In this episode
Pranav Dalal, CEO and Founder of Office Beacon, argues that when marketing people feel like they are doing the work of three, the fix is structural rather than a matter of adding hours: strategic thinkers stay in-house, execution moves to a distributed layer, and a human-gated approval step sits over anything AI produces. Dalal built Office Beacon over twenty-five years from a remote staffing company in India into a business employing thousands of full-time people across India, the Philippines, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia, primarily serving US-based clients. He and Greg Kihlström work through which roles belong to the core team, what has to be documented explicitly for a brand to behave the same way regardless of who touches it, how to measure a blended team past cost savings, and where AI’s usable output stops short of final delivery.
Key takeaways
- Keep strategic thinkers in-house and put execution on a separate layer. Dalal describes the model as hub and spoke: a small core figures out the strategy, then decides where and how it gets executed, which can be anywhere as long as oversight and process are in place.
- The modern marketing team has three components, not one. Dalal’s framing is local talent, remote talent, and AI working together to execute the strategy — not an in-house team with occasional help.
- COVID settled the trust question about remote work, and marketing leaders have not all updated. Dalal spent twenty years trying to convince companies to trust remote talent; since the pandemic that objection is gone, and the question he puts to marketing executives is whether they are limiting themselves to local talent when they could reach exceptional and more cost-effective talent elsewhere.
- Brand consistency across distributed teams requires a gated layer, not trust. Dalal’s rule: you can get 90% of the work done outside the core, but someone — or a team, or a tool — has to approve it at the right level, because work produced in mass quantity needs a named owner for brand consistency.
- AI can do some of the quality checking, but it does not remove the checkpoint. Companies including Dalal’s now use AI to check quality; the gate still exists, it just has a different mechanism behind part of it.
- Finished work is not final delivery. Office Beacon uses AI internally to produce finished work, but does not deliver AI-only output to customers without checking it, because models change constantly and output changes with them, sometimes randomly. A single mistake can carry a large consequence for a client.
- Cost savings is the entry price, not the measure of success. Dalal’s end game is uplift at lower cost — followers, site visits, cart conversions, cost per acquisition, cost per customer, cost per prospect — the question being whether the team can do more, not just do the same for less.
- “Doing more” should not translate into more hours. Dalal’s organization runs internal surveys and town halls to gauge employee sentiment, and treats productivity gains from AI as capacity rather than as a reason to extend the workday.
- Opposite thinking is a staffing requirement, not a personality trait. Dalal coined the term for deliberately using an asset the way nobody else does — he took stadium access meant for hospitality suites and ran seminars and business lunches in empty arenas instead — and says a marketing team needs someone who thinks that way. His own contrast: he ignores the twenty or thirty LinkedIn InMails he receives daily, while his team’s alternative approaches run about a 30% response rate.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Workload problem or structure problem?
- 1:36 — Pranav Dalal and Office Beacon: remote staffing across five countries
- 2:31 — “The Amazon of business services”: an HR layer, not a vertical
- 3:20 — The signal that should make a leader question in-house-only hiring
- 4:29 — Local talent, remote talent, and AI as one team
- 5:27 — Opposite thinking, and the SoFi Stadium example
- 7:25 — What stays on the core team and what doesn’t
- 9:34 — The gated layer that protects brand consistency
- 10:40 — Measuring a blended team beyond cost savings
- 12:09 — Relieved the pressure, or relocated it?
- 13:33 — Where AI’s finished work stops short of final delivery
- 15:54 — What changes in the next year
Why the signal is structural, not a workload number
The opening question of the episode is whether people doing the work of three is a workload problem or a structure problem. Dalal’s answer is that most marketing teams are still assembled on a default that predates the last five years — hire locally, develop in-house, add headcount when output demands rise. He spent two decades before COVID arguing that remote work deserved trust, including for marketing roles, and says that argument is now over. The question he would put to a marketing executive is whether staying local is a deliberate choice or an inherited one, given that the alternative reaches different kinds of talent at costs that stretch the same budget further.
