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Rafat Ali is a two-time media entrepreneur. He sold his first blog a few years ago and is now building Skift, a global media company focused on business travel, conferences, and the business of travel.
Of course, COVID was not fun.
The company nearly fell apart, but managed to eek by with a few saving graces. Namely: remote work.
Rafat made the decision to not renew the company’s lease when it came up in summer 2020, and with that decision the company - and its dozens of employees - went 100% remote. This move stands apart from what’s becoming the major wave of hybrid remote announcements, since as of right now the company is totally remote with plans to stay that way.
In this conversation with Rafat, we talked about
📈 How Skift weathered the COVID storm, coming back from the brink of collapse (and what they are up to now)
🔒 Remote work versus pandemic lockdown work (they are not the same thing)
✈️ The future of travel (and business travel in particular)
Have a listen in Substack or in your favorite podcast app!
Thanks for reading!
☕ If you enjoy what I do, buy me a virtual coffee from time-to-time to support my work. I know it seems small, but it truly helps.
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Admittedly, you’d expect the founder of a company that helps remote teams with payroll and taxes to not like offices. But Sahin Boydas is a little different than most entrepreneurs.
With nearly 10 startups under his belt (a handful of failures and a handful of successes and exits), Sahin has barely ever worked in an office - and never on a permanent basis. Whether in his native Turkey, to Boston, to Silicon Valley, every single one of his startups is remote. It’s perhaps no wonder he refers to offices as “prisons of the mind.”
In this interview, Sahin and I talked about the future of Silicon Valley, how Sahin thinks about angel investing remotely, and of course the future of remote work.
Check out key takeaways below or listen to the whole episode on your favorite podcast platform.
Image courtesy Remote Team
Silicon Valley’s greatest export
Silicon Valley was - and arguably still is - the global epicentre of tech. Even in a remote world, Sahin doesn’t think that’s going anywhere. Instead, the shift will be from requiring physical presence in Silicon Valley to requiring a Silicon Valley mindset anywhere you are in the world. What constitutes a Silicon Valley mindset? For Sahin, it’s a willingness to try new things, take bold risks, and invest in ideas knowing that not everything will work out, but the production and founding process will teach individual founders a lot and help educate the whole ecosystem for the next crop of entrepreneurs.
Key quote:
“The idea of Silicon Valley is three ingredients. The first ingredient is we welcome everyone in the world. It’s the American dream on steroids. Second, you are free. You can be anything. I think anyone, any gender, any religion, you will be welcome here. Then we have Stanford, getting millions of ideas from professors. And we have the money from Sand Hill Road and Stanford. Then we have the lawyers that know how to do the exit playbooks.”
“It’s not really about the tech, it’s about the outcome and building something fast… it’s about the culture.”
Angel investing remotely
After some business successes, Sahin began to invest in other startups (remotely, of course). Instead of following a geographic thesis or waiting for the startups to come to him, he decided to take his stock investing mentality and bring that to angel investing. Namely, Sahin invests in companies that he either is a huge fan of as a customer or, if the solution isn’t what he personally needs, that he’s a huge fan of in general. It may not be the most sophisticated, algorithmic investment strategy, but it’s a system that helps him direct his investment dollars into opportunities he’s genuinely happy to rave about.
Key quote:
“I personally read around a thousand article titles a day to generate ideas. If someone is building my idea, that’s an investment I want to make.”
“If I find any idea that I really, really, really like, I reach out to the founders.”
(Disclosure: Always do your own diligence on investments and follow your own independent research. Everything we talked about in the episode were just examples, not advice.)
The future of work
Sahin founded RemoteTeam.com to help remote companies manage the nitty gritty details of payroll, taxes, and employee administration on remote teams - all the little things that get more complicated when you don’t have one central office location.
As such, it’s pretty easy to believe that Sahin thinks the future of work is remote:
Key quote:
“We somehow got used to this 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, and 8 hours of family time. But I don’t think I’ve ever worked 8 hours linear in my life.”
“I’m so excited that the world is catching up to [remote work] and changing.”
The final word
“The office was built by the industrial revolution… the office is our prison of the mind”
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Sahin on:
* Twitter
* Instagram
* LinkedIn
* RemoteTeam.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
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Lauren Razavi is now a sought after consultant and researcher on the future of work (and remote work in particular), but she didn’t start her career that way. Instead, she ran away from home at a young age and became a music tour manager, helping indie bands get their break. Then she transitioned into full-time freelancing, digital nomadism, and eventually to big tech™ at Google before striking back out on her own.
In our conversation, she shared her insights on the future of the office, mobility, and humanity in remote work.
Building humanity into remote work
“A lot of people think technology somehow changes how humans behave, but I really don’t think it does. We behave in the same way using different kinds of communications tools. For instance, I’ve run a Slack channel for freelancers who collaborate on different projects, and it’s a small but close knit community. Most of us are in touch most days just to have some digital recreation. But you consciously have to make sure that you’re not spending your whole day gossiping on Slack, for instance. There’s a balance to strike, but I don’t think anything’s lost.”
The future of the office
“One of the trends I think we’re going to see moving forward is a shift of the office from a place that people go for 9-5 every day into spaces for collaboration and getting together on a less regular basis with a clear motivation and purpose.”
“But even the most dedicated remote workers are still going to encounter a lot of situations in their work where being remote from others is not necessarily conducive to achieving that particular task they might be focused on.”
“Software is having an absolute renaissance now from the downturn in a way nobody really expected. You have these software companies that are absolutely flourishing because they’ve been on a path and were viewing a future of work they thought was very distant. And before 2020 it was very distant. And now suddenly it’s here.”
Not just remote, but mobile
“When we say remote work right now, we mean work from home. But I think by the end of this decade we will see a fundamental and enormous shift to work from anywhere. In the next stage of things, people are going to wake up to what’s possible. We’re going to see a much more fluid approach to location from workers. For instance, if your role is remote, what’s to stop you from taking your family to a villa in Italy for three months every summer?”
“We’re seeing this as sort of a pandemic recovery process for many countries like Barbados, Bermuda, and Georgia. These countries and governments actually want to attract remote workers as replacements for tourists.”
The final word
“Remote work itself is for everybody, but I would say that remote work definitely isn’t for all types of work.”
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Remotely Inclined Chats with Lauren Razavi
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Lauren. Let’s start with your story and journey into remote work
Lauren: My story actually started about a decade ago. When I was a teenager, I basically ran away from home and joined a music tour. From that experience, I ended up becoming a freelancer and remote worker - and I haven’t changed course since.
I wanted to be a musician, but I was absolutely terrible at the guitar, singing, and the piano. So that wasn’t going to work. So I started to promote some friends. One of the bands I was working with started to get some traction, and that was mainly through my work as a music manager. Back then I didn’t really understand what I was doing, but just kind of going for it and leveraging the internet to spread the word about music and to make connections.
From there I went to university and studied politics. The main thing that studying politics teaches you is that you don’t want to get into politics! While I was studying, I fell into being a freelance journalist. I started pitching editors at magazines and newspapers in the UK and worked really, really hard for six months not getting anywhere.
Then I started to get somewhere with freelancing and it all flowed ever since. It’s taken me from freelance journalism and foreign reporting to Google in a couple different roles. Then I transitioned more into writing, speaking, and consulting rather than just the kind of straight freelance journalism, which is where I am at today.
You had a unique remote work journey. Is remote work actually for everyone?
Remote work itself is for everybody, but I would say that remote work definitely isn’t for all types of work.
One of the trends I think we’re going to see moving forward is a shift of the office from a place that people go for 9-5 every day into spaces for collaboration and getting together on a less regular basis with a clear motivation and purpose.
But even the most dedicated remote workers are still going to encounter a lot of situations in their work where being remote from others is not necessarily conducive to achieving that particular task they might be focused on.
So does that mean people who hate remote work have a point?
When people say they hate remote work, sometimes there’s a real confusion in terms of what they are talking about. Particularly this year, when people say they hate remote work, what they might mean is more that they hate doing remote work unexpectedly during a pandemic, without the right equipment and surrounded by partners, children, and other housemates. None of that is conducive to remote work just like any other kind of work or entrepreneurial activity.
You have to be able to choose your way of doing things. Right now, a lot of people don’t really have that as an option. They’re not able to say they are the kind of person who needs a coworking space or the kind of person who needs a quiet room. We’ve all been thrust into this situation.
And remote work in many ways is such a vague term. Maybe 70% to 80% of most people’s work is actually deep focused work where they need to think about things and produce stuff that doesn’t require other people. Certainly in the knowledge economy, the vast majority of work lends itself to this kind of deep focused work. When I talk about remote, I’m talking bout that aspect. But also making an allowance for the fact that some stuff does have to happen and is more efficient in person.
What physical infrastructure does remote work need?
There’s a hardware aspect and a software aspect to that question.
