Within the company, we do an organization redesign almost every 18 months because we realized that somewhere every 18 months or so the current organization structure is not well suited for ownership at a fast scale.

But we’ve also done it through what I feel very proudly as perhaps one of the best ESOP programs in the country UrbanClap/Urban Company is very generous in our ESOP awards. Urban Company has to date given ESOPs to more than 600 employees and for our current 1200 employees, about 500 of them have ESOPs.

Abhiraj Bhal Urban Company CEO Founder:

We have a very very fair ESOP policy so some things like linear vesting infinite hold period accelerate investing and hares being awarded at face value these are in our opinion very employee-friendly ESOP terms

I think that’s one.

Second I would say Vani a topic that is again fairly close to my heart is the concept of fairness. I think for organizations to do to really scale and do well over time over years it’s very important that team members feel that the organization is fair.

It is fair and it is perceived to be fair both are important and fairness is one thing that is very hard to do to scale especially as a company goes from being a startup to a slightly mature one.

How do you continue to bar raise on talent how do you ensure that the way people are rewarded in the company, performance management compensation, all of your nuts and bolts of your hr systems and processes align to fairness?

Because the one thing you need is people to feel a certain psychological safety net where they know that if they do if they put in their heart and soul into the company rewards and career progression and learning is a given and the system is fair and the system is going to judge them fairly but yeah I think the larger point is culture has to be deliberate.

Don’t let culture happen to you like weeds in the garden it will happen one way or the other so you want to you want it to be deliberate you wanted to be thought of as a founder and a leadership team.

Host — one thing I know that this conversation for sure will be fascinating because you're very original thoughts on many things and I know that urban company has a great ESOP program that’s unusual and congratulations on visualizing that.

But I do want to change the topic to hiring do you have a framework do you have a hiring philosophy or set of principles that have worked for you.

Abhiraj Bhal Urbanclap CEO and Founder:

yes I think there are two or three things that we have thought about when it comes to hiring I think is I would say probably one of the most important if not the most important thing for a startup to get right I think right off the bat probably the most important thing is to continuously hire bar raisers every individual that one that a company hires at any level in the company let’s say you’re hiding at a VP level or an EVP level or even a manager at any level you have to make sure that the individual that is being hired is in the top quartile if not the top decile of the existing bar.

At that level, this will continue up the internal bar in the company and it will become a beautiful virtuous cycle.

Often what ends up happening is that we compromise on hiring and we would end up hiring because it is typically us as companies always are in a bandwidth constraint.

Hiring is rarely done ahead of the curve usually done when the position should have been closed yesterday.

Sometimes given the pressures of work given the pressures of scaling you can make the mistake of compromising and not hiring a bar raiser and I think that’s one of the worst mistakes that we’ve done.

The only way to avoid that is to raise the bar higher so that I think that’s one-two despite your best efforts you’ll have to turn the team and you may have to turn it in a couple of times over your journey from zero to IPO and that’s because startups will scale and scale very fast and leaders may not necessarily scale as fast.

The best leaders will realize this and will not let it be a point of ego and if you’ve had an honest and transparent conversation with them throughout they will not see this coming in as a surprise and they will make way for a better leader to come and they will learn from that better leader and grow only if they are not scaling and are no longer investing in their learning and their growth should you take the tough decision to part ways with them as long as they’re scaling and learning and they’re growing even if they’re not keeping pace with the company one as a founder must do everything possible to retain them because that’s the core fabric of the culture and the DNA of the company

You don’t want to be mercenary with your leaders and your the team you want to be a missionary with that but at the same time, you have a fiduciary responsibility to keep growing the company so if you don't make these hard calls and don’t have these tough discussions then it will basically slow your growth down.

The compromise will come and grow, the other way to think about it is where are you spending the most amount of time what's keeping you up at night right so the functions and the areas of the business that you’re spending more time problem-solving that’s keeping you up at the night it’s not giving you the leverage and therefore you probably need help there so so don’t shy away from bringing those bar raisers and having these tough conversations this is probably needed to be done once twice sometimes.

Host: I wish there was a boot camp just because I know this is one of the difficult things for almost every founder.

We should create such a boot camp maybe that’s one of the future programs.

