By Jeff Lewis
Stephen King has never assembled his entire staff under one roof.
The chief executive officer of Calgary-based Mob4Hire conducts business wirelessly, more often than not in transit, out of a knapsack and via Skype.“My office is in that bag,” he says. “My computer, all my connectors, everything I need to operate. I just pick my bag up and go to a new location and I have my office again.”
The nomadic lifestyle is part and parcel of running a micro-multinational. King’s latest stopover was Barcelona, Spain, at the World Mobile Conference, a trade show with a distinct emphasis on tech, gadgets and increasingly, apps. Mob4Hire helps mobile carriers test applications on different handsets in different locales on different networks.
“We connect mobile developers and market researchers with a global community of users for the purposes of making [the technology] better,” King explains, speaking from Calgary on a borrowed handset (he dropped his BlackBerry in a Spanish toilet).
His company’s affiliates include testers – mainly young, university-educated males – in 144 countries, developers and researchers in 84 countries and a skeleton staff of 12, four of which are contract employees, spread throughout Vancouver, Seattle and Thailand, among other places.
Employing a scattered workforce is one of the challenges inherent in managing what are essentially small businesses with a global outlook.
The American Council on Competitiveness described micro-multinationals in 2007 as firms that are global from day one. They aren’t anchored by a traditional headquarters and access international markets – once dominated by corporate giants – via platforms provided by the likes of Amazon, eBay, Google and Fedex.
Pages: 1 2
Category: Articles
Leave a Reply