What belongs on the core team
Dalal’s split is between thinking and doing. Strategic thinkers — the people who generate the ideas and drive the direction — stay in-house. Execution sits on a different layer and can be located anywhere, provided there is real oversight and a process to manage it. He describes his own company operating this way: a small team works the problem out, then decides where and how it gets executed. The distinction is not seniority or cost; it is whether the work requires the context that only the core carries.
Why identity of the executor shouldn’t change how the brand behaves
Greg’s framing in the episode is that the brand lives in small operational decisions, which is exactly where distributed and AI-assisted work tends to drift. Dalal calls this harder with remote teams and harder again once AI is in the mix, and his answer is process rather than instruction: name who vets brand consistency, put checks and balances behind mass-produced work, and accept that you do not hand work to a remote team and let them run with it unless that level of trust already exists. AI can carry some of the checking load — his company uses it for quality control — but the gate itself is non-negotiable.
Where AI’s output actually stops
Dalal distinguishes finished work from final delivery, and the distinction carries the staffing implication. Office Beacon uses AI internally to produce finished work, and still will not ship AI-only output to a customer unchecked, because models change and their output changes with them, sometimes unpredictably. He reads the early wave of “replace the people and get the work done” as largely wrong, and describes the working configuration as AI plus human hybrid teams — collaborating with clients on testing, building in both the AI and the remote staff, so the outcome is faster and cheaper without the quality falling below what the client expected.
What to measure when the team isn’t all in one place, or all human
Cost savings is the obvious metric and, in Dalal’s view, the least interesting one. The measure that matters is uplift: more followers, more site visits, more cart conversions, at a lower cost per acquisition, per customer, or per prospect. He also flags the wellness side of the same question — whether added capacity genuinely relieved pressure or simply moved it — and says his own organization tracks it through internal surveys and town halls. His line on it: doing more does not mean asking for more hours, it means being more productive.
FAQ
What work should a marketing leader keep in-house versus send outside the core team? Pranav Dalal keeps strategic thinkers in-house — the people generating ideas and driving strategy — and puts execution on a separate layer that can operate anywhere, as long as there is strong oversight and defined process behind it.
How do you keep a brand consistent when work is produced by remote teams and AI? By building a gated layer: a named person, team, or tool that vets brand consistency and approves work at the right level. Dalal’s framing is that outside capacity can produce 90% of the work, but the approval step stays.
Can AI deliver finished marketing work? Dalal says AI produces finished work but not final delivery. His company does not send AI-only output to clients without checking it, because model output changes over time and a single mistake can have a large consequence for a client.
How should a blended in-house, remote, and AI team be measured? Beyond cost savings, on uplift: followers, website visits, conversions, and unit economics such as cost per acquisition, cost per customer, or cost per prospect. The test is whether the team can do more at lower cost, not simply cost less.
What is “opposite thinking”? A term Dalal coined for deliberately using a resource the way nobody else does. His example: gaining access to SoFi Stadium and, instead of hosting hospitality suites on game days, running seminars, business lunches and meetings in the empty venue — then repeating the model in other arenas that drew his ideal customer profile.
How do you know added capacity relieved pressure rather than relocating it? Dalal treats it as a still-open question under AI-era output expectations, and measures it directly through employee sentiment — internal surveys, feedback, and town hall meetings — rather than inferring it from output.
About Pranav Dalal
Meet Pranav Dalal, a Harvard Business School alumnus with decades of global business experience. A visionary entrepreneur, Pranav has successfully scaled companies from small teams to operations with thousands of employees. A published writer in prestigious publications like Forbes and Entrepreneur.com, he has been honored with the Vistage Business Impact Award and is a Member of The Forbes Business Council. As Chairman and CEO of Office Beacon, Pranav leads the company to new heights, expanding its presence across the USA, India, the Philippines, Mexico, and South Africa, with even greater growth on the horizon.
