Rapid growth presents unique operational challenges, especially when expanding across diverse markets like Latin America. Finding the balance between swift expansion and operational efficiency requires rethinking traditional approaches to hiring, communication, and system design. Alexandra Pueyo is at the forefront of tackling these challenges as she helps scale a $160 million company throughout the Latin American market.
Function Over Headcount
Like many fast-growing companies, Alexandra’s organization initially expanded by hiring aggressively for each new market. “Whenever we started growing really fast, we hired a lot of people,” she admits. “Each city that we would be opening, we would hire a workforce for each city, for each country.” The problems with this approach soon became apparent. “We started realizing that we had a lot of people that we didn’t necessarily need just because we noticed there was overlap in roles and functions,” Alexandra says. This realization prompted a complete rethinking of their operational model.
They shifted from focusing on people to focusing on functions. Alexandra explains: “Instead of bringing in people for things to get done, we focused on boxes with functions and then roles for those functions.” This helped them restructure to include only essential personnel. “Each pair of hands is doing what they need to do. We try to avoid people wasting time on things we don’t consider essential.” This functional approach transformed their growth mindset. “Growing equals people, but we’re trying to have a mindset of growing equals key functions, key activities.”
Clear Owners, Clear Goals
With leaner teams handling more responsibility, clarity becomes crucial. Alexandra points to ownership as a fundamental principle: “For each project or vertical, it’s been really important to have clear owners.” Just as important are well-defined objectives. “Without having clear goals, people were just swimming and swimming just because they needed to swim,” she notes. “Whenever we started implementing clear goals from our CEO down to managers, coordinators, and analysts, it became clear what everyone needed to do.”
This clarity helps team members work more efficiently rather than merely working harder. “Telling them exactly what they need to swim towards makes it easier for them to get there faster without having to swim stronger.”
Breaking Down Department Walls
Alexandra emphasizes that operational excellence requires cross-functional alignment. “Teams should not work independently, even if they’re doing different stuff. We try to be very aligned in what everyone is doing.” This alignment creates practical benefits throughout the organization. “I’m more on the operations side of the business and I need to know what tech is working on,” she explains. “If my team needs something from tech, I’ll know if they won’t be able to prioritize it. Based on that, maybe we need to look for a workaround.”
Weekly leadership meetings have become essential for maintaining this alignment. “At the leadership level, we all meet once a week to let everyone know what we’re working on, discuss any questions or problems. This weekly call has been very helpful for us to stay aligned.”
Scaling Systems Across Borders
Latin America presents unique expansion challenges, yet Alexandra has found workable approaches. “Latin America is a world of its own, but many countries have cultural similarities,” she points out. “That makes it easier in terms of having systems that could work in multiple countries.” Their expansion strategy involves careful market selection. “When choosing a country to enter, you need to find the group of countries that make sense culturally, systematically, politically, economically. Find countries with similarities to what you’ve already been doing.”
They also design with regional replication in mind. “We’ve always had a mindset of thinking of this as a potential product that could go everywhere,” Alexandra says. “We try not to build stuff extremely specific to a country, but always leave open the possibility we could replicate it elsewhere.” While acknowledging they’re still working toward operational excellence, Alexandra’s approach shows that smarter operations—not just larger teams—are the key to scaling successfully across Latin America’s diverse markets.
Follow Alexandra Pueyo on LinkedIn to learn more about her strategies for operational excellence.
