Well, good evening, everybody. My name is Trina Blair and I am absolutely delighted to be here with you all.Well, 140,000 women in tech, 179 countries, three days, and one global conference. What an event. Isn't it brilliant to bring so many women in tech together around the world? I'm absolutely delighted to be here tonight to present to you from Australia and on a topic that I'm very, very passionate about. But first, let me introduce myself. As I say, my name is Trina Bleth, and I'm the CEO and founder of FD Global Connections. It's a company I started over ten years ago to work with businesses as they scale from Australia into The United States. Most recently, I founded FD Global Academy, which works with scale up leaders all over the world from Australia to India, from The UK to Sweden, from Belgium into The United States.

I'm gonna share more with you a little bit about FD Global Academy later on. I am a global citizen like many of you. I've lived and worked in Australia and The United States. I've won a number of international awards, Stevie Awards, two gold and three gold and two two bronze. As I mentioned, I've been working over ten years with scaling businesses globally. My experience spans both corporate and entrepreneurial communities, including three times as a startup founder. I'm also a qualified company director, and I combine my CEO responsibilities with a board portfolio. Last year was a real highlight for me as I published my debut book, Decoding Global Growth, How Successful Companies Scale Internationally. It did win book of the year for the Stevie Businesswomen's Awards.

It was a number one bestseller in Australia and the number one best new release in The United States. And I do a lot of guest, appearances on media throughout Australia and The US on the topic of global expansion. The agenda we're going to cover off in the next forty minutes is the topic that I've selected for the Global Tech Conference, scanning your business involves more than great tech. I'm gonna cover off why it is that great tech is important, but it isn't really scaling the business. I'm going to explore growth demands versus product market fit, scaling without structure, and a concept which is called scale from the inside out. Then I'm going to ask you to do an activity. So get your keypads or your pens ready.

Then I'm going to, again, introduce FD Global Academy, and we will have time for questions at the end. So let's dive in. I love this quote from Marco Polo, who was a Venetian explorer from the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. The quote reminds me and is a great analogy that to build anything, you first need a firm foundation. What I'm here today to share with you all some considerations to build a firm foundation upon which you can scale and grow your business. Because without a firm foundation to build your scale up, there'll be no arch in your business. So why isn't great tech scaling my business? Well, let's start with a familiar frustration. Many of the founders have an amazing tech, a real innovation, but they still hit a wall when it comes to growth.

And why is that? Well, because scaling isn't just about product brilliance. It's about building an entire business around that product. Did you know that approximately 70% of scale ups fail? And that seventy percent is a universal number. It doesn't matter if you're talking about scale ups in The United States, throughout Asia, in Europe, in Australia. It's 70% globally. Most failures we see in the scale up phase don't come from a lack of innovation. Far from it. They come from a lack of execution. And today, I'll break down what it really takes to grow beyond great tech. Many founders believe exceptional tech is the silver bullet, Scaling stalls when strategy, operations, and leadership aren't aligned.

Getting product market fit is a really big milestone, but it's only the start. What holds companies back from scaling is a lack of infrastructure. Leaders don't have the capacity, that is the systems, the people, the funding to keep up with the demand. They also don't have the the discipline to make hard scaling decisions. And weak discipline in decision making is where a lot will fail. Decision making by the leader is absolutely essential. Excuse me. And as the business grows, excuse me, as the business grows, we'll learn that delegation is an essential part of an entrepreneur's toolkit. There are also gaps in capability, the capability to build and lead at the next level, over reliance on founders versus building real capability.

What I've observed is that entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of change, not only if they start up, but the effective entrepreneurs are those who have the insight to understand where they're at on their capability spectrum. Scaling without structure, growth becomes dangerous. You can easily outgrow your systems, exhaust your team, and miss targets, and this is where resilience is tested. You need systems and leadership that can absorb growth, not be broken by it. Resilience isn't about surviving. It's about being ready. What we do know is that scaling prematurely burns cash and it burns morale, and start ups implode without resilience. You need more than code. You need a company that's built to scale. So let's shift to the solution. Real scaling happens when the business itself becomes scale ready. I use a framework called the six pillars of scalable growth. These are not buzzwords. They're strategic anchors. We talk about capacity, discipline, capability, resilience, operational readiness, and achievement orientation.

When these align, your business can grow intentionally, not reactively. And remember, your tech is the engine, but the structure and the foundation is the fuel system. So let me break these down these down a little bit further for you. Capacity is very much around your team and resources. Can you actually deliver at a larger scale? It's also about your suppliers and making sure that they understand your goals, your visions, and the impact it's going to have on them. Do they have the capacity to support your growth? When we think about discipline, it is about the decision making, sticking to strategy and not chasing every shiny object, which is so easy to do in a scale up.

