Gordon Laing
Senior Company Operations Manager at Onfido
We recognize that pricing is a dynamic discipline. The topic is defined, iterated, and updated based on continuously revised data. As such, developing an effective pricing strategy can be more challenging when there is an absence of historical data.
Our latest Pricing Pioneer is Gordon Laing, Senior Company Operations Manager at Onfido. Gordon joined Onfido in October 2021, at a time of rapid growth for the London-based business. Onfido’s AI-powered digital identity verification solution has been powerful for clients looking to automate the onboarding of new customers, lower the cost of customer acquisition, and strengthen compliance.
Gordon’s task is to help define a coherent pricing and billing strategy at a time when Onfido’s revenues have doubled, and U.S. sales have leapt by more than 200%. Here’s his story.
Good Workplace Culture Supports Strong Career Growth
Gordon’s role at Onfido is split into three parts: managing the “commercial ecosystem” of Onfido’s quote to cash systems, delivering process improvement, and defining the operational systems strategy to supercharge Onfido’s future growth.
The beauty of his role is that it is wide-ranging yet specific. It requires long-term strategy and short-term responsiveness. While this can make weeks feel unstructured, Gordon appreciates the variety and the ability to spend time at different levels of detail. Above all, there is a positive workplace culture and an ability to grow within the role over time.
Culture is important, he adds, when your task is to help build a new commercial model in a fast-growing industry. It is a lesson he learned early. After graduating from Swansea University (BSc Econ), Gordon’s first job was a Consultant at Thomsons Online Benefits, later moving within the company to manage partnerships with huge global enterprises. As a 23-year-old running multi-million pound partnerships, his progress and career growth would not have been possible without a phenomenal work culture.
“It’s something I’ve learned to value more than anything else in my career,” he says, adding that he’s managed to find this same supportive culture at Onfido.
Everyone is pulling in the same direction; there is no blame culture. It’s important to have colleagues who are always willing to give you their time and expertise to help you solve a problem.
Generating Momentum at Onfido
There is no such thing as a typical day for Gordon. Long-term strategy may have to take a back seat as immediate challenges around pricing and billing emerge. “The reality of my working day is trying to find the sweet spot of delivering on our strategic transformation whilst being agile enough to support our product team bringing new products to market quickly,” he says. “It’s a constant battle to balance competing demands on your time.”
The entire Onfido business is moving at pace. In the last two years the company has launched new products, formed new partnerships, achieved industry certifications and made strategic senior leadership hires. For Gordon, finding quick wins and taking decisive action have been key to keeping things moving forward.
Improving and scaling the overall quote-to-cash processes and systems at Onfido is a big part of his role, and a multi-phase project. The adoption of m3ter was phase 1, a way to better apply pricing to usage data and ensure that the business is sending accurate bills to customers. It’s the first part of a multi-year program that Gordon is spearheading end-to-end.
For m3ter to deliver everything we promised to the business, and to be able to realise those benefits immediately, has completely vindicated our buying decision. We will deliver far above our ROI objective too, which has caught the attention of senior leadership and gives us real confidence going into the next phase of our transformation.
Helping Define a New Discipline
Gordon admits he fell into his current role. He had no idea such a role existed, but coming from a revenue role within a professional services team, the opportunity to blend that commercial knowledge with operational change ticked all the boxes. An interesting observation Gordon noted is LinkedIn has very few commercial operations roles listed.
What is certain, he believes, is that this will change. Operations and pricing roles are neither pure revenue analyst nor change manager, but actually a combination of both.
As the tech industry grows and we mature from charting bums-on-seats, or pricing, or churn, there will be a much clearer idea of the connection between all parts. I love being part of this development. The tech industry offers incredible opportunities to build scalable solutions to big challenges. The next job in this space probably doesn’t exist yet.
Advice for Those Wanting to get into Pricing
Right now there is no big team behind Gordon at Onfido. Much of his day is spent working alone or with a variety of stakeholders on projects, as his role involves dotted lines to all parts of the business, including Finance, Legal, Product, Revenue Operations, and more.
This requires a certain type of character: an autonomous self-starter, but one that is capable of building relationships with different people throughout the organization. It also takes someone who’s prepared to grasp opportunities that hadn’t previously been on their radar.
“People come out of university and have no idea these roles exist,” Gordon says. “For me, it’s taken a long time to find a role which satisfies my two skill sets and interests, a hybrid of commercial and operational roles."
He concludes:
A big part of what I do is thinking about how we scale. What does jumping from 20+ million events a month to 100+ million look like? You need to be able to understand what this impact will have on our people, processes and systems. You need to be a strategic thinker, a consultant, and a trusted advisor.
Rapid fire round
To end all our conversations in this series, we’re doing a rapid fire round of questions to get to know each Pricing Pioneer better.
Last TV series you watched/streamed?
I’ve just started The Lincoln Lawyer but enjoyed The Night Agent recently.
Favorite career resources?
Learnably. I wish every business had this for their staff, it's an amazing resource and so flexible to every individual's needs! I love sport so I am always looking for books about the business or culture behind sports teams. Some of the recent reads I've had from Learnably that I've really enjoyed include:
1. Secrets of Sandhill Road - Scott Kupor
2. Astroball - Ben Reiter
3. Betaball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History - Erik Malinowski
Favorite piece of everyday tech or software?
Sounds obvious but Slack. It's made communication so much faster, collaborative and flat structured. We rely less on email at Onfido.
Remote, hybrid, or in-office?
Remote for me, but I love my one day in the office every couple months so I do enjoy elements of hybrid.
Best advice you ever received?
I have a quote/poem that I love. Bonus points if you know the film it's also quoted in!*:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were all meant to shine as children do.
It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone.
And, as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give
other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.
*Coach Carter
If you weren’t doing this job, what would you be doing?
I'd probably still be working in a tech company. But if I had a different skill set, I'd love to be selling classic Ferrari’s or super-prime real estate.
Thank you to Gordon for participating in our Pricing Pioneer series. To stay updated with Gordon's insights, you can follow him on LinkedIn. For more information about Onfido, visit their website at https://onfido.com/.