Pranav Dalal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranavdalal/
Resources
Office Beacon: https://www.officebeacon.com/
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of the Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. If your best marketing people feel like they’re doing the work of three, is that a workload problem or a structure problem? Agility isn’t just moving faster, it’s being able to change how your team is built repeatedly without the work coming apart in the process. Today we’re talking about the architecture of the marketing team itself. Budget pressure, a tight talent market, and rising expectations for output have a lot of leaders asking people to do more inside a structure that was designed for a different set of demands. We’re gonna get into what actually belongs on the core team and what doesn’t, how to bring in outside talent without the brand behaving differently depending on who’s doing the work, and what to measure when the team is no longer all in one place or all human. To help me discuss this topic,
[00:01:30] Greg Kihlström: I’d like to welcome Pranav Dalal, CEO and founder at Office Beacon. Pranav, welcome to the show.
[00:01:36] Pranav Dalal: thanks Greg, appreciate it. Glad to be here.
[00:01:38] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, looking forward to diving in here i- in a minute, but before we do, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Office Beacon?
[00:01:46] Pranav Dalal: Yes, Office Beacon is a company I started twenty-five years ago, and, I’ve grown it privately and with a team that’s helped me, expand. We started in India as a remote staffing company. We expanded to the Philippines, South Africa, Mexico, Bolivia, and, we employ thousands of full-time employees in those countries that work for primarily US-based clients in multiple industries. And, and, and so that’s how we’ve sort of evolved as a company, over the years.
[00:02:20] Greg Kihlström: Great. Great. And so I know you gave a little background there, but, tell us a little bit more about the company’s core mission, types of businesses you typically partner with, things like that.
[00:02:31] Pranav Dalal: Yes. Office Beacon, so we, we… Our goal is, first of all, we want to, offer, talent to any sort of industry, and company within those industries. So think of it this way, we’re like the Amazon of business services. So if you’re looking for a marketing person or an IT or technical person, accounting, et cetera, we have something for every business. A- as long as, the company and owner is willing to do it remotely, we can do it, and that’s sort of the way I look at it. We’re, we’re really an HR layer or, or infrastructure platform for companies, and we don’t try to just focus on one industry or one vertical. We’re really specialists, and we have a lot of people that are specialists in multiple types of
[00:03:17] Pranav Dalal: industries. So we’re really the HR layer.
[00:03:20] Greg Kihlström: Great. Great. So yeah, let’s, let’s dive in here. I wanna, wanna start by talking about kind of rethinking, something that, that you talked about in a recent article, and rethinking who really belongs on, on your team. And for a marketing leader who’s built their whole career on hiring and developing in-house talent, what’s the signal that should make them question that, that default?
[00:03:44] Pranav Dalal: Since, Greg, since COVID, okay, so let me take you back a few years, like five years, right? The whole world changed its mindset. for twenty years before that, here I am, and companies like me that were trying to convince people to trust, remote work, and that include marketing people too. since COVID, now that question is, gone. Like, people are, are outsourcing or using remote talent from all countries. And so for marketing executives, I think the thing to question is, are you limiting yourself by just, working with local talent, or can you really broaden that reach? Because you could really find different types of talent, exceptional talent, c- more cost-effective
[00:04:29] Pranav Dalal: talent to, to, to stretch your budgets even further. So that, that’s what I would question and, and ask marketing executives to look at, is how do you assemble this team so the team can comprise remote staff, uh… And by the way, it can also, like, now comprise AI. So your team is gonna be comprised of local talent, remote talent, and AI to help you execute your strategy.
[00:04:52] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. And so, certainly, you mentioned COVID. Certainly there’s, there’s always a lot of, uh… There’s always a bit of chaos, there’s always a bit of up and down in, in the market, and so building predictive, predictable revenue is, is key. You’ve talked about using something called opposite thinking to, to do so. When you apply that to how a marketing team gets staffed, where does that lead you? maybe talk w- what d- what do you mean by opposite thinking and, and maybe give an example of how that works.
