How I got the CM role at GoDaddy [Tales of a Country Manager]
I have been very intentional about how I manage my career in the last fifteen years at least. Since I started to understand what I wanted to do, I also knew the opportunities would not knock on my door.
That was the case with GoDaddy. But to understand how I made it to GoDaddy, I need to tell you about KingHost. I was doing pretty well at KingHost, a medium-size Brazilian hosting player. A company founded by a solopreneur and controlled by him as the CEO and only shareholder. This founder and I met during college and he offered me a job when I left BlackBerry.
The hosting business was completely new to me, I had some pretty basic knowledge as a user of hosting services for my personal websites. Soon as I joined the company and met the team I realized I would have to learn as much as could and as fast as possible to gain their respect. Most of the leadership team — at the time I joined — had been at KingHost since its inception. Software engineers, infrastructure engineers, folks with deep technical knowledge on the field.
I was seen as an outsider, someone that knew nothing about hosting and had to prove my value to them.
Learned a lot by being humble, asking questions, expending time with them. Creating rapport and understanding their needs as professionals. It was critical as I had a big mission ahead, promote the largest rebranding, company repositioning, since its creation. It was not only launching a new brand, it meant recreating the entire purchase flow on the website. A company-wide effort that would require allies in various teams, mainly on the core engineering teams.
I can say the re-launch of KingHost was a success. A modern purchase flow, with flexible tracking capabilities (embedding e-commerce best practices), a more fluid communication to allow a direct conversation with the end user — small business owners — without losing the loyal tech-savvy customer base that brought KingHost there.
At that point, after almost two years in the role, I started to realize that I wouldn't have much of a career path there. The organizational structure was very flat and I was already reporting to the CEO. The business ambitions weren't very clear to me at that time and what else I could accomplish there in terms of growing the business. That was when I decided to build my next opportunity. Didn't want to waste all the amazing learning on the hosting/domains business I'd acquired there.
My thought was, what are the main global competitors that don't have an official presence in Brazil that I could help them be more successful here?
The list came down to three logos that called my attention. I went to Linkedin and looked up for the senior leaders that would potentially be the hiring managers for a country manager in Brazil. I think I sent a message to 3 or 4 folks at each company with roles like vp of hosting, coo, vp international, chief commercial officer, cmo… I don't recall how many replied to me, but I think it was only 2 or 3 of them.
But only one really engaged in a conversation and was genuinely interested in learning more about what I had to say. He was the svp of hosting at GoDaddy at the time, we exchanged a couple of messages until he scheduled a skype call. In that conversation, I learned GoDaddy had plans for international expansion, and Latin America was on the roadmap. He introduced me to the EVP of International — the exec in charge of international expansion and hiring the team.
I've got to the decision-maker before he was planning to open the role. He was in the process of hiring a vp for Latin America and wanted me to get to know the person before moving forward. After a couple of months, I met the new vp and some other folks and got an offer.
Luck favors the prepared mind.
That's true to me. I reached the right person at the right time, that person was in a good mood to reply to my "cold message" on LinkedIn, I was prepared to show them I was capable of doing the job. The stars aligned and I joined GoDaddy.