There are quite clear hardware aspects of a decent remote work set up: ergonomic set up, electronics, etc.
Software is having an absolute renaissance now from the downturn in a way nobody really expected. You have these software companies that are absolutely flourishing because they’ve been on a path and were viewing a future of work they thought was very distant. And before 2020 it was very distant. And now suddenly it’s here. So they’ve seen interest in their products and users skyrocket.
A lot of small office interactions are being eaten by the world of software. But that’s really exciting because it’s freeing us up to have more meaningful human-to-human interactions.
Do human relationships suffer when you don’t have the mundane little interactions to prompt conversation?
When I think about the mundane things, in an office that might be asking if someone wants a cup of tea. Or helping them out with something. The same kind of thing happens in digital spaces.
A lot of people think technology somehow changes how humans behave, but I really don’t think it does. We behave in the same way using different kinds of communications tools. For instance, I’ve run a Slack channel for freelancers who collaborate on different projects, and it’s a small but close knit community. Most of us are in touch most days just to have some digital recreation. But you consciously have to make sure that you’re not spending your whole day gossiping on Slack, for instance. There’s a balance to strike, but I don’t think anything’s lost.
What else is involved in the future of work besides remote?
I’m actually writing a book on this at the moment - it’s about the global mobility aspect. For the past six years I’ve lived and worked as a digital nomad, essentially travelling all around the world whilst building my career.
When we say remote work right now, we mean work from home. But I think by the end of this decade we will see a fundamental and enormous shift to work from anywhere. In the next stage of things, people are going to wake up to what’s possible. We’re going to see a much more fluid approach to location from workers. For instance, if your role is remote, what’s to stop you from taking your family to a villa in Italy for three months every summer?
We’re seeing this as sort of a pandemic recovery process for many countries like Barbados, Bermuda, and Georgia. These countries and governments actually want to attract remote workers as replacements for tourists.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Lauren on her newsletter and on Twitter.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
One truth about remote work that’s become a cliché is that it saves you money. Many remote entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with say that their choice to be remote was, at least in part, due to the costs of an office.
The challenge I have with this statement isn’t about its truth. Instead, it ignores the other, very real expenses that pop up when you run a remote business. I want to shine a light on those for two reasons:
* A lot of bashing around remote work stems from the idea that companies are reaping massive savings while forcing employees to pay for office expenses (in the words of Laurel Farrer - “will no one ever be satisfied?”).
* Entrepreneurs thinking of going remote - you need to go in eyes wide open. You’ve probably experienced some of these costs as you navigated COVID, but there are others that will come up if you want to build a thriving remote culture.
I’ve broken down this article into three categories: freelancers / solopreneurs, services teams, and product teams. Each category is cumulative, meaning a services team will also have the expenses that a freelancer or solopreneur has. Further, a product team will likely have the expenses of a services team and a freelancer, since a lot of product companies offer services, whether as a revenue line or under the banner of customer success.
So shall we talk about money?
Image via Burst
Remote expenses: Solopreneur and freelancer
All businesses have some fundamental things they need to pay for. In the freelancer and solopreneur world, thankfully those expenses can be relatively low. However, they can still amount to thousands of dollars per year for:
* Payment processing for digital payments
* Web hosting for personal sites and ecommerce platforms
* Custom email and digital asset managers
* Social media management tools
* Contract management and e-signature tools
* Any custom technology necessary to do their job (design platforms, etc.)
These infrastructural costs hurt freelancers and solopreneurs the most, in my opinion, because they are not built for the freelance world. Big tech platforms like Zoom didn’t build for freelancers when they launched a ‘freelancer’ level. Instead, the company simply took enterprise value triggers and offered fewer of them for a lower price. While this covers some needs, it does not reach all - leading to platform creep for freelancers.
Services companies
Services companies will have the same infrastructural costs of a freelancer, scaled up by the size of their team. However, they will also have:
* Virtual office tools like Workplace by FB or Memberstack / Memberspace / etc.
* Project management tools like Asana, Trello, or Airtable
* Travel and retreat expenses (don’t assume remote teams shouldn’t spend time together)
* Home office stipends or coworking memberships for employees
* Virtual events
* Gift cards and other goodies in lieu of office perks like snacks and coffee
* Payroll and team admin software that manages the complexity of having employees in different countries
These kinds of expenses are often higher for remote service companies than they would be for an office-centric company. Take retreats, for example. You can’t hire a coach bus to drive outside the city with the team - everyone has to fly in, some folks from very far away. It creates opportunity for fun exotic locales, but also adds to the cost base.
Product companies
Selling a product is the most scalable type of company, but it also carries with it a higher fixed cost base. Not only will product companies have all the costs associated with human capital, they will also have:
* Ticket management and support hub software
* Fulfillment and shipping costs
* Returns and inventory management costs
* Cyber security costs associated with remote product development
* And more based on what kind of product they are selling
Many of these costs can be outsourced or handled as a percentage of revenues, but that leaves a smaller pot to pay employees and hold profit for investment later. When these companies are remote, there is some efficiency to be gained - an ecomm brand can have centralized inventory instead of distributing it to storefronts first - but that doesn’t mean it’s all easy from there.
There are of course other costs associated with running a business, but I tried to highlight the ones that remote companies have (or have more of) compared to office-centric companies. And if you’re noticing some overlap, that’s a good thing - it means that many office-centric companies are more set up to work remotely than they may have thought.
One more thing…
I started Remotely Inclined to investigate running a business remotely, and now invest multiple hours per week researching different topics, interviewing experts, and putting together this content.
If you’d like to support that work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You get access to everything I produce and you can have me solve your remote work problems for you - just send me a question. I’ll do the research and publish the answer.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
Laurel Farrer has been leading remote organizations for 14 years, well before it was a hot topic. Now, she helps other companies figure out their remote work arrangements with her company Distribute Consulting and she built a thriving community of remote workers in the Remote Work Association.
While Laurel knows there’s a lot of flexibility in remote work, one thing that grinds her gears is when people have complained about wanting remote work for years only to deride organizations now for “downloading” office expenses onto employees. To quote: “Will no one ever be satisfied?”
In this interview, Laurel shared the four categories of remote work infrastructure, how to take care of your mental health during both the pandemic and with regular remote work, and more.
Remote infrastructure is four things
→ Too many companies ignore infrastructure, believing that once you don’t need an office space anymore, you’re good. Not only is this not the case for hybrid remote companies, but it’s also not true of all-remote companies.
Physical infrastructure: All workers, remote or not, need a place to work - desks, chairs, wifi, etc. For a business, this could mean an office, coworking memberships, or home office stipends.
Digital tools: Whatever tools you need to get your work done. This was commonplace in an office environment, but additional tools for communication and collaboration are critical.
Processes and rituals: You may not see everyone every day, so no chatting by the coffee machine. But that doesn’t mean you can’t build regular practices to make work life easier and more pleasant.
Information management: If you don’t manage information properly, you get the worst of both worlds.
Mental health: Remote work challenge accelerated by the pandemic
→ Like an office environment, a remote work environment has mental health risks associated with it. That’s to be expected.
→ The difference between offices and remote work is that feelings of isolation, disconnection, and micromanagement can be very physical, whereas they might be more difficult to pin down in an office full of people.
→ Unfortunately, the pandemic served to accelerate and exacerbate all these issues, meaning it’s critical that people check in with themselves.
→ Self check in questions should be about discovering patterns which you can then do something about. This is entirely about what works for you - not about any sort of best practice.
The final word
“There is no right way to do remote work. It’s however you want to leverage this as a strategy in order to optimize operations or retain employees or access a greater talent pool. It’s up to you.”
Remotely Inclined Chats with Laurel Farrer
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Laurel! What’s your remote work journey and why did you found Distribute Consulting?
Laurel: I’ve been working remotely for 14 years. The entire time I was operating distributed companies. And 14 years ago, remote work wasn’t cool. It wasn’t natural. I got a lot of questions. Through those years, I was a consultant informally on the side, answering those questions. About four years ago I was experiencing a horrible company culture, and I said I was going to dedicate my life to preventing this for other people. I unexpectedly quit my job because it got to a level where I couldn’t do it anymore. I thought about what would be next, and I knew I wanted to strengthen the conversation about virtual organizational development and create the resources I wanted and needed as a distributed company executive.
What does it mean to be an “office manager” in a virtual world?
The role of an office manager is to keep operations humming - to create an environment in which productivity and business operations continue and people have a place to come together that fuels their productivity and collaboration. That’s exactly what you do as an office manager in a remote company, but in a virtual space.
We still need to have a place to work together. We still have tools to manage. We still have environments to create activities or to plan and coordinate.
How does the office manager role change in a hybrid-first remote world?
