People, Purpose & Process

Since our founding in 2015, like many startups, we have our own struggles to define ourselves, our strategy and our principles in a fast-paced and competitive tech startup environment. With targets in mind, and the need to fundraise at the early stages to stay afloat, at one point, we were constantly focusing on building new products fast, or getting more sales.

But there was a period of time, we have forgotten about ourselves, why we started the company and spent countless hours trying to do the impossible in the eyes of the outsiders. This was made worst when some of our early employees were poached by more well-funded startups, and some even tried to create issues and tensions within the team when they couldn't get what they wanted. This resulted in an exodus of some members of our team between 2017-19, and at some point, existing employees also had to deal with negative feedbacks on public job portals from disgruntled staff. 

However, we didn't give in to the negativity, and decided to learn from the mistakes and climb back up. With the prudent use of funds in the past years, we still have the resources to recruit new key team members, restructure the teams, and define our guiding principles ("PPP").

(1) Purpose

(2) People

(3) Process

SourceSage was founded by me in 2015, with the objective to digitize my father's (John) B2B business as it had incredibly tedious and fragmented processes especially from the procurement side of the business. With the idea to create a transparent B2B marketplace to emulate B2C marketplaces and to automate the process for him, I managed to rope in my father (John) as a co-founder and fundraised from WaveMaker in the same year. 

Along the 7 years journey, beyond my father's business, we have helped countless companies including DBS Bank to build B2B platforms to streamline B2B buying process. This also gave us 7 years of on-the-ground experiences of studying the pain points in the market which then led us to create our best selling product till date, SAGE in Sourcing, a multi-catalogue whitelabeled B2B marketplace. Although we have now expand our B2B marketplace catalogues to cater to industries beyond chemicals (i.e. DHL, Certis, Cushman & Wakefield), we have not forgotten our origin and our purpose of creating B2C experience for B2B buyers, just as what I have done for my father as a chemicals buyer, 7 years ago.

With a clear purpose, the logical way for us to expand our business was to look for people who believe in the same thing as we do. With limited funding, our recruitment could only limit to new graduates. While this also meant greater learning curve and time needed to train the new staff, this also gave us plenty of opportunities to define our talent strategy from scratch that suits our company at that time. After few years of iterations, we managed to refine the 4R's within our talent strategy:

(1) Recruitment, 

(2) Retention 

(3) Recognition

(4) Rewards

For example, in SourceSage full-time recruitment today, we have a reverse 3 stage process including the C-level executive in the first round, the Head of HR in the second round, and a member of the team or team lead in the last round. And prior to selection for interview, every candidate will have to take a culture-fit test. This allows us to filter out candidates who probably will not suitable for SourceSage startup culture. And, the last stage of the interview will typically consists of employment verification from their reporting officers in their last 2 jobs. This differs greatly from the early days of recruitment where the candidate probably do not even know what it means to join a startup.

After we recruit that candidate, we will then plan out 1 week of onboarding, and 3 weeks of on-the-job training. This includes checklists from declaration of conflict of interests, HR softwares to training guides, and reading of learning reports of the mistakes previous candidates for that role have made. This allows the new employee to identify potential pitfalls. While every employee has a clear set of KPIs which are clearly stated in employment contracts before they join, we also aim to help them achieve their targets as much as we can within a 3-6 months period. As such, SourceSage has also laid the foundation of Performance Improvement Programme (PIP) which rotate them to other functions and other targets instead of terminating their contracts when their targets are not met. This differs from many of the startups and companies which have a stricter hire and fire culture.

In retaining and recognizing performing employees, we have now reformed our organization chart to remove C-level positions, to make way for younger employees to climb up with the establishment of team leads and deputy team lead appointments. For example, more than 50% of our team leads are under the age of 35, while more senior executives act as mentors to younger team leads. When an employee performs well, he or she will then be appointed as a deputy or team lead, and when a team lead performs well, he or she will then be promoted to manager, senior manager, director or senior director roles.

Finally, we have moved beyond an all work and no play culture to incorporate monthly team leads, birthday celebrations, onboarding gift packs, and monthly company wide lunches, including our overseas staff from Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Vietnam and Japan. Prior to Covid pandemic, we have also organized company wide overseas trip to Vietnam for a week!

Having clear purpose and a good team are necessary ingredients of a good startup, but does not necessary guarantee scalability. Beyond having a good business model, sales channel and unit economics, we also need to ensure repeatable and scalable processes. As such, we have also appointed in 2022, our first Head of Risk and Compliance to oversees the processes within our product development, operations and sales teams. By listing every single step of our processes, identifying the gaps, flaws and duplication, we can then identify the potential risks, mitigate them and processes which can be automated on a weekly basis.