iSee is an online eyewear retailer based in Melbourne, Australia. The company was founded in 2010 by a commerce graduate, Eve Freeman, who now acts as the company's CEO. While studying, Eve found herself dissatisfied with the high prices demanded for designer frames at large chain stores, and sought to create an affordable-yet-stylish online alternative for people with lower incomes.

On its website, iSee exclusively sells its own frames, which are manufactured by a production partner in Vietnam, one that was recommended to Eve by a Vietnamese friend from university. When ordering online, customers input their eye prescription into the website, and then select the frame(s) they want the lenses to go into. iSee then sources lenses that fit this prescription from a local manufacturer in Melbourne, fits the lenses to the frame(s) in its Melbourne assembly warehouse, and ships the glasses to the customer. The average total price for a pair of glasses is $200 - far cheaper than the $400-$500 price tag of a pair of glasses at larger chain stores.

A key part of iSee's strategy has been its emphasis on "giving back" to local communities. Specifically, iSee has gone to great lengths to ensure it not only complies with but goes above-and-beyond relevant legislation and regulations. iSee donates 10% of its profits each year to various charities and not-for-profit organisations in the Melbourne region. iSee has also launched an initiative in partnership with low-decile Melbourne primary schools, through which it provides free glasses to children at the schools who meet certain qualifying criteria. In addition, iSee runs a summer internship programme where it brings local commerce students into the company between December and February, to help them gain valuable work experience and boost their career prospects.

iSee has experienced strong revenue growth in Australia since launching, and now has approximately 50 employees in its Melbourne location. Things are going well, but there are 2 major issues that have recently been keeping Eve busy:

1. Expanding to Aotearoa

Recent company analyses suggest that iSee has likely exhausted customer demand in Australia, leading Eve to consider expanding operations to Aotearoa/New Zealand. Specifically, Eve is considering setting up a new office and assembly warehouse in Wellington (where rent is cheaper than Auckland), and employing 10 new staff to run this Wellington branch.

Although Eve believes the expansion idea has a lot of promise, and the company's analytics team is supportive of it, 2 issues are making it difficult to get the idea off the ground:

Eve is having trouble getting her colleagues in the senior management excited about the idea. While relishing the planning, organising, and controlling aspects of running a company, Eve has always found the motivational side of things somewhat challenging - something she has always attributed to her naturally introverted personality. Eve tends to find she's happiest when in her own company, and feels drained after long-meetings with others and when she has to "pitch" ideas to colleagues and customers. She recently attended a leadership seminar to try and improve her leadership capabilities, but left feeling even worse at the end of it because the facilitator just presented a lot of research about the benefits of charisma and certain personality traits (particularly extraversion) for leading effectively. Given her low self-efficacy, Eve is worried she might fail to motivate her team to pursue the (worthwhile) expansion idea.

Eve is an indigenous Australian, and has worked with iSee's designers to incorporate elements of Aboriginal art into many of the iSee frames. These frames have won several international design awards, and have proven to be very popular with Australian customers - something Eve attributes to her marketing team's initiative of getting famous indigenous sports stars to promote the frames on their social media pages. She would like to do a similar thing with Mori art in any eventual Aotearoa operation, but is unsure of how this move would be received by potential New Zealand customers, as well as the general New Zealand public.

2. Hiring a new Chief Financial Officer

To everyone in the company's surprise, iSee's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Amelia - who also happens to be one of Eve's best friends - recently left the company to take up a job overseas. Eve is now faced with the challenge of hiring a new person for this role at short notice, but the recruitment process is proving challenging for several reasons:

Neither Eve nor any of her senior manager colleagues are experts in finance. As such, simply reviewing candidates' CVs and interviewing them, as they have been doing to date, has not been enough to give the team confidence that any given candidate has the required skills and expertise for the CFO role.

On account of its fairly small size, iSee cannot offer a lucrative salary to CFO candidates - certainly not one that would be any match for what good candidates could get by taking a similar role at a larger organisation. Eve is worried that iSee's inability to "show candidates the money" is hampering its ability to attract top quality talent for the CFO role.

Eve has considered promoting a member of the finance team into the CFO role, but she's not confident anyone in the team has the necessary skills and expertise to carry it out successfully. iSee is not a particularly large business, and hasn't had the finances to pay for much in the way of career development (e.g., professional development workshops, leadership and management training) with its more junior staff since launching in 2010.

Given your recent experiences in MGMT101, Eve has turned to you for advice on the issues outlined above!

Give some possible questions and solution from this case please, the more the better.