Building a 26-Person Team Across 3 Countries

The challenge

When I joined Tekion, there was no L&D function. Training happened through recorded meetings and tribal knowledge shared in Slack. The company was growing rapidly across multiple countries, and the lack of structured learning showed up in longer ramp times, inconsistent customer experiences, and support escalations that training should have prevented.

My mandate was to build it from scratch. Team structure, governance, technology stack, content strategy, delivery models, measurement framework. I started as a team of one. Over four and a half years, I built it to 26 people across the US, Canada, and France, with dotted-line coordination of an India-based content team.

The approach

I treated this as a department build-out, not a hiring exercise. Before posting a single role, I mapped the capability architecture: what functions we needed, what skills each required, and how they would interact. I designed the org structure, career frameworks, and governance model first, then hired against that blueprint.

This paid off two ways. Job descriptions were specific enough to attract the right candidates. And new hires could see where they fit and where they were going from day one, which reduced early attrition.

The execution

Over four years: zero to 26 direct reports across the US, Canada, and France. I participated in 200+ interviews, made 60+ final hiring decisions, and hired and developed five managers, each requiring a different development approach.

The cross-cultural dimension required real adjustment. My default leadership style — direct feedback, fast decisions, minimal hierarchy — didn't translate universally across regions. I learned to give constructive feedback privately, acknowledge contributions publicly, and actively create space for dissent in team settings. The relationships I built across regions were among the strongest on the team precisely because I had to be more intentional about them.

Key structural decisions:

• Separate content development from delivery to enable specialization
• Regional leads with local autonomy within global standards
• Cross-functional partnerships with Product, Support, and Implementation
• Quarterly business reviews tying L&D activity to business outcomes

The results

The insight

Building a team is about designing the system before filling the seats. Structure determines what's possible. If I were doing it again, I'd invest in cross-cultural competency training for myself earlier — I learned most of those lessons through trial and error, and some of those errors were avoidable with better preparation.

The first questions I ask about any new organization are about structure, not content. Who reports to whom? What does career progression look like? How are decisions made? What gets measured? Get those wrong and the work suffers regardless of how good the content is.