Abhiraj: I think the only other third point I would say is that as a founder your role changes and recognize how that role changes so you know you go from sort of being a builder to a designer to sort of designing the system to be an enabler.

I think at some point like as you bring more skilled leaders in another the life you could have also reported into some of them you have to give them space to build to make mistakes you have to get out of the way.

Host — how do you evolve yourself as a leader ?

Abhiraj Bhal:

Reading writing and talking.

I mean these three I would say at the highest level so read a lot and reading is a combination of reading plus podcasts so both of them together also have over time developed a very good trusted network of people who forward me who do the grunt work to forward me great articles to read so I'm usually just catching up on all the forwards that I get apart from that, of course, a few books and a few podcasts so that’s one piece.

Writing, I find it very clarifying and so I write a lot I write probably more than I should I write in every meeting, I write after every meeting I write before every meeting in prep for that meeting find writing to be extremely clarifying and I definitely strongly encourage people to write.

Talking to people like you other people in the industry younger founders who are starting new people who’ve done been there and done that talking to the team. Talking to most importantly customers and service partners.

I have a whole bunch of service partners on my Whatsapp I get bombarded with WhatsApp all the time from service partners, customers have my email id so they can ping me anytime before the pandemic, I used to try to spend half a day a week in the field shadowing partners and most cases I would pretend to be like a plus one to the service partner so most customers wouldn't know who I am and that gave me a great opportunity to be like a fly on the wall to see how the service partner and the customer interacts you pick up small things you pick up how even society guard is treating the service partner and things like that very interesting nuggets and almost every company has done something very well so just sort of reaching out and learning from them helps a lot.

Host: what I think is fantastic about the urban company is that not only have you scaled rapidly which you have but you’ve done that without really dropping the customer experience and keep that the same standard of customer experience.

So what’s your advice to companies on when to scale? How to scale? even go global what to do what not to do in that whole dilemma?

Abhiraj Bhal: yes I think in the long run customer experience and growth are perfectly aligned and unfortunately in the short run they are perfectly misaligned.

So that’s the difficult part you know which is the short-run versus the long run I think what we have done is one is we have internally genuinely we live and breathe NPS as a metric it is as important we only have two metrics that matter to us as a company our top line right now we’re not very very hard focused on profitability so one non-stop metric for the company is the top line the other non-stop metric for the company is the customer NPS.

I would say between the two for me at least the more important metric is the customer NPS metric like a lot of companies say we’re obsessed with customer experience but you have to be obsessed and it has to be reflective in the internal trade-offs that you make I think the second thing is actually the scale allows you to do things and make investments in customer experience.

Which you probably didn’t have when you were two or three times smaller as a company.

So every year one of the things we do is are we ask ourselves what is it that this new scale that we have seen allows us to do now which we couldn’t have done earlier.

What kind of investments can we now make into the core quality of customer experience that has led to investments we’ve made over time like training.

Today we have over 100 training centers in the country we have an in-house fleet of 150 trainers any given month we’re training four to five thousand service professionals so that has been a big investment.

It has allowed us to go deeper into categories and create category-specific capabilities. it has allowed us to invest in the supply chain of products buying from OEMs so a whole bunch of I would say capability building.

Because eventually, quality is only going to come from if you have the core capabilities of your business built out if you have the sort of highways of your business sold outright so I think there one shouldn’t be shy like I particularly in India one shouldn’t shy away from heavy lifting quality in most sectors in India comes thin so you almost as a technology company have to say okay technology is super important and it is going to touch every aspect of my business and my operations and many of them will be technology first or technology only but I will also build the core underlying supply chain in this category I will build it versus just aggregated and that’s somewhat different from the silicon valley view of doing things but my views in India there are the real modes and the ability to build a large business only comes if you do that

host — this is a wonderful conversation I took away many things to put into my notebook and I really appreciate the generosity of your time to talk and share your ideas and thoughts and insights to the rest of the startup ecosystem and community thank you so much for having me it’s a pleasure speaking to you

This video can be seen below:

Tags — Abhiraj Singh Bhal, Abhiraj Bhal, Abhiraj Bhal Urbanclap, Abhiraj Bhal Email, Urbanclap CEO, Urban Company CEO, CEO Of Urbanclap, Urbanclap Founder, Urbanclap CEO Email