[00:05:27] Pranav Dalal: Opposite thinking is a coin I termed, because that’s, something actually I do and I realize I do that. And what– I’ll give you some context. So I’m in Los Angeles, and a few years ago, I went to SoFi Stadium to basically get season tickets to two football teams, the Rams and the Chargers, because I love football. Well, the opportunity came about where I spoke to executives and they, they offered, a business, development relationship where I had access to the stadiliterally every day of the week. And I immediately started thinking, “How could a company like mine use that?” And I thought, “This is- tr- a classic case of opposite thinking. So the traditional way of using a stadium is you
[00:06:12] Pranav Dalal: invite people to a suite, you have hospitality. I said, “I’m gonna take it even a step further. I’m gonna use it for seminars, business, lunches, meetings, et cetera, even when the stadium is empty.” And it became a huge draw, and then we started doing that across the country in different types of s- not the SoFi Stadium type, but other types of arenas and, and special places that would attract our ideal customer profile. And that’s an example of how to think differently, how to think in an opposite way to what other people are doing to gain an, a competitive advantage. And for marketing teams, you really need someone who can think like that. I would… A- any business actually. How do you stand out
[00:06:57] Pranav Dalal: from your competition? When I think about all the marketing messages that you get daily, everyone gets daily. For example, on LinkedIn you get prob- I probably get 20 or 30 in mail messages. I don’t open a single one, yet our strategies enable us to get about a 30% response rate. So you really need someone on your team that’s looking at alternative ways to get your messaging through to your ideal customer.
[00:07:25] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. And so le- let’s talk a little bit more about, when, when a, a marketing leader is looking to augment their team, they’ve got content and campaign operations, data analysis. how should they think about work that is, good to, fall outside the core team, and, and what, what, what should they try to keep in, i- internal to that core team? Like, what’s, what’s a good way of, of thinking there?
[00:07:57] Pranav Dalal: Yes. I, I think the way I look at it anyway is you need your strategic thinkers in-house. You need the right people that are able to come up with the ideas and drive, strategy, and keep that as a core team. Execution can be at a different layer, so you can have people to execute anywhere. it could be in any country, as long as you have good oversight and good process to manage it. so that’s the way I look at it. You have your c- it’s like a hub and spoke. You’ve got your core, and then you’ve got the ways, the different ways you’re gonna execute, the strategy itself and, and that’s what we do. We, we, we figure it out with a small team, and then we, we figure out where we wanna a- and how we wanna execute
[00:08:43] Pranav Dalal: things.
[00:08:44] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Well, and, certainly, that hub and spoke model works, works really well. although, there, there are… E- even if you keep the c- the creative and, and the strategic work in- internal to that hub, there’s still obviously lots of things that need to get communicated out and-
[00:09:04] Greg Kihlström: … the brand itself can live in some of those very small operational decisions. So, what do, what, what’s a rule of thumb or what’s a, what’s a way for leaders to think about, what do, what do you write down or document that needs to be explicit for distributed teams so that the brand really can, maintain consistency and everything like that, whether it’s remote or outside or, or internal core team working on it?
[00:09:34] Pranav Dalal: that’s a fantastic question actually, because it becomes har- much harder, right, with remote teams or even incorporating AI, and that’s where you, you do have to have the process of oversight, having checks and balances. So when things are produced in mass quantity, you do have a s- process of who is going to be, vetting, brand consistency for example, and, can… AI can do some of that, right? Like s- there are companies including ours that now use AI to check quality, but you do have to have a, a gated layer. So you have to have the right process in place, the right people in place, or tools that is definitely checking that. You just are not gonna, hand it to over to a remote team
[00:10:20] Pranav Dalal: and then just let them run with it, unless you have that sort of level of trust with them, but I think you need a gated layer for sure. So you can get 90% of the work done, but then you do have someone or people or a team making sure things are getting approved at the right level. You, you definitely would need that.
[00:10:40] Greg Kihlström: And then as far as measuring success, I mean, certainly, cost savings, is a, is a great way to, to measure if, if a blended team is, is working. But what are, what are some other ways, beyond, beyond financial?
[00:10:58] Pranav Dalal: Yeah. So, yeah, there’s definitely cost savings, but, that’s not the end game. The end game is really, can you do more? Can you get more, you know-
[00:11:07] Greg Kihlström: Yeah
[00:11:07] Pranav Dalal: … an uplift, an uptick in your metrics, whatever you’re measuring? It could be the number of followers. It could be the number of visits to your website. It could be conversions, onto a shopping cart, and that’s what you’re really looking for is cost per acquisition, cost per customer, cost per prospect, whatever it may be. You’re looking for that uplift at a lower cost by using these re- by do- being able to do more with a distributed team that, i- ideally costs less, and enables you to, to really do more, ’cause everybody’s doing more, and [chuckles] you’ve gotta compete with that.