The goal with remote work is not to necessarily make everybody go distributed overnight. We can’t do that. It would completely crush our economy. What we need to think of instead is location irrelevancy in our work so business operations can continue regardless of where we are. So that means we can be just as productive outside of the office as we can be inside of the office. That’s where this new office management role becomes environment creation - we’re going to create an environment where people can collaborate digitally in order to work together as a team in order to produce and review output. It’s creating infrastructure of employee engagement, culture, rituals, and accessibility. It’s just making the office digital instead of physical.
Continuing on the idea of infrastructure - what physical infrastructure is necessary in a remote work world?
This is a conversation too many people neglect. We’re still physical people - we might work in digital spaces, but we’re physical. We need to pay attention to our coworking spaces or home offices or mobile and HQ offices. They have to support our health and safety so we can continue to be productive, safe, and strong mentally, emotionally, and physically.
The conversation about infrastructure is not just tools. Too many people stop there once they figure out if they should have Microsoft Teams or Slack. It’s bigger than that. It’s about how you’re interacting with each other.
Infrastructure is four things:
* Physical infrastructure like offices and desks.
* Digital tools like Zoom or Slack.
* Processes and rituals to help people get their work done.
* Information management to ensure everything is accessible for people to do their jobs.
I spoke with Avery Francis on the podcast about mental health for remote workers. How many current mental health issues are embedded in remote work versus caused by COVID?
There are health risks - mental health, emotional health - that come along with working remotely. The coronavirus pandemic exacerbates them. We’re at risk of feelings of invisibility or micromanagement or imposter syndrome. Or feeling very controlled by our leadership team. Or burnout. Or informational isolation. Or feeling disconnected from our job.
When we’re in this exaggerated situation, all those problems become even more extreme. So people have to be hyper-aware and hyper-preventative of that isolation, burnout, and micromanagement, which means they need to be extremely proactive in self-awareness and thinking about “ok, do I have a problem? How am I doing today?”
Some ideas:
* Cutting off work at scheduled times.
* Start work at scheduled times.
* Reach out to a coworker.
* Go for a run during lunch.
The point of remote work is that it’s all about employee empowerment. It’s autonomy management, which means we’re in control. We don’t have to be supervised, which is a double-edged sword. On one side you get all this freedom, but on the other it’s up to you - if you’re feeling these problems of burnout or isolation, you’ve got to be willing to solve it.
What steps can people take if they do a self-check in and things aren’t going well?
You’re learning about yourself. So for some people, that’s journaling. For some people it’s talking it out with a friend. Or talking to a therapist. Or taking a schedule of their day and collecting data about how you feel at different points of the day.
However you get there, just get a point of clarity and be able to notice patterns.
Is remote work just an excuse for companies to make employees pay for things like rent and desks?
I always laugh at this conversation. For the past 10 years, employees have been begging their employees to please see the light about how much money you can save. And that productivity is going to increase and output will increase and retention is going to increase. And the employers wouldn’t even think of it. And now all of a sudden we have this global boom and everyone’s saying employers are just trying to take advantage. Will no one ever be satisfied?
There are pros and cons to both. Companies will save tons of expenses, but now some other expenses they’d never even thought about in their budget, like increased travel or home office stipends or coworking memberships… now they have to compensate for those.
There is no right way to do remote work. It’s however you want to leverage this as a strategy in order to optimize operations or retain employees or access a greater talent pool. It’s up to you.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Laurel Farrer on LinkedIn. You can also check out Distribute Consulting and the Remote Work Association.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on…
Sharon Koifman has been running businesses remotely for 18 years, and now he helps companies around the globe hire full-time remote workers with his agency DistantJob. He’s also publishing a book, Surviving Remote Work, all about how to become the best possible remote employee (or manager). In our interview, Sharon shared a couple lessons he learned the hard way - namely, why CEOs should never try to be their company’s social centre.
The perils of CEO-driven company socializing
→ When Sharon first started DistantJob, he went remote as a matter of cost: no office expenses and geographic arbitrage on salaries. This was also the value he thought he was offering to clients - a cheap talent solution.
→ He soon realized the paradox that if you see humans as simply outsourced cheap labor, they won’t perform as well for you. He switched his mentality - and DistantJob’s work - to focus on placing full-time remote employees.
→ As a result, he immediately tried to become what he called the “social centre” of the company. He’d bring everyone together for Zoom happy hours and crack jokes. The feedback was dismal: no one was having fun.
Remaking socializing for remote work
→ After collecting feedback from employees, two themes emerged: they didn’t like that Sharon was driving all the company social activities and they didn’t like being forced into big digital groups. Both resulted in feelings of disengagement.
→ As a result, the company revamped how it socialized:
* The company uses Donut, a Slack app to match people for 1-1 coffee chats.
* Further leveraging Slack, there are different channels for different kinds of socializing and fun, so people can pop into the “rooms” they are interested in - food, board games, etc.
* The company is “99.999%” remote, but will occasionally get together around conferences (back when that was possible) - this allowed the team to socialize at night but also learn and connect with the latest industry trends during the day.
The final word
“When you have too many people in a physical or zoom meeting, the majority of people don’t get invested in that meeting. But when you have one, two, or three individuals … you can really get to know them.”
Image courtesy DistantJob
Remotely Inclined Chats with Sharon Koifman
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Sharon! Can you share how you got into remote work and what your company DistantJob is all about?
Sharon: I’ve been running businesses from my computer for about 18 years. I started off running a web hosting company - and I’d even started a company before that where I was trying to create one of the first music distribution sites, though unlike Napster it would all be legal.
I didn’t really have money. So when I decided to find myself, I was sharing my hosting account with a few colleagues of mine and charging them. Next thing you know, we had about 3,000 clients and that music site never came to be.
So hosting became my first company. We had offices in India. Had our servers originally in Texas then moved to New Jersey. I was sitting by myself running this entire operation. I realized my dad inspired me a lot because he ran an engineering firm. He would do the design of the machine on AutoCAD, on his computer by himself. The machine shop would make the components, someone else would ship it to the client… again, it was all remote.
Then came DistantJob. The original concept came to me from the first business - when you have an office in India, you have to do some outsourcing. It’s unavoidable. But for me that was like a business sin. You’re getting paid for the way you’re doing things, your processes, and your methodology. But then you take everything you claim you have and you give it to a company which you have no control over. You don’t know their processes. You don’t know if the results will come in the way you want. It was pretty shocking for me. I didn’t understand why you couldn’t just hire somebody that will work on your processes and build your culture.
After I sold my hosting company, I realized the need for full-time, permanent, career-driven, focused individuals that are working internationally and remotely. You still have this massive advantage of going to the world and finding amazing talent, but back in those days for some reason people felt the only way to hire individuals was through outsourcing.
You’ve mentioned before that it’s not just about hiring someone, but actually helping them build digital relationships (colleagues and friends). How do you do that at DistantJob?
I came into DistantJob with the original focus of making a cheap solution. Then I realized that wouldn’t work - the world was too big. My mentality initially was that remote workers were less efficient, but then I realized they could be more efficient if you manage them.
Now, the way I approach it is to start with all the positive things about the office and see if I could replicate them. So instead of hanging out in person, turn on the video camera. Then you can start to know people on a personal level - getting to know their hobbies and such.
At DistantJob, we have a lot of Slack channels for different hobbies. We’re a big fan of food, nerdy stuff like video games and board games, and we have channels to joke around in.
You found virtual happy hours didn’t work - what happened? What do you do instead?
I remember my director coming to me and saying “I hear that people are not happy or having much fun.” I realized also that I was busy talking and doing all the entertainment. I was literally trying to entertain my team, make jokes, hang out, and be the social centre.
You slowly see that even though managers got the hint and tried very hard, it didn’t move the conversation along much. I’ve since had a much better experience one on one - intimate conversations. We still have drinks with one another, but now it’s two or three people and it works so much better.
I think this is reflective of meeting culture completely. When you have too many people in a physical or zoom meeting, the majority of people don’t get invested in that meeting. But when you have one, two, or three individuals, you can really get to know them.
We also use Donut on Slack, an app that randomly matches you with someone for one-on-one conversations for 15 minutes. That gets better results than a big happy hour experience.
We’re also completely remote. Once in a blue moon I’ll hang out with my managers, but that’s a big project and it means a big investment on flights in. We usually do it around conferences, so it’s an opportunity to see the market while taking the evenings to hang out. But 99.999% of what we do is remote.
In the remote world, there’s a huge conversation about pay vs. geography. What’s your opinion?
This is a very conflicting discussion because I’m a little bit on both directions at this moment. I pay what I can afford to, but I am a big fan of the geographic arbitrage solution on an ethical side, surprisingly. Take for example India. They’re known for outsourcing (the grandparent of the remote job experience).
