Simon Ma is the Managing Director (ASEAN HK TW) at Freshworks.
He’s a goal-focused sales management leader with 12 years of experience in driving growth in sales and revenue by managing customer relations and the acquisition of new accounts.
Prior to the appointment, Ma was the Regional Sales Director for ServiceNow, where he hired, coached, and oversaw business growth across Southeast Asia.
Ma regularly contributes articles for e27 (you can read his thought leadership articles here).
In this candid interview, he talks about his personal and professional life.
How would you explain what you do to a five-year-old?
Freshworks makes business software people love to use. It allows businesses to have a simple and friendly way to talk to their customers and employees to help solve issues quickly.
The ultimate goal that my team and I at Freshworks put ourselves behind is to help businesses remove the most pressing obstacles that they may have in achieving an engaging experience for their employees and customers.
Like what I tell the toddler at home, “Daddy’s work is to help your friends’ daddies and mummies so they can spend more time at home and play with their kids.”
What has been the biggest highlight/challenge of your career so far?
COVID-19 was a challenging period for a lot of businesses. Companies transitioned to a WFH environment and had to keep businesses going while grappling with a widespread pandemic.
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On a personal front, each of us was dealing with challenges at home and in our daily lives. My first priority was to ensure that each of our team members had a safe environment to operate in and make sure that they had access to proper support in case of emergencies.
Our other priority was to keep employees engaged, collaborating, and ensuring resilience in business operations. Staying close and checking in regularly with one another was critical. Everyone had different situations at home, and it was vital that we all understood and worked around each other’s family situations to tide through.
We also found that providing employees with systems that reduced operational work through automation provided us with a way to build resiliency in operations. Many tasks are now automated, and even if some of our team members were on medical rest during COVID-19, we could keep the operations going. This also allowed our employees to focus on high-value work that yields more impact.
How do you envision the next five years of your career at Freshworks?
Asia is a fast-growing region with a massive population of digital native youths. There will be continued strong consumer demand for digital services, and being able to cope with this demand is also where organisations are investing in. With the current macroeconomic headwinds, organisations are also looking to cut costs while coping with rising demands.
Freshworks is well poised to help organisations by delivering great value and managing costs. Our goal is to build a business that has our customers front and centre, and part of that is investing in a team close to where our customers’ businesses are located in Asia.
What are some of your favourite work tools?
Freshservice! In our business, we need to actively collaborate with team members globally to help solve our most pressing day-to-day business concerns.
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We leverage Freshservice in our 5,000-employee-strong company to ensure that we can quickly track and resolve cross-functional issues for our employees from different departments like IT, Finance, HR, and legal. This elevates our team and allows us to focus on the top business issues in our organisation.
Do you prefer WFH or WFO, or hybrid?
Hybrid work is here to stay because it allows for more flexibility and global access to a larger workforce. For hybrid work to be successful, the right culture and process are critical because there will be a need for cross-geography and remote collaboration. It is also essential to leverage modern tools for employee experience to enhance the desired culture and process.
What would you tell your younger self?
Get involved in your interests, pursue them, and engage in more side projects outside your usual work/school. Meet more people and understand who they are/what they do, we live in a fast-paced, changing world, so take more action and be curious about the world.
Can you describe yourself in three words?
Curious, dynamic, and engaged.
What are you most likely to be doing if not working?
I have received excellent advice from the various mentors I have had in my life, and therefore I make it a point to mentor students or young professionals starting their careers. I also lend my time to consult with startups who are new to the market. These activities keep me engaged and fuel my curiosity about the ever-changing world.
What are you currently reading/listening to/ watching?
Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni.
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