Rethinking Talent, Scaling Smart and Leading with Clarity: Insights from a SaaS Growth Journey

How do you build a company that’s purpose-led and performance-driven? How do you grow fast without losing focus? And what does it really take to rethink how we hire, retain, and upskill talent in today’s market?

In this episode of SaaS Stories, Tom Larter (CEO of WithYouWithMe) shared a refreshingly grounded view on what it takes to scale a mission-led tech company globally and why the future of work will belong to companies that optimise for potential, not just pedigree.

Here’s what we took away from the conversation from leadership lessons to hiring disruption to navigating market expansion.

1. Scale Starts with “Why” Not “What”

When you’re building something new, clarity matters more than complexity.

Tom emphasised the importance of starting every transformation whether it’s a product shift, team restructure, or go-to-market pivot with a clear and simple explanation of why the change is needed.

Without that shared “why,” execution stalls. Employees get lost in tactics. And momentum fades.

At WithYouWithMe, strategy is boiled down to a one-page plan. Everyone from leadership to new hires is expected to understand and own it. It’s a reminder that strategy isn't what you write down. It’s what your team can repeat without a slide deck.

2. Leadership Is Less About Direction, More About Alignment

One of the standout leadership takeaways from the episode was this: being a great leader doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means creating the conditions for others to perform at their best.

For Tom, that means listening deeply, trusting domain experts, and staying accountable even when a decision doesn’t go as planned. It’s a style shaped by his military background, where young officers must lead more experienced teams under pressure.

In SaaS, the translation is simple: your job isn’t to prescribe solutions. It’s to maintain focus on the vision, remove roadblocks, and make sure your team is equipped and aligned.

3. Hire for Potential, Not Just Experience

One of the biggest ideas from the conversation and a cornerstone of WithYouWithMe’s model is the shift from hiring based on past experience to hiring based on aptitude and potential.

Traditional hiring models rely on resumes, degrees, and behavioural interviews — all proxies for what someone has done. But in a world where skills evolve fast, what matters more is someone’s ability to learn.

Using cognitive and personality assessments, the company matches people (especially from overlooked groups like veterans, neurodivergent individuals and refugees) to roles they’re likely to excel in often outside their previous industry.

This mindset shift doesn’t just create access. It builds more adaptive, resilient teams.

4. When You Scale Too Fast, You Learn Fast Too

Like many SaaS companies post-Series B, WithYouWithMe hit a period of hypergrowth. In 12 months, they went from a 20-person Australian startup to a 250-person global team across the UK, US and Canada.

The lesson? Growth alone isn’t the win, sustainable growth is.

Tom reflected on how that phase revealed gaps in product-market fit, operational maturity, and sales predictability. It led to a hard but necessary pivot: a “shrink to grow” strategy focused on operational efficiency, tighter execution, and founder succession.

For founders or operators in similar phases, the insight is clear: don’t scale based on potential revenue. Scale based on repeatability.

5. Local Markets, Local Mindsets

One of the most tactical parts of the conversation came down to go-to-market execution. It turns out the same SaaS product can land very differently depending on the maturity of the local market.

For example:

In Australia, prospects often needed education around the problem WithYouWithMe solved.

• In the UK, HR buyers understood the problem but wanted proof of value and differentiation.
• In the US, talent is abundant, but distributed creating challenges in access and alignment.

This reminded us of something many companies overlook when going global: translation isn’t just about language. It’s about context. Your messaging, positioning and even your sales motions may need to shift market by market.

6. Rethinking Hiring Infrastructure

Beyond the assessments themselves, WithYouWithMe’s tech creates an entirely new hiring infrastructure especially for large organisations.

Here’s how:

• It captures cognitive aptitude and learning potential through a proprietary algorithm.
• It maps individuals to future-ready roles (e.g., cybersecurity, software engineering, data analytics).
• It tracks internal mobility, helps identify upskilling opportunities, and creates new career paths inside businesses.

For companies struggling with retention, skills gaps, or diversity challenges, this approach offers a clear path forward: stop hiring for what people have done. Start building for what they can do.

7. AI Isn’t Just a Trend. It’s a Tool for Inclusion

Another standout theme: AI is quietly changing how companies think about people.

Tom explained how they’re using AI not just to streamline assessments, but to infer skills from life experience even outside traditional work.

For example: AI can now identify core competencies from hospitality work, caregiving, or volunteering and map them to in-demand skills in tech, operations, or customer service.

This does two things:

1. It expands the talent pool by recognising skills that would’ve been missed by resume screening.
2. It reduces friction in onboarding and learning by giving users a head start on what they’re naturally suited for.

It’s not just more efficient. It's more human.

8. Going Global? Don’t Just Add Markets, Add Focus

Finally, Tom shared some candid reflections on expanding internationally.

The big takeaway: Going global doesn’t mean going everywhere.

WithYouWithMe had success in Canada and the UK because the market was receptive and aligned to their value proposition. In contrast, their initial US play proved more complex despite the size of the opportunity.

The lesson? Start with one market. Win real customers. Gather data. Adjust. Then scale.

And, just as importantly, go to that market because it’s the right fit not because it’s the biggest.