One of the biggest things that you’d outsource to India or the Philippines was a call centre. You’d go there because it was cheap. But the jobs you brought helped the economies evolve, and now a call centre is only 15% cheaper there than it is in the United States. As a result, some jobs are coming back to the United States. It’s crazy - give it 10 years to let those economies evolve and the jobs are coming back while you just created half a billion jobs somewhere else.
Now, I don’t know about producing shoes in child labor camps in some backwards-ass countries. I’m very much pro building successful, intelligence-based jobs.
You’ve just written a book based on your 18 years of remote CEO experience! Tell me more about it.
The book is called Surviving Remote Work - it’s all about getting people comfortable with (and not fearful of) managing remote employees. It’s about figuring out the optimal ways of success for remote employees and remote managers. And I hope I wrote it in a fun, easy to read way.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Sharon via email or pre-order his book on Amazon.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on…
Techstars is one of the largest startup accelerators in the world, with hubs in over 30 cities, spanning over 10 countries around the world. But in 2017, the accelerator launched Techstars Anywhere, a program for people who can’t - or shouldn’t - relocate for an accelerator. With COVID, the whole startup ecosystem went remote, but Techstars Anywhere was able to continue operating and support all other Techstars accelerators with its experience and knowledge.
In today’s chat, Ryan Kuder - the Managing Director of Techstars Anywhere - shared the biggest challenge he’s seen on remote teams, the secret to getting into Techstars, and why Techstars Anywhere is all-in on remote work.
The biggest challenge of remote teams
→ Whether hybrid or all-remote, Ryan observed teams struggling with intentional communication. It’s not just that you can’t read body language, but each act of communicating requires the intention to act. It’s a weird thing initially for people who are so used to sitting in an office and passively recognizing opportunities to communicate.
→ The solution that Ryan shares with Techstars founders is two fold:
* Plan channels for emotions, problems, and specific issues to rise to the surface. Because you can’t see things in person, the different channels (i.e. “Client issues.” “Stuck on a problem.” etc.) make those challenges visible again.
* Set the tone as the founder, actively leveraging the channels as you want employees to leverage them. Encourage people to use the systems in place so that they become habit.
Techstars Anywhere: the secret to getting in
→ Techstars is sector and stage agnostic, meaning a brand new startup might be in the program with a multi-million dollar scaling company. This is because Techstars chooses to focus on inflection points in companies.
→ Ryan said the inflection points he looks for are:
* Companies that are getting ready to launch once they’ve built a product.
* Companies getting ready to fundraise, whether a first round or a subsequent round.
* Companies getting ready for scaling and fast growth.
→ From there, Ryan said the companies that are successful at getting into Techstars all have both a vision for the future of the world and a clear understanding of how their company fits into that new world. Then comes the traditional team assessment, skills assessment, and other common elements of getting into a startup accelerator.
From remote companies to empowering remote work
→ In the first cohorts of Techstars Anywhere, the accelerator wanted any kind of company. The issue wasn’t whether you were remote or not, simply that relocating for an accelerator didn’t make sense. For example: one of the first Techstars Anywhere companies was an organic mushroom farm in Brooklyn, NY.
→ Ryan and Techstars have a vision that remote work will become significantly more accelerated due to COVID (something we agree on!), and as a result tons of industries will change, both in terms of how we work but also how we live and travel.
→ In response to COVID and the changing world of remote work, Ryan and the Techstars team are making a big bet with Techstars Anywhere, focusing the accelerator on the future of work and startups tackling the impacts of remote work.
The final word
Techstars applications are open. The accelerator is looking for companies at the point of evolution - product to revenue, revenue to growth, etc.
Remotely Inclined Chats with Ryan Kuder
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Ryan! When we chatted, you said Techstars Anywhere isn’t a remote version of Techstars, but a whole new, remote accelerator experience. What do you mean by that?
Ryan: We’re all thinking about how to build remote experiences for our employees - especially over the last six months. The first step people take is usually to do what they’ve always done, but now on zoom. Everything kind of stays the same - but you wind up with some dissonance in that experience.
So the way we’ve thought about Techstars Anywhere is we’ve got objectives for our founders. We want them to become great storytellers. We want them to build a fantastic network. We want them to be able to raise money. We want them to understand the levers and metrics that drive their business. And we want them to be able to understand the rhythms and cadences for their companies.
We used our decade of experience that we had running Techstars accelerators as the starting off point then thought, given these objectives, what are the changes we need to make? It’s been an evolving process since our first remote accelerator back in 2017, which had a hypothesis of a hybrid model - it’s a little bit of time together in person, a little bit of time working remotely with the objective being to create an experience that was going to get that full value of a Techstars accelerator experience.
Which elements of the accelerator are all-remote versus which are in-person?
So much of what we do is building relationships. And there’s just something about breaking bread or having a drink - or even just sitting with somebody looking out over the ocean. In normal times (non-covid), it’s an experience that combines three in person gatherings with five week sections of remote work.
When we’re in person, we’re focused on deep dives into particular topics and focused on relationship building. We’re focused on building out the network with our mentors. And then when we are in our remote periods, we’re focused on the meetings, execution, and building of the companies. In-person sessions are spread out evenly throughout the program so that we’re constantly getting back and forth.
One of the great things about the Techstars network is that with all current Techstars accelerators running remotely, we’ve been able to try out of a lot of things and been able to focus on what it’s like to build experiences for founders that are delivered first and foremost, remotely.
What’s been the biggest change or evolution in your process with Techstars Anywhere (barring COVID, which of course forced lots of change)?
There have been a lot, to be honest with you. Like a startup founder, one of the things we’re constantly figuring out is how do we continuously build better experiences for our constituents - founders, mentors, and investors.
The way we’ve gone about it is thinking about three experiences and figuring out the opportunities for us to create and opportunities for those to overlap. Each of the four programs we’ve put in different things, set up different kinds of meetings, structured interactions differently, and created more opportunities for connections. It’s focused on creating community that involves not just the founders in the accelerator but also all the alumni and mentors and investors attached to the program.
Can you share an example of how you structured your virtual experiences?
I believe that great remote work is not exclusively remote. When we think about how people develop relationships, there’s a ton of value that comes from hybrid things.
At Techstars anywhere, we spend the first two weeks really understanding our business. Week one is a qualitative look at the business. Where are we as entrepreneurs? What are the businesses we want to build? Who are our customers? What are they buying from us and why? In week two we look at quantitative parts of the business: revenue, financial models, KPIs, and target setting.
For the remainder of the program, companies work through meetings with mentors on their KPIs and understanding the challenges that companies are facing. Midway through the program, we get together and start to talk about storytelling, fundraising, and figuring out the best financing strategy for the business.
We don’t have a traditional demo day - we do it online, and have been doing online demo days since 2017. We’ve been playing with the format to get the right audience to the right founders. We’re really focused on a few questions: What are we doing after this is over? How does everybody go home? What kind of continuity do we keep? When the program is over, the Techstars experience is really just beginning.
What have been the biggest stumbling blocks administering a remote accelerator?
One of the biggest challenges is having a comprehensive understanding of everything that’s going on. With the shift from co-located to remote work, we lose the ability to see people. You don’t know when to tap somebody on the shoulder and say ‘let’s grab a cup of coffee and talk through whatever’s going on’.
One of the most important things I can do is to approach every day with intentionality. We need to ensure we’re communicating the things we need to and that we are checking in with people on a regular cadence. If folks are struggling with a task or job or customer, create channels that allow that to surface so we can see what’s happening around us without necessarily being able to see it visually. That requires everybody to buy into the systems that are put in place in order to allow those things to surface.
How do you make sure you’re in a good spot as a leader to be intentional with communications?
It’s important that your company develop the culture that’s right for it. There isn’t any kind of culture that fits everybody. When you think about your own remote policies and remote styles, the most important thing is that founders recognize for themselves where they want to be. Some founders will be overly transparent. Some will tend to be more reserved.
The big part is how you set the tone of the types of things we share and talk about as a community. That becomes something reinforced by behaviors.
The accelerator is now beginning to focus on startups that support the future of work. What prompted the shift?
Our first class was really focused on how we create a great experience for founders who can’t or shouldn’t relocate for an accelerator. But Techstars is a largely remote company ourselves and we started to see the changes that happen in work firsthand.
With covid, we went from slow roll adoption to overnight nearly 100% adoption where it can happen. Our hypothesis is that this will come back down a little bit but is still a step function above where it used to be. We’ll see this adoption of more flexible work-from-anywhere policies, where it’s home, the office, or a coffee shop or coworking space. We believe that will have big, lasting, fundamental changes not only in how we work but in how we live. So we’re interested in founders that are looking at these types of impacts.
When a person’s office does not dictate where they live, all kinds of things change: neighbourhoods, transportation, entertainment, travel, etc. There are all these downstream effects.
What kinds of companies are you looking for with the new cohort of Techstars Anywhere?