[00:11:43] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Well, and, the, the thing I mentioned at the, the survey I mentioned at the, at the top of the show where a lot of the employees feel like they’re doing the work of, of three people, when a leader adds capacity outside the core team, how do they know that they’ve genuinely relieved some of that pressure rather than just kind of relocated, relocated it?
[00:12:09] Pranav Dalal: as a business owner, that’s a tough question. I’ll, I’ll tell you why, because with AI now, there is s- considerable pressure on business owners and business leaders to do more, right? To have teams do more, and that I think is a question that’s still to be answered. So we are mindful, as an organization, my organization is very mindful of employee wellness. We take a look at that and, do surveys internally and get feedback and have a lot of, like, town hall meetings to understand and gauge, the s- the sentiment of employees. We certainly don’t want it to turn badly, and we don’t want it to be negative, and we want them to be very excited about this new world, that we’re entering with
[00:12:54] Pranav Dalal: AI particularly and distributed teams the way we’ve known it forever. And I think we’ve turned that corner. We’ve, we’ve, we’ve made, our teams and enabled them to be very excited. So they understand by doing… Not doing more, but just doing more with AI, for example hey are able to do more. But it doesn’t mean they’re working more hours, they’re just able to be more productive, and they understand that that makes us very competitive as an organization. So I think that’s the trick and the fine line for organizations is doing more doesn’t mean asking for more hours necessarily. It just means you’re able to be more productive.
[00:13:33] Greg Kihlström: So I wanna… You mentioned AI usage a little, a little bit ago. I wanna, wanna talk about that. Certainly we talk a, a lot about that on, on the show as well, and I wanna talk about what AI actually changes. ‘Cause, there’s, there’s a lot of different potential uses for AI, and AI just as a umbrella term can, can certainly mean a lot of things. But, across the teams that you work with, where are you seeing systems that are actually producing finished work versus making someone faster at something, maybe au- more augmentation than, replacing the work that they’re doing? And, how does that distinction change how a leader thinks about staffing?
[00:14:17] Pranav Dalal: Internally, we’re using AI, to do a lot of things, including finished work, but I think the caveat there is that finished work doesn’t mean final delivery. We are very careful on delivering AI-only product or outcomes, for customers without checking it, and, because AI models are changing all the time, output from AI is changing, sometimes randomly. [laughs] And, we have to be very careful. I think that’s what most companies are finding right now. I think the initial rush for AI was, “Hey, we can replace all these people, and we can just get this work done,” which is not necessarily the case. It might be in some, but, we are very cautious about that because
[00:15:02] Pranav Dalal: a single mistake could have a huge consequence on, one of our clients. And while we’re– and we’re collaborating with our clients to to do the testing, to build in the AI, to build in the remote staff so that they do see an actual outcome in terms of faster speed and lower cost. But we are very responsible to make sure, we call it, combining AI plus human hybrid teams together, to make sure the outcomes are what clients want and, at the same time, the quality and assurance of the, the, final product is what they would expect, cheaper, faster, better, et cetera. So I don’t… I, I, I would be very cautious as a business leader to promote, “Hey, just go all in on AI and leave people out.” I, I don’t think that’s the answer right now.
[00:15:54] Greg Kihlström: Right. Yeah, totally agree. Well, Pranav, thanks so much for joining today and, and sharing your insights. I’ve got two last questions as we wrap up here. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
[00:16:10] Pranav Dalal: We’re definitely gonna be talking about new ways of marketing [laughs] and, and, new ways of using technology with people. We don’t– We’ve– we’re just touching the tip of the iceberg here, so one year from now it’s gonna be radically different.
[00:16:27] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Love it. And last question for you, what do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:16:36] Pranav Dalal: I, I love, researching new concepts, whether it’s technology, people, countries, and how it’s gonna expand our business to, to be– to keep us with a competitive advantage for our clients. So that, that’s what I do a lot of my time is just look at what, what we can offer a- as a competitive advantage.
