Free Events in Lisbon, Ericeira Nov 2024, and an interview with Gonçalo Sequeira CEO @ Hiire
Richard Lucas
Introduction
Exciting news, we have a new Content Manager and Marketing strategist in the Open Coffee Lisbon team: Edith Bodi - She’s recently arrived in this part of Europe, has an MBA from Monaco, and hails from Hungary.
If you want to be interviewed - let her know via this form.
The Lisbon and Ericeira team got together after Open Coffee Ericeira.
(Carsten, Olg, Edith, Richard, Renato, Lena, Mia)
Events coming up…
Open Coffee Lisbon Web Summit Special
Tuesday 12th November at Startup Lisboa. Meet entrepreneurs from all over the world, and show off our friendly local eco-system. Sold out here
We have created a curated Open Coffee Lisbon WhatsApp group. Sign up here https://chat.whatsapp.com/HZNea7wHN0093bOylglaKY
Open Coffee Lisbon #26
Tuesday 26th November Open Coffee Lisbon at Startup Lisboa 09:30-11:30 with free coffee thanks to the @351 Community Fund and @Capital Factory . Sign up here
https://www.meetup.com/open-coffee-lisbon/events/304421163/
Hosting by Richard with support from Renato Carbone and Edith with help from Giselle, and others. Everyone who attends gets the opportunity to introduce themselves, answering four questions, who they are, what they do, what they want, and - importantly how they can help other people in the room. If you want to help and get involved in making this gathering a regular part of the Lisbon eco-system please let us know here https://forms.gle/hjQUMyFap5K8yo8y9. This event starts on time and is always on the last Tuesday of the month.
Lisbon Newcomers Welcome Club
Tuesday 26th November at @Titanic @ 18:00-2030 - Sign up here . Richard is hosting this event with help from Naren, David, Roman, Jacqi, Giselle and others. LNWC meetups are introvert friendly, designed to work for people who don’t know anyone else in the room. They are not only for newcomers but also for longer term residents of Lisbon who want to welcome them. if you want to volunteer and get involved, sign up here. This event starts on time, and is always on the last Tuesday of the month.
Open Coffee Ericeira #10
Open Coffee Ericeira #19 Friday 6th December hosted by Olga at Coastal Cowork Collective. R. de São Félix 12e · Ericeira 10:00 - 12:00, Sign up here
Please note this event starts on time! Same format as Open Coffee Lisbon. Everyone gets a minute or two to say who they are, what they want, and how they can help others in the room. This gathering starts on time and is always on the first Friday of the month. Let Olga know if you can help share the organisational lift, or what to contribute to a kids group so that parents with young kids can have them play together somewhere nearby during the event.
We have a candidate for Ericeira Newcomer Welcome Club. There is a chance we will have a meeting before the end of the year.
Interview with Gonçalo Sequeira Founder & CEO @ Hiire
Interview with Gonçalo Sequeira, Founder & CEO @ Hiire
Richard: Please introduce yourself and the businesses/projects you are involved in. Where you're comfortable sharing numbers, please do so to give a sense of the scale of the business.
Gonçalo: Hey Richard! thank you so much for inviting me. I’m a recruiter since 2013 and a business owner since 2022, when I decided to open Hiire. After working for companies like Feedzai, Mercedes-Benz and Adyen in Lisbon, Amsterdam and Singpore I decided to create my own agency while travelling the world.
Currently we are working with companies like Siemens, Secil and Solvay, besides interesting tech startups and we are around 8 people working 100% remote. Besides the B2B segment of the business we also help individuals land new jobs and plan their careers.
We did early 6 digits in 2023 and we will double our revenue in 2024 but we are just in the beginning of our projects.
Richard: What is the vision for @ Hiire? What problems is it aiming to solve?
Gonçalo: The vision for Hiire is simple, be the agency that clients want to work more than one time. We aim to help companies to hire better and faster every single day.
Richard: What is your origin story? You worked for quite a long time in corporate. When did you decide you were going to start a business? Was that something you always knew you were going to do? Did you have role models among family or elsewhere?
Gonçalo: I was the 2nd person in my family to have a degree, it was something new in my circle. Since a young age I needed to build stuff without a lot of resources but I always had fun with with. After Covid19 I started to create more content in the internet and I decided that one day I would create my own business but It took me two years to get the courage to do it. Before that I was already doing some freelance work, helping job seekers landing new jobs while I had a full time job as a recruiter.
Richard: There are so many recruitment companies. What was your idea to make @ Hiire different/better and give you a competitive edge?