We have applications open for seven or eight Techstars Accelerators, including Techstars Anywhere, most of which will be running at least partially remotely. We’re not 100% sure what that will look like moving forward.
For Techstars Anywhere, when we think about the founders that are a great fit, it’s people who have a vision about the way the world should look and what their company is in it. They’ve got an ability to share that story and get people on board. They’ve got all of the technical and functional skills necessary to get to whatever the next stage is. And we also look at the market people are working in, the progress they’ve made, and the idea they are working on.
It’s about companies entering inflection points. Around launch. Around a fundraising round. Around growth.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Ryan on Twitter and via Techstars’ website.
Image courtesy Techstars
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Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on…
Today: I’m responding to two viral articles about remote work on today’s podcast. The long and short of it? I’m skeptical.
Ok, so two articles went mega-viral this week in the remote work blogosphere:
* Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy
* Working from ‘anywhere’ is possible—but not sustainable
From a media perspective, I have to hand it to them. Salacious headlines. Very “anti.” It’s got punch, facts, scary futures… it’s a delight. A great story. Which is exactly why I eye-rolled at the titles. However, I was also intrigued and curious. So I read both articles - here are my thoughts.
Are we in for a crash - or a call to creativity?
The article on how a trillion-dollar economy is dying because it was very tied to the office ecosystem is real, and it’s scary. White collar workers and business travellers are the dominant spending category for a huge swath of the economy:
* Hotels.
* Airlines / air travel.
* Food delivery.
* Restaurants and cafes.
* Office-adjacent businesses like dry cleaners, shoe shiners, and suit stores.
* Office furniture, technology, and supply stores.
But, as author Steve LeVine suggests, the bigger fear is not necessarily the primary loss (even though that alone is tens of thousands of jobs), it’s the next-step loss caused by city dwellers fleeing the city. If too many people leave the city, even further carnage could result in terms of commercial downtowns falling apart, losing jobs, and more.
The logic is all there. And we’ve already seen a huge loss due to COVID, but I worry that the fears might be overstated.
Here’s what I see instead: a call to creativity.
Rents falling in major cities could result in a huge spike in small-time entrepreneurship: the cute cafes, shops, and restaurants that could never afford city rents. Further, people leaving could ultimately be nothing. What’s 50,000 people leaving in a city of millions? A painful blip, but little else. There’s real potential damage from the idea that more people might choose not to move to cities from small towns, and that could cause some city damage. However, doesn’t it kind of suck that our current model of city living is “it sucks, but you have to”? We can do better.
Who isn’t able to afford the city right now that could soon? Photo via Unsplash.
Remote work is giving people the opportunity to live where they want - and it might even make cities more affordable. Just as thousands of people are taking their remote jobs and buying old houses, there are people who have always dreamed of living in the city (or just love cities) and now it’s affordable for them. I think the only people that will truly fail in this shift are the ones that built on the idea of guaranteed demand. If anything, we might see new developments building actual homes in cities (or “home in the sky” condos) at affordable rates, instead of shoeboxes we cram into because the only good jobs are here.
Innovation has a remote work problem
In the article that remote work isn’t sustainable, Professor Hyejin Youn’s main point is that remote work cannot produce the same levels of innovation that central HQs in large cities can.
So, right off the bat: this article is not about remote work, it’s about innovation and what kinds of environments foster it. The remote work connection is interesting and topical, but this article is not analyzing what remote work is or can do. Simply suggesting that remote work and innovation are not compatible.
From there, the Professor Youn - a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, walks through his primary arguments:
* Big cities are hubs of innovation because of their diversity.
* Remote work is great for productivity, but not innovation.
Ultimately, he drew the conclusion that if a company wants to be innovative, it needs to have an HQ in an innovation-breeding city, which he says starts around one million people. There’s a grave message to “think twice” before going to cities under one million, and suggests that municipal leaders need to create policies and infrastructure to attract “cognitive labor” (aka knowledge workers) - something we completely agree on.
Where I disagree with Professor Youn is the implication that you can only get diversity from large cities. Sure, cities might bring the diversity to you, but distributed and remote teams are possibly the best cross-section of global diversity available to the working world… if you build it that way. Yes, you can work remotely with all your bros from college, but you can also work remotely with brilliant minds living in different cities, countries, and circumstances. That’s a heck of a lot of diversity.
We need to build innovation systems for remote work. Image via Unsplash.
The concept of remote being great for productivity but not innovation is one I have a hard time disagreeing with. However, what I’ve seen and learned from my interviews with remote entrepreneurs is that the new crop of innovators is not trying to take office-innovation virtual, they are looking at the strengths of remote work and building new models of innovation. For example, Shelly Spiegel focuses heavily on her remote culture. Melissa Kargiannakis leans into short meetings with ample additional communication opportunities. Floyd Marinescu focuses on reducing cognitive load to make innovation easier. This isn’t to say it’s a silver bullet - just that innovation is not a one-legged beast.
PS - liking these articles? Share them with a friend!
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Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on…
Today: I interviewed Job (pronounced “Yop”), the founder of Remote.com. He shared his views on how to build a strong remote company - and what remote work advocates mess up on.
There are laws, admin work, and a lot of planning that goes into making a job offer. Double (or triple) this amount of work if you want to hire an employee that isn’t in your home country. With the rise of remote work, this will be a key challenge for distributed companies in the future - and it’s a problem that Job van der Voort is solving with his company, Remote.com, a platform that handles all backend administration for hiring employees around the world.
In our interview, Job shared his experiences on how to onboard new employees remotely, why a day of zoom calls is the wrong day to succeed in remote work, and what remote work advocates get wrong about the future of work.
Onboarding the right way
→ In Job’s experience with Remote and GitLab, good remote onboarding is a function of three things:
* Communication.
* Documentation.
* Welcoming.
→ Communication should be frequent and try to answer every question before it’s asked. Companies should provide all standard messaging and go further to ensure that they are answering every anticipated remote-work related question. All of this should be documented and made readily available for new employees.
→ When it comes to being welcoming, Job means helping new employees build their network within the organization. Professionally speaking, this takes the shape of encouraging coffee calls with either the whole organization (in small businesses) or the person’s new team (in big companies). Outside of the professional realm, this is also about creating social opportunities.
→ At Remote, for instance, they have a question of the day where everyone answers in a thread. These questions are meant to be philosophical or just fun (for instance “What’s the best food you’ve ever eaten?”), but never about work.
A day of zoom calls is a day wasted
→ Job is a huge fan of asynchronous communication, and says it should be the default in every remote organization. If you’ve filled your days with zoom calls, “you’re doing it wrong,” since that will lead to the lowest levels of productivity.
→ To get better at asynchronous communication, Job advocates a standard framework in the organization of what kinds of communication go on which platforms. (This is very similar to the “communications triage” framework advocated by Floyd Marinescu in our interview).
The power of human connection in remote work
→ While asynchronous communication should absolutely be the default in remote companies, there are clear exceptions to the rule for Job:
* The moment when you have too many back-and-forths.
* Anything social or with the purpose to help people bond.
* Creative sessions and brainstorming.
* Just wanting to work together.
→ The last bullet - just wanting to work together - is a critical one. This is the area Job says remote work advocates often get wrong. Promoting asynchronous communication and remote working arrangements should never imply that human connection isn’t important or desirable.
The final word
“I think the biggest mistake in remote work advocates can make is to deny the value of being together in person.”
Remotely Inclined Chats with Job van der Voort
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Job! To start, can you explain your role as CEO of Remote.com?
Job: I founded the company along with my co-founder, who is the CTO. It’s my job to make sure that we execute and operate well. I started Remote.com after experiencing the struggles of international hiring when I left my previous employer.
We founded Remote to solve what we believe is one of the biggest challenges when you want to build a distributed teams - when you hire someone in another country, you have to pay them, be compliant with local labor laws, and provide benefits. Remote has its own global infrastructure, meaning we have an entity in each country in which we operate. Through those entities, we can employ people for you. We act as the employer of record.
In practice, let’s say you want to hire Jane from Portugal. You come to us - within a day we can onboard Jane. We give her employment agreements, any benefits you would want to offer, and we invoice you as the employer each month, but you just treat Jane like any other employee. For Jane, she gets a local payslip, benefits, and everything else she would expect from local employment.
Do you only support full time employment or also contractors, consultants, and other forms of work?
Most of our clients have a number of contractors working for them. They start paying them through our platform, which we allow them to do for free. Once they feel it’s necessary to convert those contractors to employees, they can easily do that through our platform as well.
What’s your advice or process for onboarding employees you’ve never met before? Any examples to share?
The important thing is that you communicate a lot, especially early on to create many moments of interaction and communication - and not just between managers and a new hire, but within the whole organization.
You don’t get any accidental interactions when working remotely, so you have to force it. For onboarding, that’s where it starts - literally just have a call with each other. Make sure there are plenty of ways to talk with each other.
