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Building Success Through Flexible Work : How LAFS Is Redefining Team Dynamics and Marketing with South Korean Founders in Vietnam?
There are marketing agencies that have a M/W, T/W, Th/T schedule. LAFS is one of them, and they're trying out different ways to work more efficiently with freelance team members and working on different days of the week!
At one point, their team grew to 35 people, but after some trial and error, they're now running with a mix of full-time and freelance team members.
We spoke with the LAFS team about their team-building trials and tribulations in Vietnam and where they're headed next.
📝Recap of interview insights
- LAFS's freelance team is divided into Monday/Wednesday and Tuesday/Thursday squads. Checklists and a weekly KPI system are used to fill in the gaps in quality of work. Trello, an intuitive collaboration tool, is adopted for smooth communication. This is an example of how implementing a system and collaboration tool that is tailored to the task and team member level can determine performance.
- Recruitment is a challenge in Vietnam, so it's important to ensure the right fit and company culture through internships and freelancing, and to nurture talent through one-on-ones and detailed feedback. This process creates a strong team spirit with those who join the team full-time!
- I was impressed by the answer ''one-on-ones are a training process for managers.'' If you have to take a day off work every week to do one-on-one, you might be put off or burned out. If you look at one-on-ones as an opportunity to grow as a manager, your approach to one-on-ones will change.
🙋About LAFS?
LAFS is a digital marketing agency with offices in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Seoul, Korea, and Chennai, India. LAFS specializes in local marketing in Vietnam and offers customized solutions. After carefully analyzing the client's goals, industry context, and budget, LAFS provides the best solution.
Coming for the wedding, leaving to start a corporation
Q. What made you decide to start a marketing agency in Vietnam?
Emmanuel Shin (Creative Director) : At the time, I was running a marketing agency called Pitma in Korea. I visited Vietnam to attend a friend's wedding. We were classmates in Vietnam who studied in the U.S. It was a personal thing, but it led directly to the establishment of a company.
Q. So you were running a marketing agency in Korea and expanded into a branch office?
That's right. I started Pitma in Korea in 2012 and ran it for almost eight years, and then we expanded into Vietnam in 2019. Before we expanded into Vietnam, we expanded into Rabs India in 2016, so we had three locations at that time, Korea, India, and Vietnam.
Q. What's the story behind the India office?
The India branch started with my roommate when I was studying abroad. It was more of an IT development branch than a marketing agency. In India, we currently have about 30 developers, and we also have a call center and now a CS center.
The main things we do in India are website and app development, and Google search optimization (SEO). Although our focus is on development, our goal this year is to strengthen our capabilities as a marketing agency to promote and sales to foreign companies that want to enter India.
Q. What was it about Vietnam that convinced you to do business there?
At the time, I was thinking about how to expand my marketing agency further in Korea.
After coming to Vietnam, I realized that marketing, design, and planning in Vietnam were not yet on the same level as in Korea or on a global level, so I actually saw the opportunity. To be honest, I'm a very action-oriented person, so I just went for it.
Q. Is your main revenue coming from Vietnam now?
Yes, Vietnam is now our biggest revenue source, and almost all of our projects are geared towards clients who want to enter Vietnam.
Our services and unit cost are about twice as high as local agencies, but I assume the reason why clients come to us is because they feel the difference in quality. Especially Korean clients, communication and speed are the most important things to them, so having a process that can be customized to Korean and global clients is the key differentiator.
Q. Team building is so important in the foreign countries. How did the director come on board?
I believe that team building is the key to entering Vietnam. We had to adapt to the local culture and go through a lot of trial and error, which is something I'm still working on.
I met Mr. Lee through a mutual acquaintance, and I know a lot of people who are related to him, so I naturally asked her to join.
He's the opposite of me. He's meticulous and thorough in operations and management, and the most crucial factor is that he's a workaholic. Even if everything else is different, we should have something in common, and that's that he's a workaholic.
