Founders Friday – Daniel Callaghan
This Friday, we are excited to feature Daniel Callaghan, CEO & Co-founder of Veremark.
About Daniel
Daniel started his entrepreneurship journey with Talmix, a global freelance marketplace for independent business consultants during the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, he capitalised on the downturn by helping firms who needed consultants but couldn’t afford to pay expensive consultancies.
After 8 years as CEO, Daniel switched to a non exec role and moved on to the Adecco Group, the world’s largest recruitment firm, where he headed their APAC digital innovation and investment arm.
Looking across the entire APAC HR Tech landscape, he identified just how poor the service was in the background screening industry. This led Daniel to launch Veremark, a digital platform that gives peace of mind and complete confidence in a hiring company’s prospective candidates credentials.
About Veremark
Veremark is a digital background screening solution that helps companies to process a full range of candidate checks, ranging from academic qualifications to criminal records. Through Veremark, employers get peace of mind and complete confidence in their candidates.
Veremark also benefits candidates. By completing the checks requested by employers, these individuals will receive a block-chain based career passport. This gives them full ownership of their career credentials, thus eliminating the need for repetitive checks in the future.
What has been the most satisfying aspect of entrepreneurship for you and why?
D:The most satisfying aspect of entrepreneurship is seeing it work in the real world and knowing that the product or service is achieving its goal of improving whatever aspect of life it touches.
It’s always about the client and what their end experience is, so working hard to achieve that and seeing it pay off is delightful.
In order to achieve that though you need to have a whole range of other enjoyable achievements – like seeing the team work together and hiring the right people and along the way, winning lots of awards. Ultimately though, if it doesn’t enhance the customer experience, it wasn’t a good use of your time.
Drawing on your personal experiences, what traits do you think are essential for startup founders and why?
D:Founders come in all shapes and sizes, but the commonalities between the good and the great are:
- A willingness to explore and try new ideas
- The persistence to try again when they fail
- The resilience to not worry about having failed
- The optimism to know that if they keep trying they will succeed
- The passion that makes others want to join their cause
It is the softer skills that play the strongest part in the end, as the rest you can hire for.
What was the biggest challenge you faced in scaling your sales and why?
Founders can, in the first instance, sell through sheer force of personality or contagious enthusiasm. However, it becomes more science than art when the company starts to distill what was said into a scaleable process.
It is easy to get distracted in sales with lots of shiny opportunities. In an early stage business, it is vital that focus remains on picking a target market and iterating on that to be able to prove out the best methodology, and ultimately, to build your playbook.
After that, hiring salespeople is always a challenge, because they are usually good talkers. It is imperative that you take references and get as much evidence as possible on the reality around their prior achievements, as well as put their capabilities to the test with exercises or case studies during the interview process.
How did you acquire your first customers?
D: Good old-fashioned cold calling and direct sales. Our first client was one of the telcos in Singapore. Before Veremark, their HR team was doing candidate checks manually, losing a lot of time in the process.
What aspects were most important when you were first building your team and why?
D: We were very fortunate in that the founding team was well balanced already. The two other co-founders of the business, Angus and Dan, were both very product and tech-oriented. As a result, we were able to move quickly and build a fantastic product and service with the in-house capabilities that we had.
With our product in place, the first external hires made have all been about growing the commercial side of Veremark.
On hindsight, if you to build your team again, is there anything you would do differently?
D: So far so good on Veremark! The foundations on which we built Veremark are very strong. As we grow though it’s always about maintaining the same level of quality in the team and a strong alignment around goals and virtues
What are the top 3 tips you have for investor pitching?
1)Have a clear story of where you are going and why you are different.
2)Present a roadmap to success. Show investors how you can scale your company into a big business.
3)Relax. Investors are human too.
What sets you apart from other startups?
D:Our aim is to add simplicity and confidence to the background checking process by providing a seamless experience. We have spent a lot of time building a digital-first experience that helps gather information faster, process it more securely and deliver clearer insights than the traditional pen and paper led competition.
We have also introduced an industry-transforming blockchain-based career passport for candidates. With this, they can take back ownership of their career credentials and share them with recruiters whenever needed.
This eliminates a huge amount of repetition, expense and lost productivity in the hiring process for both recruiters and candidates.
Any other words of wisdom that you would like to share?
On the hiring process: Taking references and background checks should clearly be a key part of the process. Just identifying one wrong hire will likely cover the cost of your entire year’s screening. It makes excellent sense to have a $90 check on a $30k risk, which is essentially what every hire is.
On entrepreneurship: Just a few paraphrased words from Ben Horowitz- “There are only lead bullets and you have to learn to embrace the struggle. Everyone goes through it – keep going”.
Stay tuned for next week's episode of Founders Friday
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