position-spotlight-regional-director-sales-and-supply
Sales & Supply
Dec 19, 2017

Position Spotlight - Regional Director Sales and Supply

GetYourGuide
Careers Team
Julia Randow, Regional Director Sales and Supply for APAC and GCC
Julia Randow, Regional Director Sales and Supply for APAC and GCC

Regional Director Sales and Supply - Julia Randow.

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Can you give us a brief summary of what your job entails?

I am the Regional Director for APAC (Asia Pacific) and GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), which includes Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Arabic Gulf countries. As part of our global growth strategy, we are rolling out offices in these regions to maintain a local presence and cultural understanding. My job is to support the respective regional managers and their teams in their strategic development, recruitment, growth, and sales, and to ensure that our satellite offices are aligned with our global strategy and culture. Our team consists of 8 nationalities from Australia, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico and I’m from Sweden, each bringing unique backgrounds and perspectives to our daily work. That level of diversity is both inspiring and an important part of our strength.

The team alone is enough reason to love my job, but as if that wasn’t enough, our daily work makes me love it too. Roughly half my time is spent in Dubai meeting partners for negotiations, understanding their needs and seeing how we can best help them to create the best customer experiences. The rest of the time is split between the rest of the APAC region where I could be meeting with Disney in Japan, testing a new boat tour with the Thailand team, trying one of our many attractions to check if it is a seamless customer experience, doing workshops with the team in Bangkok or looking out the window on a flight to meet the Sydney team. Is this really what you do for a living, you might ask? Yes, this is actually my job. I ask myself the same question sometimes. It’s an amazing part of our culture that we do these things to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and never stop trying to improve their experience. It gives our job meaning to know that the end result of all our work is customers having amazing adventures all over the globe.

All in all, I am here to support our teams in securing a top-notch customer experience at every single one of our activities. Apart from living the experience, that means we also have to keep our part of the organization running efficiently. We need to catch trends and opportunities as they arise, build a solid foundation for collaboration between the teams, make decisions on organizational structure and office openings, and remain great representatives and ambassadors for GetYourGuide. The position and responsibilities in Sales APAC are diverse! This could mean in one part of the world, we have a team member speaking at a travel tech event spreading the word about GYG, and in another, we could have someone sitting through 30 back to back meetings at a trade workshop signing up and optimizing multiple products in one day. All in all, our focus is always on our product and our customer and how we can grow this in the best way possible.

Has your role changed since joining GetYourGuide? If yes, how?

Yes absolutely! I started off as Country Manager/Regional Manager in charge of the Dubai office opening and my job was to run MENA (middle east and northern Africa) from here. This meant overseeing North Africa and the Gulf countries while getting the office in Dubai up and running. In my current role, Dubai is still my base and now APAC has become one region where all current (and future offices) in the region are reporting to Dubai. This career jump came very fast and there are a lot of opportunities in this company if you can deliver strong results, are passionate, driven, and willing to challenge yourself and embracing learning.

What does an average day as a Regional Director look like?

There is no such thing as an average day! My day consists of juggling meetings with our partners, testing products, recruitment, team meetings (either online or at the local offices), traveling, and communicating with our colleagues in finance, marketplace, marketing and supply tech in Berlin.

What is the most challenging aspect of your role?

My two most challenging aspects are balancing the needed speed in our headcount growth with the quality of the recruitment process; it’s always challenging to not only find the future stars but to find them quickly. The second is to catch all trends and opportunities the moment they materialize as these trends can differ in different parts of the region and in the same time make sure we all run faster than you thought was even possible yesterday.

What advice would you have for someone who would like to work as a Regional Director with GetYourGuide?

Be positive, work hard and smart, embrace change and cherish our open feedback culture in order to develop faster. Put Learning as the main core value, if you are not learning at a fast pace the company will grow faster than you and then the career opportunities will be fewer. From a sales perspective, be aware of what an amazing product we have and make sure you use your network and referrals for all that it is worth to get it out there as fast as possible. From a local office perspective, stay connected with Berlin, the heart of our company to keep up with learning and to just stay connected. And don’t forget to have fun at work, positivity is contagious!

Favorite thing about working with GetYourGuide?

The diversity in our company. Looking at the fact that we are more than 50 nationalities makes me proud and motivated and you get so many angles and perspectives. I also love the fact that we have such a great product that is really scalable globally and something that is truly changing the travel industry for the better.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Well, taking on this role was a big step for me, but having known the people in the different APAC offices already and their capabilities, I saw a real opportunity to create a strong, positive, results-focused and fun team. And, so far, it has been better than I could have ever expected and wished for.

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