I'm also a workaholic and my hobby is work, but when I saw her, I realized that he doesn't have a life outside of work (laughs). That's what I liked the most. I thought he's the kind of partner that I can enjoy working late at the office with.
Q. Did the division of roles come naturally to you?
Yeah, I think the moment he joined the company was the time operations started to run properly.
Before that, I was running operations while also doing creative direction, so there was something inexperienced about it. Of course, we had team leaders, but it wasn't organized, but after he came in to run operations, the company system changed a lot.
On my business card, I have the title of creative director. I've been doing marketing for almost 15 years, so I consider myself more of a creative director. Our director takes care of the business and operations, and I split my role between campaigns, planning new projects and consulting on sales, development, and marketing.
Q. Have you found any good ways to recruit local talent?
It's only been about 10 years since marketing became a major in Vietnamese universities, so I have to say that there are still some aspects of marketing and design that haven't reached the worldwide standards of the Vietnamese team members.
In my short 6 years of hiring and working with many employees, I would say that my core strategy is to have as many young and motivated people as possible.
When I first came to Vietnam, we would hire an employee and they would introduce us to their friends. Now, we do a lot of collaboration with the university, and we work with the university community, like the English Club, to recruit new interns, part-time or full-time employees.
From an Expat in Vietnam to a Marketing Agency Director
Q. How did you come to Vietnam?
GJ Lee (COO) : Initially, I came to Vietnam as an expatriate for an insurance company. After my two-year term as an expatriate ended, I saw a lot of potential in the country, and I married a Vietnamese woman. I felt strongly that I needed to settle down in Vietnam, and that's when I met Mr. Shin and joined the marketing industry.
Q. What did you see as potential in Vietnam?
I saw a lot of room for development, in a good way, because it is underdeveloped. I had lived in Indonesia when I was in high school, and now as an adult, I can see with my own eyes that there is a lot of potential for growth in Southeast Asian countries, plus the weather suits me. Those two things inspired me to stay and start a business here.
Q. Did you notice any differences when you were an expatriate compared to working in Korea?
The most difficult thing I felt was that I could communicate with my employees, but the work didn't work properly. For example, in Korea, if I say this much, my thoughts and opinions are conveyed, but here, I have to tell them 10 things to get the result I want. That was the most difficult thing when I was working as an expatriate.
Q. What led you to realize that you should join LAFS?
We have a good synergy. Mr. Shin is like a dad figure, and he's an outgoing person, and I purposely put him outside the company.
I thought I could trust him enough to handle sales and external investment to bring in clients. On the other hand, he doesn't know so much about accounting management, recruitment, and business processes that are required to run a company. When I noticed that, I thought that if I could work with him, I could utilize my strengths while he would cover my weaknesses.
Q. It's one thing to envision the future, but it's another to actually do it. What was the biggest challenge you faced when you joined?
I had been in the insurance industry for a long time, so coming from a different background, I couldn't communicate well with the staff. We spoke the language, but they knew more about marketing than I did. The biggest challenge was that I couldn't give them the right direction and review what they were doing because of my lack of skills.
Q. How did you overcome that?
I learned marketing from the ground up. Even though I knew the general idea of marketing when I was in the previous company, I realized how in-depth it was when I joined a marketing agency, so I studied hard. Since Mr. Shin is here, I've received a lot of one-on-one tutoring, and now I've gotten to the point where I can judge what they say and whether it's true or not.
Q. Were there any other challenges you faced?
For instance, if we were doing an influencer marketing campaign, it was all organized in Excel, and the forms were all different. It was very inconvenient and disorganized in my eyes, and I didn't have people to help me fix it. I created my own system and improved it as I went along, and then I applied it to our marketing process and refined it.
Q. As an expatriate, you were a team member, but now as a manager, you have to manage Vietnamese team members. Are there any cultural differences that you feel as a manager?
I often wondered, 'I told them this much, but they didn't do it because they didn't want to bother with the quality.' I've been systematizing and checklisting things to make up for it.