Then make sure all information they might need is well documented and they could easily find it themselves.
But the most important part of this is that you should spend time thinking about how to make people feel welcome and comfortable in a new situation. When you do things in person, we have social standards. We have social scripts that we can follow to make sure someone is comfortable. When you’re remote, those aren’t established. You have to spend time thinking about making someone feel welcome. Once someone is onboarded, ask for feedback and let people tell you exactly how they feel.
For example, we encourage people to set up coffee calls with almost everyone else in the organization. Of course it depends on the size of the organization, but at least encourage people to have coffee calls with every single person on their team so they get a bit of a network established throughout the day.
Beyond that, the most important thing is to have many moments of interaction that are not about work. On our team, we play a lot of games together. We have a Minecraft server at the company. We play Pictionary together. We share news with the team. We have a question of the day, for instance “What’s the best thing you’ve ever eaten?”
What’s the best balance of asynchronous versus real-time communication?
This work should by default be asynchronous. It helps a lot to establish standards around what communication happens where. Slack doesn’t really encourage asynchronous communication, whereas other platforms (we use GitLab, for instance) helps a lot with asynchronous communication because it doesn’t feel like a chat.
But there are very clear exceptions.
* The moment when you have too many back-and-forths.
* Anything social or with the purpose to help people bond.
* Creative sessions and brainstorming.
* Just wanting to work together.
I think the biggest mistake in remote work advocates can make is to deny the value of being together in person or doing synchronous work.
Changing gears, should remote teams care about data security more than in-office companies?
I used to work in an office building software for government, so it has to be highly secure. What we did there is if you walked away from your computer and left it unlocked, people would run a script on your computer to set your wallpaper to something ridiculous. It’s to make fun of you but also show you that you left your machine unattended and you run the risk of someone walking in and doing something with your data.
When you run a distributed company, you can’t do this. So you have to create a strong culture around security awareness. There are some basic things you can do. It starts with educating people and giving people great hardware and software.
I’m not a fan of bring your own device. I feel like that’s mostly a cost-cutting measure for organizations. Everyone at Remote gets a Macbook Pro, it’s very simple. The hard drive is encrypted by default and has good security practices. And then we know exactly what can be ran there and what people run over there.
We also manage our passwords through password managers, which is one of those simple facts that makes your life a lot easier when it comes to security.
Your culture of awareness needs to make people think about what it means to be secure and what you can do to prevent others from messing with your data. For Remote, we handle a lot of personal information. What we did is created extremely limited access to essentially everything. Even as CEO of the company, I cannot access our customers’ data in any way, and everybody in the organization is very clear on that. The way we built our software is that if you as an employer or employee were to revoke access or delete something, it would be unrecoverable for us.
What’s your advice for folks who want to stay remote post-COVID?
The best thing you can do is treat your organization as one of your products. Review it and try to improve it - and never stop trying to improve it. You do so iteratively because there are no hard and fast rules and how to make remote organizations work. There are just a handful of examples. You really have to invent much of it yourself.
There are many challenges of working together in an office, but we’ve been facing them for one hundred-plus years. Whereas the problems of working remotely we’ve been facing for maybe the last five years or do.
Also: I would tell every leader that if almost every day is full of meetings or zoom calls, you’re doing it wrong. That is not necessary. The only way you can work effectively is by working asynchronously more and adopting modern tools.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Job on Twitter or check out Remote’s website.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on…
Today: We’re talking about the next generation of remote entrepreneurs - and how BETA Camp is helping them launch their businesses.
Yifan Zhou and Ivy Xu met in middle school and became friends, but went their separate ways after college - Yifan to Bain & Company and Ivy to Silicon Valley. Years later, the two reconnected and realized all of the things they wished they’d learned in high school about entrepreneurship, strategy, and business. High school business classes in Ottawa just didn’t cut it. So the two founded BETA Camp, an immersive camp for high school students to teach them how to start a business - then help them actually do it.
In this conversation, Yifan and Ivy shared the BETA Camp founding story, the curriculum students learn at the camp, and their thoughts on the future of remote entrepreneurship.
Seeing an opportunity
→ Yifan and Ivy reconnected in late 2019, shortly after Yifan finished her MBA at Wharton and Ivy had left her Silicon Valley job to interview tech entrepreneurs around the world. The two reminisced about high school and all the learnings they wished they got as teenagers.
→ With that passion - and realizing that no such camps existed in Canada (and their American counterparts were cancelled due to COVID in early 2020) - the two saw an opportunity to launch BETA Camp as a virtual, six week summer camp.
From nothing to business
→ Weeks 1 and 2 focus on business fundamentals: Strategy, the Four P’s of Marketing, Porter’s Five Forces, and other foundational knowledge.
→ Week 3 is all about customer discovery and product market fit.
→ Weeks 4 through 6 focus on taking customer lessons from Week 3 and creating a real, thriving remote startup. Each week features lectures, team discussion and activities, and talks from successful founders about the startup building journey.
The new crop of remote (teen) entrepreneurs
Now in Week 5 of 6, the program is already churning out viable businesses led by teens:
* A business teaching teachers how to use more state of the art technologies for more collaborative classrooms.
* A fitness accountability and accessibility app in Slack.
* A new Slack plugin.
* A UV light box that will kill germs in your garage.
Tools mentioned in this episode:
* Miro
* Mural
* Zapier
The final word
“The future looks remote to us.”
If you’re thinking of freelancing - or side-hustling, launching an ecommerce store, or something else entrepreneurial - check out #5to9Conf.
I’ll be speaking about building an inbound client funnel, and other speakers are covering everything from community building to building new products.
Remotely Inclined Chats with Yifan Zhou and Ivy Xu
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Yifan and Ivy! Can you share what BETA Camp does?
Yifan: BETA Camp started out just this summer because of the pandemic - we knew there were going to be a lot of high school students at home without something impactful for the summer. So we started a six-week immersive virtual summer camp focused on enabling the next generation of leaders, whether they want to be entrepreneurs, tech innovators, or business leaders.
The BETA Camp program has lectures from industry professionals on topics around building a business: intro to business, user design, scaling, to growth. They see the whole spectrum and then actually apply it to their own startups. Throughout the six weeks, they have the opportunity to work in teams and build a startup from the ground up.
Was this going to be remote anyway, or was that in response to COVID?
Ivy: I’ve always been interested in helping high school students broaden their perspectives. Both of us grew up in Ottawa and we didn’t see many opportunities. After going to Queens University for a bachelor of commerce, I ended up moving to Silicon Valley and seeing the ambitious entrepreneurs, the startups, and the scale of things. It really broadened my perspectives on what I can do with my career - it’s something I wish I’d seen earlier.
Yifan and I met in middle school, but then went our separate ways after university. But there was this unique time - back in 2018, I quit my job and travelled for a year, interviewing tech leaders all over the world. In 2019, Yifan had just finished her MBA at Wharton. So it was time when we both didn’t have that much on our plates and so we could start something. That’s when we thought of BETA Camp in the spring.
Both of us being from Canada, we realized that there weren’t many competitive and immersive programs in the business, tech, and entrepreneurial space here. So there was a market gap. There are plenty in the US, but a lot of them were not running during the summer and now so many got cancelled due to COVID. So we saw this opportunity to provide this experience - and we think we can do it well with counselors that we can bring in. It really highlights the strength of a virtual program, since we can allow students to learn from the best of the best, no matter where the counselor is anywhere in the world.
How did you develop the curriculum? What’s included?
Yifan: When we came up with the curriculum, it was asking what we would have wanted to know in high school.
Week one is very introductory - intro to business and entrepreneurship.
Week two is business fundamentals. Thinking about strategy, the Four P’s of marketing, and Porter’s Five Forces. That kind of traditional business stuff.
Week three is product-market fit and customer research. Basically: finding a problem and finding out the pain points of your customers and designing something they actually want.
Weeks four, five, and six is developing that product and growing it. Think about scaling, sales, marketing, etc.
We have lectures and bring in amazing camp counselors from all over the world, and they are generally an hour and a half. There’s some theory, but then immediately live activities. It creates this MBA program atmosphere when you think about cases and having discussions.
Then there’s Founder Fireside chats, where we bring in founders to talk about their journey and students can ask whatever questions they want. One amazing founder I want to highlight is a highschool student who built a business - and I think the students could really relate to how you establish the ability to start a business as a high school student.
From there we have Future Fridays, which talks about what the future could look like. We’ll have someone with an MD, JD, MBA, or PhD talk about what that looks like from their perspective. Or a digital nomad talking about not having a permanent place to stay and how they deal with that.
Should everyone start their businesses remotely?
Ivy: I believe the future is moving more and more towards being remote. As for BETA Camp, the future looks remote to us. We’re going to stay a remote program just because of the broader horizons and the skills that we want to teach at BETA Camp.