And capability is essential making sure you have the right leadership and not just the talented founders. Other work that I've done around leadership capability shows that over the business life cycle from prototype to start up to scale up to maturity and growth stages, not only is the business life cycle changing and demands different elements at different stages, but the role of the founders also change.

So going from a start up to web founder where you've been a director and you've been directing all of your staff, telling them literally what you want done in their start up. As you scale, you no longer have the capacity to be able to do that. What you need to have built is a team that you can trust so that you can delegate. And you as the founder then work towards other more strategic elements in your business. So capability is, the right leadership, not just talented founders. So think about where you're at. Resilience, it prepares you for those shocks, the financial, the operational, and the emotional. It's the endurance in uncertainty and change. Operational readiness is where a lot of scale ups actually fall down. It means having processes, not just people.

Particularly as a scale up, you're going to have your financial processes as well as your people and culture processes very well integrated. However, as you scale into either a bigger part of your domestic market or you go international, there are three processes that you must have bettered down. You must be managing on a daily basis those key metrics that you've identified as your lead indicators and your lag indicators. And those three processes are your sales process, is your brand and marketing, and also your customer support. Really focus on those. And achievement orientation, well, that's about focus. It's outcomes over activity. It's about focusing on the inputs to achieve the outcomes, not the busyness that we all get caught up in in a day to day basis. So when you think about these six core foundations, it's essential that these align, and then scaling becomes possible. Right.

I now want you to think about your business, and I want you to give each of these foundations as, a rating on a scale of one to three. So one is poor. So for example, capacity. Remember, it's about the resources to meet increasing demand, not about all not about the people all the time. Your supplies was an example that I gave. Do you have the capacity? Is it established, which you would give a three? Is it basic? You know, you can do some more. You would give a two. Or is it not really there at the moment? It's one. So I'm going to give you a couple of minutes to go through and give yourself a scale on each of these foundations. So off you go. Alright. How did you go? When we get to the q and a, I'd love to get some feedback on how you went with your self assessment.

This is a really basic assessment of your business. I'm going to share with you a very complex assessment in a minute that you can do. So your mind shift is your secret weapon. You need to go from a founder to a global scaler. And here's the transformation I see in every successful scaler. The founder has to become the CEO. That means letting go of the product just enough to build the business around it. You stop being the doer and you still start becoming the architect. You're designing the systems. You're hiring the right people. You're thinking globally. You're the architect, not just the engineer, and you're building for sustainability, not for survival. So your role from founder to global scaler evolves from doing to enabling. So what does success look like? A scalable business doesn't rely on heroics. It runs on aligned systems, a really strong team, and a clear strategy.

You can take on new markets, launch new products, and still sleep at night because the infrastructure is sound. That's not just growth, it's sustainable growth. So when all of those six pillars are in place, you attract better capital and partners and talent sticks with you. They want to be with you because systems are supporting the growth, and your tech becomes the enabler, not the sole engine. So now what I want to do is share with you another assessment, a full assessment, and this is in FD Global Academy, which I'll introduce to you now. Our vision for the academy envisions a world where every scale up leader has the confidence, the knowledge, and network to expand globally. We strive to be the premier learning hub for ambitious business leaders to foster a dynamic community, a new movement, if you like, of innovators who drive sustainable international growth.

Within FD Global Academy, and the link is at the bottom there of the screen, we have a global scalability audit. It's a very comprehensive audit based on those six pillars and it identifies the gaps in your business of those six pillars and you will receive a very comprehensive report on your business's ability to scale, whether that's domestically, on a bigger bigger scale, or whether it's international.

Once you've completed the audit, and it takes about twenty, maybe thirty minutes, the yes, no, and maybe answers, you will then receive your individual report. And at the beginning of the report, it will look like this. So on the left hand side is the introduction, and this is a, global scalability audit that I actually did. On the right hand side, you'll see each of our six pillars, business configuration, strategic alignment, predictability, durability, operational readiness, and achievement orientation. You'll also notice the colors. Green is where I did really well. So on capability, I received 91%. The yellow is I did okay. There are some areas in operational readiness that I need to be mindful of, but I can still scale. However, I have two areas of red.

One is predictability, and this is my capacity to scale. Remember, this is all about processes, those sales, the marketing, and the customer support as well as your people and culture and your financial. So this is the predictability of those process outcomes. I have work to do, 33%. And then we have achievement orientation. So according to this at 56%, I don't have an achievement focused culture. I'm not measuring what I need to be measuring. And again, as a red, the advice here is not to scale. So for capacity and achievement orientation, the advice is not to scale until I have addressed the core items within each of those foundational elements.

