Meet Kevin Lamas, Senior Business Development Representative. He joined inDrive in October 2018 as a marketing specialist, making him the fifth person ever hired by the company on the American continent: “We literally started with a booklet that wasn’t translated into proper Spanish … and five years later we're here with more than fifty cities in Mexico and and pretty much operating all over the American continent!” he recalls. Here’s his story, along with insights and advice for colleagues.

Starting out: My first role was to acquire physical media – booklets, billboards, moving cars, do radio interviews etc. After that, my role expanded to driver acquisition. I was handling the team that recruited drivers once we started launching Mexico City. Now I’m a senior business development representative.

I can divide my experience into three phases: the first phase was when there was not so much structure, it was like the Wild West! The second phase would be the COVID year, when the team decided to divide up driver acquisition; in my case I went with the business development team. Before, we were handling the whole Latam region and then during COVID, it got separated into Central America and South America. In my case, now I handle Central America – and here I really want to thank my supervisor, Roman Zhuchkov, because he changed the game for me. When Roman came in, he really gave me access to a lot of information, to a lot of decision making,

What I do is investigate potential cities or countries to launch, to see if we will be successful. Once I establish this, I take care of the launch itself: I coordinate with the drivers acquisition team, with the marketing team and the GR team – a lot of teams – to make the launch. Also managing cities we already work in, in order to improve our current metrics.

Career highlights: Launching all of Mexico! You’d think that you need perfect timing and perfect resources… but when inDrive came they changed my mind, and it has totally changed my life. Being able to travel all over my country, visit the 32 states and launch all of them, was really awesome. And, definitely, changing people's lives and being able to recruit thousands of drivers.

The other highlight I would say is that I was able to launch Jamaica. And then growing Saltillo, because I believe right now Saltillo is the number one city in Central America as far as revenue, so you might think, “oh, we will not grow anymore.” So to give it a boost by 5, 10% – that was really cool.

Biggest challenges: Working with an overseas team. It really depends on the people, but some came with the mindset of “hey, this is how it works where I'm from, let's do it the same way here”. But sometimes, because of cultural barriers, things don't work that way. However it's not impossible; once they start seeing oh, this is how it works, it definitely gets better. There are other teammates who are like, “hey, you're the local person here, so tell me how we can make this work,” then we start brainstorming ideas or bouncing ideas to actually make it work.

What makes for a good work environment? Be people-oriented.

The biggest game-changer for me was when my current supervisor, Roman, told me, “hey you're not going to be an assistant anymore, I'm going to give you responsibilities, I'm going to open the data sources for you to go ahead and start making projects on your own, doing launches on your own”.

So I would say, definitely give people a leadership role. You can start with small places. Not micromanaging people but giving them freedom to do something, giving them a leadership role – once they feel that they are actually impacting the business, that’s when you get better results.

And have open dialogue. When teammates from other regions have asked me “how have you grown so much?”, I tell them it's pretty much because my manager allowed me to grow. Of course, if he allows me to grow, I'm going to take responsibilities away from him, I'm going to make his life easier - and I'm going to grow myself.

Best career advice: Don't look at things as “challenging”. Instead, start thinking about the positives. Give it a five-minute breather to just hear what you're going to do.

Sometimes you might think “oh, this is impossible, we can't do it” , but once you analyze it, you think “OK, we can start doing it this way”. And definitely, if you don't have the answers, there's somebody who can help you.

How do you stay motivated? I think of what I've already accomplished; all the people who are in my life; and why I’m doing this. I've learned that it’s one day at a time.

Maintaining a work/life balance Don't bring work problems home! Everything has its own time frame. So, if you work from 9:00 to 5:00, then from 9:00 to 5:00 do things as well as you can. But once you're out of the office, literally disappear. I know that it's really hard and there are sometimes emergencies – you can have emergency contacts who can contact you, but otherwise, work is work and home is home. If you bring work stuff home, the people at home are going to start resenting it.

What is “success”? If we're able to achieve our goals, if, for example, they ask us to grow revenue by 5% and we're able to grow it by 6% that's success, metrics-wise.

But also, seeing your team succeed. One of the things that I've learned here is that if your team succeeds, you succeed. If they are happy that they are involved in the project, and they know they have the tools to succeed, then even if we didn't reach that 5%, but we got 4% and we're going to make it grow, it’s still a success.

Dealing with failure: Take it as a lesson. If you gave it your all, if you did everything in your power to make something work and it didn't work, OK, you learned something. The world isn’t going to end because you failed, so just breathe and take the lessons as it comes.

My favorite motto: Be present in the moment. Enjoy what you're doing and know that tough times don’t last.

You never know what's going to change for you. For me, inDrive really changed my life, it really opened my eyes. Every time we talk to a driver, or we recruit somebody, I know that I'm not just selling them some dumb thing that they don't need. I really do agree that we're changing people's lives. Why? Because it's a product that is beneficial for them, that's going to bring them more income.

And to my colleagues I would say, go for it! Risk it. If you feel like you're not getting enough play from your manager, try to talk directly to them.