In 10 years, by the time Campers join the workforce, they’ll most likely have the option of joining a remote team. Something I want to highlight is the skills we teach is how to communicate remotely - our teams are located all across North America. And then they come together and are using some of the best tools out there like Miro, Mural, or building integrations with Zapier. These are the tools used by remote teams.
Do you work with universities? How can parents get involved?
We haven’t really done university partnerships. Unlike some other programs, we’re not a recruiting channel for these universities. But we’ve found amazing camp counselors from universities like Stanford, Wharton, MIT, etc. and also from some amazing companies.
On the parent side, it’s fantastic to see some of them - some of our campers have parents who are very entrepreneurial. It’s great for an entrepreneurial parent to guide their child, but also BETA Camp is a great opportunity for those students to meet other students with a similar passion for producing what’s going to be valuable in the world.
As we record this, you’re in week 5 of 6 - how are things going? What’s next?
Ivy: It’s really not even a six week program to build a startup, since the first two weeks are introduction and strategy. Looking back, all the skills and new tools they know is great.
* We have a team starting a business teaching teachers how to use more state of the art technologies for more collaborative classrooms.
* We have another team building fitness accountability and accessibility app in Slack.
* Another is building a Slack plugin.
* Then one team is building a UV light box that will kill germs in your garage.
It’s all across the spectrum. With today’s systems - and we teach them about integrations with no-code - everyone could operate remotely.
It’s one of the most rewarding things for me is seeing the real projects with validated markets - it’s unparalleled learning for these students to apply what they learn and feel how hard it really is to get customers and think about backend operations.
Next is we’re launching a Fall 2020 program that’s going to be 12 weeks instead of just six, from September to December. It’s going to have the best parts of summer based on feedback from students, just pushed out over 12 weeks.
Running parallel to school, we hope they’ll be able to achieve at least the same, if not more results by the end of 12 weeks.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get learn more about BETA Camp on their website or Instagram.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on…
First: I recently stumbled upon Hauniv, an amazing monthly email digest of the startups that have raised money (they manually verify the data - no robots). If you’re interested in the startup space, you should definitely check them out.
Today: We’re talking about how to build a thriving remote business of one with Anna Codrea-Rado, a NYT and Guardian journalist turned remote entrepreneur.
Anna Codrea-Rado started her career as a journalist, eventually getting laid off by Vice Media in one of their mass layoffs. Instead of getting another job, Anna decided to go freelance, publishing pieces in the New York Times, Guardian, and more. From there, she built a fully-fledged business of one with multiple streams of income coming her way.
In our interview, Anna shared how she started her business of one, the process she used to build multiple streams of income, and how she continues to expand even though she is still her only employee.
Setting up multiple streams of income
→ When Anna was laid off, she decided to go freelance and her main income source became pitching and selling stories to major media outlets or magazines. She knew she wanted to grow her income in other ways, so she looked at building out new opportunities.
→ Now, Anna still writes for major outlets but also has: A podcast, a paid newsletter, online courses, and a forthcoming book on building a freelance business of one.
→ Getting to this point required a shift in thinking. Here’s are the questions Anna asked herself that led to identifying new business opportunities:
* Who else wants your skills? In Anna’s case, she started with media outlets but corporate blogs wanted her skills as well, which opened new client opportunities.
* Who can you teach your skills to? Anna taught writing in journalism schools and now teaches freelancers how to build their businesses.
* What else can your skills produce? Instead of only writing for media outlets, Anna started self-publishing her newsletter, The Professional Freelancer, and is now writing a book.
* How can you step out of your comfort zone but lean on your current skills? Everything Anna does is based on her skills as a writer and journalist, so she has a higher chance of success from the start.
Building your own support systems
→ As freelancers and solopreneurs, it’s easy to feel lonely, isolated, or just plain alone with no one to ask for help or advice.
→ Anna found that the way around this is to find two kinds of people:
* General support such as a spouse or friend. The one who will tell you it’s going to be alright when things get touch.
* Colleagues / “work spouses.” This is the person you can turn to with professional issues who can offer real advice based on relevant experiences.
→ Once you have your support systems in place (Anna calls it your “emotional emergency fund”), it becomes a lot easier to stand up for your rights to be paid fairly, paid on time, and treated well. Solopreneurs work with multiple stakeholders, often with a power dynamic involved, so having additional support systems help give you the courage to ask for what you deserve.
The final word
“[Growing my business] was about learning my options, what made sense for me, and going one step out of my comfort zone but very much leaning on my existing skillset.”
Remotely Inclined Chats with Anna Codrea-Rado
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Anna! Can you share what your business is all about?
Anna: We were just saying before recording that there isn’t really a neat word for encapsulating everything that I do, but I always say first and foremost that I am a journalist. That’s what I’ve done for the past three years working remotely for myself. Beyond that I am building out more of a digital business. I still do traditional journalism for legacy media organizations like the New York Times, Wired, and the Guardian. Then I have a newsletter called The Professional Freelancer. It’s on Substack, which is how we got to know each other - through the Substack community. I also have a podcast called Is This Working, which is about the messy parts of work. And I campaign for freelancer workers’ rights while working on a book - it’s a guidebook for freelancers and anyone else who wants to work for themselves.
You built a lot of revenue streams for your business. What are the mechanics behind your business and its growth?
I believe very passionately that a diverse portfolio of income streams is really fundamental for anyone, regardless of whether you’re employed full-time, a freelancer, or whatever your business structure looks like. Multiple revenue streams provide a bit more stability and security - they spread the risk out. It’s simply not putting all your eggs in one basket.
I also think that there’s a bit of an image problem with multiple streams of income because it’s such an unsexy phrase. I know we have side hustler, but I don’t think that quite gets to it either.
I got into freelancing in 2017 when the company I was working for, Vice Media, pivoted to video and had a massive global layoff. I started with my existing skill sets and how I could package them up differently and sell them to different types of clients or in a different format.
So you think about large businesses and think about it in terms of B2B or B2C. I’m both since I sell to individuals and to large organizations.
I built it all one by one. I started with traditional journalism - selling articles and stories to newspapers and magazines. Then I started adding new ones. I started doing some public speaking. Then I started doing some teaching and 1-1 coaching. Selling the newsletter came a bit further down after I’d built up the audience.
It was about learning my options, what made sense for me, and going one step out of my comfort zone but very much leaning on my existing skillset.
How can people get started finding that first “thing” they can use to become the foundation of their business?
Start with an audit of your own skills and what you’re doing, because it’s easy to forget how valuable the skills you already have are. If you’re doing it repeatedly or have been doing it for many years, you take for granted that you have something very valuable. It’s a good idea to think about who else might want to have that thing.
Take myself for example. My main thing was writing journalism. So then I thought about what other offshoots come from that. One of them is that I can teach the business of freelancing and the business of journalism. That is often a first step when you’re thinking about multiple income streams: what skill can you teach to others?
For a lot of people, it’s easier to teach than you might think it is. And you can teach in lots of different formats. I’ve taught guest lectures at journalism schools. But you can set up your own webinars or online events - or in person events if we ever get back to a time when we do those.
Then you can think about who else wants the actual skill. In my case, it’s distilling complex ideas into easily digestible copy. That’s a skill that not just media outlets want to buy. So you can take it and sell it to companies that maybe want to start a blog. And then you can end up in a place where you’re selling directly to your readers.
It’s really starting with how am I looking at something and what are other ways it could work for me.
How do you balance advocating for your own rights as a freelancer with so many stakeholders and clients?
It’s much easier said than done. But I have been advocating for freelance workers’ rights, particularly around pay. I have two campaigns at the moment. One is about late payment terms in the media and journalism industry, since all freelancers face issues with getting paid on time because of the power imbalance.
Then I have a campaign around pay disparities in what I’ve identified as the freelancer pay gap - differences in pay that freelancers experience depending on a number of factors like gender, race, ethnicity, age, location, and all of these things. On top of that, there’s a disparity between what a freelancer gets paid versus an in-house person, with wages in favor of the in-house employee.
Nonetheless there are structural problems that make freelancing unnecessarily difficult. So as freelancers it’s really important that we educate ourselves on what our rights actually are and then try as hard as we can to stand up for them.
As a solo business owner, you can also work with other people. You can hire people to help you out. I’ve recently started working with a bookkeeper, since it’s difficult and draining and this person is better at it than I am. I’m paying for peace of mind and mental health, basically. It can be scary when you work for yourself and think that hiring someone is scary and daunting. But in the long run it’s investing in not only your business but yourself.
What’s your advice for folks just getting started in their business?
This might sound counterintuitive, but I think when you are a business of one you need a work spouse or freelance advisors - your kind of freelance board of executives.
However you want to think about it, you need people. You need them to support you but also people to give you solid business advice and who can talk to you about your specific issues. The number one challenge freelancers face when they work alone is there’s no one to turn to. I’ve lost so many hours just to self-doubt because I haven’t had someone who can share an idea.