Now what I've given you here is the beginning of the report, the front page if you like. Behind this page is an in-depth description of each of the scores that I've received. So there's a couple of pages on business configuration and capability. There are more details around capacity to scale and achievement orientation, all sitting behind this front page. So what I'd love to do is share with you FD Global Academy, which does concern the resources that we we're building a membership community and expert led growth tools. We have one part which is complimentary, which I'd love for you all to join, and I'll share with you the details of that in a moment. We then have our next level, which is global parts. At the moment, it's 39 US dollars per month.

But as of January, it's going up to to 59 US dollars per month. So it's cheaper at the moment, but it there will be a price increase from January. We also have an enterprise hub. So if you're representing an organization that might have a corporate venture fund or you've got an accelerator that you support start ups and scale ups with, let us know because we're working with enterprises who are looking to offer the courses that we have in the academy for their scale ups.

So let me quickly now share what we do have in the benefits for, the Academy plus members. So as I remember, as I mentioned, it is no cost per month. You receive invitations to monthly webinars with business leaders across the globe, and you have access to all of our courses. At the moment, as you can see, their global scalability is one of the courses, and we have five others. There is a fee for each of the courses, however. In the future, we are building market courses as well, and you get access to each of those market courses. So USA unlocked, Australia unlocked, Japan unlocked, Singapore unlocked, and UK unlocked. So that's the academy plus membership level. For subscribers, the global pass level, it is $39 a month.

As I mentioned, it is going up to $59 from the July 1. And in this, you receive a package of incredibly valuable resources. We have monthly master classes, not the webinars that were in the previous, but master classes next week. I'm doing a master class on storytelling, the secret ingredient of storytelling. You have access to a resources vault, and within that vault are templates that I've used in my consulting business over the last eleven years. You get 15% off all academy courses. There's an opportunity for each of our members to be featured in our weekly newsletter. We have global growth webinars as well. We have a private leaders community. There is a 20% off one to one mentoring with myself and you also have access to our playbooks. So it's really valuable information on various topics that we put within the academy.

In addition to the 39 or the 59 per month, you get 15% discount on all the courses in the academy. And as you can see, the global scalability audit is in there. And, of course, you also get first access to future courses. So with that, Socrates said questions are the beginning of wisdom. So I'm gonna go back to the main screen and hopefully, you'll be able to, hopefully, ask me some questions, which which I'd love to hear from you all. So if you have any questions, perhaps, either put on yours, I'm not sure how we do this in this platform, but maybe, type in a a message, and I'd be more than happy to answer that for you. I don't see any questions in here at the moment. Perhaps somebody would like to oh, thank you, Margaret.

In your experience, advising global leaders and entrepreneurs, what mindset shift is the most critical when moving from local to an international growth strategy? Yeah, Margaret. That's a that's a really, really great question. The most, the most critical piece, and I mentioned it, in the course but didn't go into a lot of detail about it, is delegation. So as a start up founder, the the founders are very, very deep in the day to day business. As the business goes international, what we do know is it needs to be founder led. So first of all, the founders need to ensure that they're up for going into a global market because let's not forget, they've probably invested most of their time, effort, and energy in the first couple of years going from prototype to start up.

That that within itself is a very significant, undertaking. And there are founders that I know that have actually said, look. I can't I I can't take this business international because I've done what I've needed to do, and so they're looking for someone else to step in. So going international ideally is. That's number one. But in order to do that, you've got to have the right structures within the business to be able to allow the founder the breadth to be able to go into a new market, and that is where you've got your delegation. And it's about delegation is all about defining the areas of responsibility really clearly for the next level of leadership so that when the founder is in the new market, their focus can be on that building relationships, building the network, generating interest, proving product market fit, and so forth.

They need somebody in the market, in their home market to be able to manage their home market. It's very difficult for a lot of the founders to let go of those reins because they've had so much control up until that time. But it is a really important skill, delegation, and, it it's one that I see many founders struggle. But once they understand why it is important to delegate and how they go about delegating, then then they're off and running with their global growth. Thank you for the question, Margaret. Perhaps somebody would like to share how they went on their own assessment. I asked you to write down where you thought you were with your business in terms of scaling.

So if you're looking to go international, was there one area within your business that, I highlighted one of the foundations? Okay. Alright. Well, we are going to wrap up a little bit earlier today, but we do have, a lot more guest speakers coming into various rooms. And so I do hope that you've enjoyed my presentation. I hope that you connect with me on LinkedIn. Let let me just get my details up for you. And please indicate in LinkedIn that you are on my call on my presentation so that I know who you are and where you've come from. But you can get more information about, the academy at that website there. You can email us at [email protected] or you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Trina Blair. And, of course, don't forget to log in to our learnworlds website, and, hopefully, you can complete your very own comprehensive, audit on your business and receive that that very comprehensive report on where your business is at with scaling globally.

I wanna thank you all very much for joining me and wish you a good