Getting It Done

Think of HelloAsia as a toddler in a business suit -- more a mature, operationally focused one-year-old than a nimble startup with a monthly growth rate of 50% and a staff with an average age of 31. According to Ellenbogen, a tall, shambling man with dark hair and John Lennon specs, "fast planning" is no oxymoron. The key to HelloAsia's rapid implementation is distilling the company's plan into a highly detailed process that puts everything on paper before anyone makes a single move. "A lot of startups think they're too dynamic to plan," says Ellenbogen, who dreamed up HelloAsia with Harvard Business School classmate Chih Cheung, 29, who is also the company's CEO. "They say, 'We're growing too fast to follow a plan.' But we didn't feel that we had a choice."

The complexity of HelloAsia's product and the stakes that the company is playing for place a premium on execution -- and on the careful planning of that execution. Asia's online base is ballooning at a staggering 80% a year, and by 2002, it should hit 50 million subscribers. By 2004, the Asian market will carry $32 billion in commerce. It's a delicate dance in any environment, but HelloAsia has made it even more dicey by setting its sights on four very different Asian markets: Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. That means creating and coordinating four different strategies around the same business model and core architecture. And, naturally, speed is critical: HelloAsia isn't the only startup to have recognized the potential of the Asian e-market. So Cheung and Ellenbogen have had to roll out four launches simultaneously -- and flawlessly.

Like most fast-moving tech companies, HelloAsia relies heavily on a bright, motivated workforce that uses the usual startup formula: Solve problems, add value, earn equity. But unlike most startups, HelloAsia achieves effectiveness through a highly structured organization. Cheung and Ellenbogen are following a traditional -- and therefore, by today's standards, a nontraditional -- business model: HelloAsia channels its employees' boundless creativity and energy through a meticulous planning process -- one that breaks every project into components and assigns each component to teams and individuals. Those teams and individuals know precisely how their pieces fit into the overall strategy, and they confer regularly to make sure that they are on task and on target. "Sure, we're decentralized, empowered, and all that," says Cheung, who spends much of his time in Asia pitching his company. "But we're trying to build an extremely complicated business, and without a central plan or vision, we'd be running amok."

Cheung and Ellenbogen aren't just spouting theory; they've learned the importance of careful planning the hard way. Before cofounding HelloAsia, Ellenbogen spent four years working with U.S. Representative Peter Deutsch, a Florida democrat, as the youngest, most Internet-savvy chief of staff on Capitol Hill. A born strategist, Ellenbogen quickly saw that lawmakers who didn't start planning their reelection campaign at least nine months before election day found themselves unemployed the following year.

Cheung, a former financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, learned a similar lesson while working with Ellenbogen at Crimson Solutions, an online-recruiting service. At Crimson Solutions, Cheung saw firsthand what happens when a bunch of overachievers go to work without a strong central plan. "Everybody ends up pulling in opposite directions, and nothing gets done," says Cheung. "You need a strong overarching vision and a plan to make things happen."

And how do you achieve that? In the course of ramping up HelloAsia, Cheung and Ellenbogen have uncovered five rules for successfully moving from idea to implementation.

Don't move until you know exactly where you're going. It may sound obvious, but these days, it's almost heresy: The new economy invites companies to set off with limited planning, relying instead on energy, brains, and flexibility to fill in the details later. That, say Cheung and Ellenbogen, is a recipe for disaster. They insist on having a plan for every detail, no matter how long it takes. Their employees -- all of whom are energetic, smart, and flexible -- establish two or three core goals and then list the elements, or "key results," that are required to meet each of those goals.

Strategize globally, but plan locally. In preparing for their first big rollout last year, Cheung and Ellenbogen knew that they couldn't prefabricate every detail for marketing events in four markets -- especially markets as diverse as Korea and Singapore. Instead, they broke the central strategy into smaller plans, allowing each market to draw its own blueprint. To start the process, an executive team identified and refined common goals and themes, such as introducing the company and its concept. Local teams then took those goals back to their respective countries, where they worked with PR agencies that were familiar with local marketing practices.