Gonçalo: To be very honest, when I started Hiire, the goal was not to be another recruitment agency. I knew the market was saturated with it. So I wanted to create a company to train recruiters. I saw there wasn’t much good recruitment training so I thought it was a good bet. However, the bet wasn’t successful because I couldn’t sell those on the scale that I needed. A previous CEO asked me to hire 4 people for his new company and I needed money to keep the business, so I decided to “be an agency” for a while. Then another past-colleague asked for 2 more roles, then another one, and I started to hire recruiters to help me out. Then I realised that building an agency that I would love to work at could be a fun challenge and I decided to be all-in in the idea that I was trying to avoid in the first place.
Richard: You worked in HR and recruitment for other people. Is that a function you feel close to or could you imagine being involved in completely different businesses
Gonçalo: Currently I want to make sure we do the best recruitment in Europe and we can have our clients happy. I want to explore other businesses in the future but keep the focus is important to archive something different.
Richard: You've been involved in other activities alongside being a CEO/Founder, like investing in a startup and LinkedIn content creation with more than 40K followers. What's the story there? What are your motivations, goals, and desired outcomes?
Gonçalo: Do you know Gary Vaynerchuk? If you don’t, you should! During covid-19 i was consuming a lot of his content and basically he was saying to create content on LinkedIn and Tik Tok - after 6 months of hearing the same thing all over again I decided to give it a shot and I never stopped. I already used LinkedIn before to find candidates but now they were finding me, people were requesting advice (and paying for it). When I decided to start hiire it helped a lot because I already had a personal brand and I continue to develop it every single day.
My main goal is to help people with my content while I develop my own skills. I was a bad writer and now I’m an average one because I practise a lot.
I like to say that everyone has a personal brand but it depends on you if it’s good, bad, big or small and I want mine to be a good one! :)
Richard: What were/are the main challenges, both when you were getting the business up and running, and now that you are more established?
Gonçalo: The main challenge is simple - getting people (clients, employees, candidates) align with your vision. The bigger you get the harder it’s.
Richard: How do you assess whether the business is on track? You mentioned at Open Coffee Lisbon that you didn't need investors as you are a bootstrapped service business. Free from external shareholder pressure, do you set annual targets/OKRs, revenue, profits, or other targets for the company?
Gonçalo: For sure - if you don’t set-up goals in life you don’t know where you are going. Currently I setup the company goals, share with the team and then we create goals for each department together.
We keep track of them every single month, some of them every single quarter. Besides that every quarter we see the financial results of the company together. So everyone knows how on track we are to achieve our goals. I’m still learning a lot how to do this right.
Richard: Can you share a bit about the finances now and in the future? Do you aim to grow the company forever, or at some stage partially or completely exit, or is it hard to say?
Gonçalo: I’m building it for the future. We will have +350.000€ of gross revenue this year. For now I don’t plan to sell my business any time soon. I’m building it for the next 10-20 years and planning to be one of the best HR agencies that Europe ever saw.
Richard: Moving onto sales and marketing, how do you make sure that people know about your business so that potential clients are aware you exist, and then move them through your sales process?
Gonçalo: In a nutshell a lot of LinkedIn content - both on my personal and professional Hiire’s page. Events (we go to a lot of events, not only attending but also speaking at conferences). Besides that we have a referral program to our clients and we are starting to build a cold outreach approach as well.
Richard: How do you assess the Lisbon and Portuguese business and startup "ecosystem"? What's going well and what still needs improvement?
Gonçalo: Since 2017 everything has been growing a lot. Portugal has a lot of talent, great universities, and finally a lot of great companies to work for and with. I say since 2017 because Mercedes moved that year to Portugal and then VW and BMW did the same and a lot of big companies followed. That helped the startups to get more clients, visibility and talent.
What we are missing is a good tax ecosystem to be able to compete with cities like London, Berlin or Amsterdam in terms of Talent and Investment in my point of view.
Richard: What advice would you give someone new in Lisbon who is interested in startups and entrepreneurship but doesn't know who to talk to or what to do?
Gonçalo: Get someone local. Can be a agency like Hiire or a local Recruiter - don’t hire people in Portugal with your international Hub. Can you do it? Yes. But it will take more time, and you won’t get the best talent. Knowing the market, the cities, the cost of living, the small difference between Lisbon, Porto, and the rest of Portugal is huge.
Richard: How can people get in touch with you if they want to ask more questions?
Gonçalo: LinkedIn is the best way: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gsequeira/ , feel free to reach out :)
Richard: Is there anything I didn't ask that you want to share?
Gonçalo: Thanks a lot for the invitation and show-up at the next open coffee meetup!