Q. Is there a big difference between having a manual and a checklist?
There's definitely a difference. To some extent, you have to make a checklist even if you're overwhelmed. If you have a good checklist, you can use it repeatedly. It's hard to improve if you just give them a mission and tell them to get this done. I think it's easier to work with people in Vietnam if you have a well-designed checklist and they just check it off.
When I give feedback, I try to be very detailed, pulling out a checklist and saying, “I gave you instructions to do this and that, and I think you didn't deliver on this task that I told you. I've already given you instructions and you didn't fulfill them,” or something like that.
Of course, I have to tone it down so I don't make them feel bad. And then I have one-on-one time with them to give them in-depth feedback on the mistakes that they've made. I think the key is 'as detailed as possible'.
Q. Do you find that team members have a hard time accepting that they've done something wrong or have an emotional reaction when they hear such feedback?
A lot of times, and that's why when we hire people for our team, we try to work with them as interns or freelancers first, and we don't hire them from the beginning unless they're a friend who we've collaborated with and can accept some feedback.
The emotional component is so critical. It doesn't matter how well-meaning we are in checking off checklists and giving feedback, once you're off track, it doesn't matter. We try to hire people from the beginning who can take feedback.
Q. What do you think about the argument that Vietnam's rapidly rising income levels make it easy to change jobs when a better salary offer comes along?
I agree 100%, but I think as a company owner, you can't develop a company if you think, “Oh, I've hired and trained people to the max, and then they leave.” We accept that it's a natural process, and we're very open with our team and say, “If you guys want to do something else while you're still freelancing, you can always do that.” I don't discourage that, but what we can show them is the vision of the company and the salary that we're offering based on growth.
And some of the team members are touched by that vision, and it's like, “Hey, if I work with the owner and the director here, we can go to a higher vision, and even though I might make a little bit more right now, $100,000, $200,000, but if I work with these people, I'm going to get a lot of experience, I'm going to learn, I'm going to do new marketing events,” and if they can see that vision together, then they join the team full-time.
Q. That sounds like a solid team building process!
It's a solid team. The full-timers are almost three years old, and they're all friends from the internship. I think there were about 200 interns that we met over the years, and there are about three of them left, so it's not a lot, but I think the team members that are left are a really strong team.
Q. Even if you share the vision of the company, I think it can be troubling for full-time team members to feel like freelance team members are making more money.
Yes, it can happen, but we give our full-time team members special experiences. When we go out on location or have a special initiative or event, for example, they are the first to be given the opportunity. We recently had an exhibition project in Hanoi, and we told our freelancers outright.
“Sorry, but you haven't shown the commitment and effort that we're looking for, so why should we take you to Hanoi?”
Other companies that work with freelancers just give them a job, but here we try to give them the expectation that depending on what they contribute, they can have other experiences. We try to keep showing them those possibilities and bring them into the company full-time.
Why flexible workweeks made us more efficient
Q. I heard that you combine remote and face-to-face work in your business. Do you have a reason for doing so?
GJ Lee (COO) : Vietnamese employees are sensitive about salaries. They have a tendency to try to make a lot of money by doing freelance work, so I thought it would be a bad idea to try to discourage them from doing so. We have separated freelance team members from full-time team members, so that we have a Mon/Wed team and a Tue/Thurs team.
Q. It might be assumed that the quality of work might not be as good or that the flow of work might be disrupted by the split days of the week. Has that been the case?
I think it's the system that overcomes this disadvantage. We have a checklist for basic tasks, and we have a weekly KPI system internally, which we call Weekly Deliverables. We have a Monday/Wednesday team, a Tuesday/Thursday team, and on Friday, when they're done, they have to submit their deliverables. Once they have their assigned KPI, we don't push them any further.
In a way, it reduces the amount of work that managers have to do. It's a cost-effective way to divide up the work.
Even so, labor costs in Vietnam are not high, so we choose to increase the quality even if we reduce the amount of work. It doesn't matter as long as the tasks and deliverables that we really need to focus on are done well. We check them on Friday and move on to the next week's work. This is how the weekly cycle works.
