Business challenge

Largest Co-living operator in Europe with over 10,000 rooms in Italy wants to expand immediately to France  and Spain, while considering UK & Germany on a second phase They face strategic needs ranging from brand positioning, process implementation, document adaptation, workflow management and growing their international team, from finding their leaders to key local strategic partners. Their main challenge is taking care of today’s business while preparing for future international expansions while pivoting internally from an Italian StartUp culture to a european enterprise leader, facing multiple M&As, team rotations, and expansion.

Approach

• Implanting team: acting as Interim Head of International Operations, we directly supported the CEO by advising on areas of improvement, building scalable approaches, hiring local team and advising on key cultural differences to adapt for, from local team needed to launch, to legal adaptation of co-living product.
• Opening and Set Ups: Being PM for preamble market research, proper set ups, from asset creations (playbooks, blueprints per country, per asset portfolio assessments and setting up key objectives) to mapping opening workflows, checklists, programming cross functional meeting leading to successful opening, commercialization and post openings.
• Management and support:  Ramp up, support team on the ground, coordinate and tone setting with different departments, HR support, ideating profiles of JDs, interviewing, consolidating and being the key link with HQ and satellite offices, assisted in YAMMER implementation. 

Conclusion

Aside from being culturally challenging, one needs to recognize the friction between new markets operating as a new start up and HQ being in a different phase of growth wanting to become more procedural. Navigating does two realities to help each other instead of impeding growth is key for healthy internal culture. 

We worked on reinforcing the idea of One global team, serving a business focused on community (co -living). We are still in continuous relation for special projects, to ensure as they focus on growth they don’t lose their roots.