Protexting, a full service marketing company specializing in SMS and MMS messaging, has its headquarters in New York City, but the back end—the developers and coders that make the things they do actually work—are, for the most part, in Bulgaria. On one level, that is not surprising. Kalin Kassabov, one of the partners that founded the company, hails from the former Iron Curtain country. But, on another level, getting started and proceding with a workforce halfway around the world presented unique challenges.
“In New York, where the headquarters is based, the employees come from Bulgaria, Albania, China, and the US,” he says. “What we find is, it’s not about nationality, obviously. It’s more about loyalty, intelligence and go-getter attitude.” Finding that talent posed no special problems. Staffers got recruited, screened and hired in pretty much the usual way. Finding the people they wanted to work with in Bulgaria was another matter entirely.
“From the beginning we’ve been fortunate enough to have access to Bulgarian talent,” says Kassabov. “Going overseas is a much greater challenge because you have to have knowledge of the laws, of the culture, of the rules, and the rest of the dynamics in the country that you’re hiring. We started out with one very solid and loyal and knowledgeable person in Bulgaria.” That individual formed the basis of their Bulgarian contingent, and through him, they grew their first team of developers.
“Our first 25 developers were hired without our even meeting them,” he recalls. “But it was because of that one person that was able to trickle down the culture.”
Whichever side of the Atlantic they are working from, Kalin Kassabov says the most important thing is that they fit well into the team. “For the first five years, we did not meet face to face with the people that we hired. We did the interviews by telephone and by Skype,” he says. “The team itself became the filter. They were the ones that would accept or not accept the candidates. Only when they said they would work with that person, myself or my partner would jump in to interview them to make sure they were the right person.”
The Team Makes Protexting
By Manny Frishberg