The CEO and I are actually seeing productivity improvements in our work. The more you break things down, the better they work.
Q. How do you manage real-time work communication and project/task management internally?
I use Zalo for simple task checks and real-time communication, and Trello a lot.
I used to do CS and claims management using Monday.com as an expatriate for an insurance company and moved to Notion for a while, but the downside is that it requires more training than other tools.
There are a lot of college students in Vietnam who use Notion, and most of them use it as a notepad, so I had to train them anew. Therefore, I chose Trello because it's intuitive. Trello is as easy as sticking a post-it note on the wall.
When I work with freelance team members, I create task checklists and communicate the details of their work, and I send them a link to Trello. We share it on Monday, and then we go back to a system where we do a quick check on Wednesday, and then we review it together on Friday. That way, we don't miss any tasks and avoid a lot of back-and-forth emails.
For team members who are new to collaboration tools, I've created training guides and tutorials. When a new intern or freelance team member joins the company, we spend about two hours onboarding them on Trello.
Q. As a freelance team member, it must be satisfying to have clearer tasks and standards.
That's right. One of the biggest trends of the times is flexible work. If the company tries to force the opposite, I guess the talent we need won't come to the company.
First of all, we let them experience the way we work and the culture of the company first, saying,
“I won't give you a lot of work, but I want you to be clear about what you need to do.”
If there are talented people, we often have 1 on 1s and provide growth that other companies can't provide.
If they are interested, we have frequent one-on-one meetings and tell them about our vision to offer growth opportunities that other companies can't give them.
Q. I've seen that you make it a point to have one-on-ones in Korea as well. Do you also have one-on-one time?
Yes, I pay a lot of attention to one-on-one because you have to create the growth of the company with your team members.
On Mondays, I have about 15 team members that I have one-on-one time with. From 1 to 6 p.m., I have one-on-one time with each of them, and on Fridays, we have team meetings. For example, if I have a team of three marketers focusing on influencers, we discuss the weekly KPIs as a team and give feedback.
Q. How long have you been doing this?
I started doing it seriously about six months ago, I've always felt the importance of one on one. In the beginning, it was just like once a month, I'd call one person up on the roof of the office and talk to them. But then I realized that it's not just for the team members. I think it's a training process for me as a manager.
If a team member has a problem, someone has to solve it. Whether it's helping them understand the context if they don't understand their work, or if they're suffering because the workflow we've set up isn't working, I have to jump in and solve it. One-on-ones are the best solution to address these issues.
I can get feedback on the current work process or structure, so I can see specifically if there are short deadlines, inefficient work processes, or if someone is struggling emotionally because of another team member. I don't find it tough because it's part of my training as a manager.
Q. Now that you have a full-time and freelance team, what are some of your biggest challenges?
I believe we've made some progress in solidifying the team from the bottom up. We have a larger pool of team members who can work freely, including freelancers, and we have teammates and friends who we can call on for help even at 12:00 a.m. in a pinch.
Even though the ground has been established, we're still thinking about how to scale up further. We've created a system, but we're not sure if it's the right system to take us to the next level.
We're still a small business of less than 50 people, but if we wanted to double our revenue, we'd have to think about how to approach it.
Q. If you're thinking that deeply, you must have a big vision!
I have experience in developing an app called Micket with Mr. Shin and launching it in Vietnam but failed. The reason why we created such an app is that we are a marketing agency, but the limitations of the marketing agency itself are clear.
What we are planning now is to create platform apps in specific fields, and LAFS Marketing Agency will be the marketing department of those apps. We are planning to attract investment so that we can implement and operate various platform apps.
If there's one thing that any business, whether it's F&B or fashion, must do, it's marketing. Right now, we don't have a lot of investment, so we're not at the stage where we can scale up, but we're building a solid system from the marketing agency. When we find a decent business idea and get the right investment, we can really jump.
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