You also need an emergency fund and all of that practical stuff. But there’s an emotional side of working for yourself - you need the emotional equivalent of that emergency fund. Build up that support network - it will pay off in the long run rather than finding yourself in a position where you need that network and then not knowing where to find it.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Anna and Instagram and Twitter. You can pre-order her book on Amazon.
Image via Instagram
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one) Or just read on…
First: My book is live in paperback! If you know any freelancers (or are one yourself), I hope you enjoy it.
Today: We’re talking remote salaries, documentation, and more with remote work consultant Rhys Black.
Rhys Black started his career managing remote teams before starting his own multi-national, all-remote company helping government trade agencies connect with entrepreneurs. Now, he runs Delocate, a consultancy based in London, UK, that helps companies plan their remote work strategies.
In this interview, Rhys shared his insights on how remote companies can better use documentation to encourage autonomy in employees. From there, he sounded off on what he thinks the remote salary debate is really going to be about.
Remote leader to remote entrepreneur
→ Rhys started his career leading remote product teams, engaging with developers, marketers, and designers all around the world.
→ His first foray into entrepreneurship was a company called Trade Nations, which helped government trade promotion agencies connect with entrepreneurs and level-up their marketing. He built a distributed team across Europe and Latin America.
→ His friends started asking him for advice on how they could run their remote teams more efficiently. Soon, he had too much demand on his time. He moved on from Trade Nations to found Delocate, his consultancy focused exclusively on helping companies set up the backend processes and culture frameworks to make remote work successful.
Asynchronous is king
→ When working remotely, particularly with team members in multiple time zones, Rhys advocates for becoming as asynchronous as possible (asynchronous basically meaning that you don’t expect an immediate response to a message).
→ Asynchronous communication starts with documentation. When companies build “lean documentation” - treating any internal document like a product intended to solve a problem (or answer a question), you can train people to build a muscle memory that they should always check the documentation and do some of their own research first before asking another team member for help.
→ From there, leaders have to encourage and promote a culture of non-immediacy. This means reminding people who are always jumping from question to question that they should be focused on their own deep work and to let people’s questions sit for a bit. Part of this, of course, is having nomenclature or a tag for truly urgent issues, since sometimes you really do need an answer right away.
Tools mentioned in this episode
* Notion
* Slack
* Loom
* Salesforce
* Asana
* Tandem.chat
The final word
“I think that it [salaries] become a bit of a land grab by some of these larger tech companies. They are happy to continue to pay San Francisco salaries. So they’ll do it to suck up the best talent around the world in the short and medium term.”
Remotely Inclined Chats with Rhys Black
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Rhys! Tell me more about your work with Delocate
Rhys: Yeah. My background is in the tech industry, predominantly in London, UK, and a bit in the US, as a program manager. I was managing teams of developers, designers, testers, and marketers. Those teams were usually some form of remote. Not necessarily fully distributed, but a mix.
Then I started my own company previous to Delocate called Trade Nations, which was a fully distributed company with employees in Europe and Latin America. We were working with governments, specifically trade promotion agencies.
Delocate kind of spun out of Trade Nations. I started helping some friends who had businesses and were running remote teams. They were having a lot of similar challenges, and I’d made all of the mistakes already. So it was telling them what to do and what not to do. It evolved from there.
What were the top three challenges you noticed on remote teams?
The first thing would probably be the basics of collaborating and communicating together. Especially when time zones are involved.
One of the things we work on with clients is helping teams become as asynchronous as possible. That’s a big part of it when time zones are significant - you can’t be waiting on someone for 10 hours. So the first thing is to create an environment where people can answer their own questions and get to work.
The other thing is creating an environment that is as distraction free as possible. When you’re working synchronously, it’s easy for teams to end up answering everybody else’s questions more than focusing on their own work.
How can a founder or team leader create distraction-free environments?
One of the most important things is to create a culture where hyper-responsiveness is not tolerated. If people see it happening, it should be cracked down on pretty quickly. If you don’t breed that culture in a remote company, it can wreak havoc. You need to be pretty staunch on that and make sure your team realizes that we don’t expect you to respond immediately.
We don’t want you to respond immediately because we want to create a work environment that allows you to get into flow. It’s a much more enjoyable experience as an employee to be more productive and focused as opposed to pinging you left, right, and center every couple of hours.
Does that mean leaders should punish people for responding quickly?
No I don’t mean cracking the whip on people, but I mean being proactive in creating that culture. A lot of the time culture is just left up to chance. It’s about being proactive so people know it’s very clear. Then it’s a case of nudging a little bit and creating habit formation. Eventually, it becomes second nature and the team starts to moderate everybody else.
Should leaders remind people they don’t have to respond to everything immediately?
Yeah. I did that in my own company. I regularly had team members that I could see they were messaging too much in the evenings and things like that. I’d tell them that I was not expecting a reply that moment. It’s just about setting the expectation.
Can over-documentation reduce creativity?
Documentation has a pretty bad rap. It’s thought of as this thing that gets written and then never really used. That certainly shouldn’t be the case in a remote company.
In my eyes, documentation has been created wrong - or suboptimally - for quite a long time. There’s a balance between documentation and spontaneity. In a young company, you don’t want to kill the best thing a company has which is agility and being flexible.
I approach documentation like any product, since documents are the productization of knowledge. You can create a document in a very lean way - it doesn’t need to be a 10-page thing on a particular topic on day one.
What I usually tell clients is to link all these individual pieces of information in Notion. Add a blurb or context about what it’s for, and then let that be the seed of the documentation. If it starts to get traffic and traction, then maybe it’s worthwhile to take that information and consolidate it a bit.
But documentation is useless if you don’t use it. You have to build that muscle memory where instead of pinging someone on Slack, first look in the documentation. Then comes the balance point: if you’re looking for 20 minutes, maybe it’s time to call it quits and message someone you know has the answer. So it shouldn’t get in the way of asking questions.
What’s your opinion on setting remote salaries - should it be done by location?
It’s an interesting topic. How do you price Thailand in a global market, for instance? It’s not something I typically advise our clients on, since there are some good salary calculators out there.
I think that it will become a bit of a land grab by some of these larger tech companies. They are happy to continue to pay San Francisco salaries, since pretty much anywhere else in the world is cheaper than San Francisco. So they’ll do it to suck up the best talent around the world in the short and medium term.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Rhys via email.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one) Or just read on…
First: Welcome to new subscribers! If you know someone interested in running a business remotely, I’d be grateful if you forwarded them this newsletter.
Today: We’re talking choosing to go remote, structuring a business in a way that works for you as an entrepreneur, and the power of moving your energy where it’s valued.
Avery Francis has been an HR leader for years, but went out on her own to found Bloom in 2018. The company has been some form of remote from day one, but went fully remote in late 2019, and Avery has since run the business from Canada, Scotland, the Netherlands, and more.
In this conversation, Avery shared the biggest shift she made as an entrepreneur - and how it led to generating over $500,000 in revenue from Instagram, only working 28 hours a week despite growing quickly, and becoming more profitable than she ever thought possible.
Copy what you know and end up a copycat
→ Avery worked for a few companies before she went out on her own to found Bloom. In the beginning, Avery structured Bloom based on copying her experience at her previous employers.
→ This helped her get off the ground, but she realized that the business wasn’t actually serving her. She was making some money, but was working more than she wanted to and in a way that didn’t feel authentic to her.
→ She thought actively about the kind of business and lifestyle she wanted, not just what she knew about at the moment. This was based on personal desires, what she admired about other companies, and Bloom’s values. From there, she started to restructure Bloom to better serve clients, make more money, and provide a better lifestyle for her and her team.
Changing for the better
→ A key part of Avery’s realization is that she wanted to travel more and build a business that served her, instead of the other way around.
→ Here are a few of the changes Avery made to her business:
* Moving from 5 days a week, 8 hours a day to 4 days a week, 7 hours a day.
* Moving from working on client site to working remotely with occasional client visits.
* Not being available 24/7 on email for clients and setting boundaries.
* Launching more specific services, including Bloom Experiences, to evolve the company away from just contingent recruiting.
* Invoicing monthly instead of bi-weekly.
→ These changes not only provided a far better lifestyle but made Bloom more profitable, as new services brought in revenue and monthly billing allowed for more client development without concern that an invoice was always coming the following week.
Twitter energy on Instagram
→ Another part of Avery’s transition with Bloom was to bring her personality more into the business. She wanted a business that allowed her to be herself, not have to put on a face for clients.
→ As part of that, she started using expressing creative / visual side, taking the insights she would share on Twitter and creating graphics for Instagram. One Instagram post took off, and helped her gain over 70,000 followers - including Arianna Grande.
→ Her newfound platform with Instagram helped Bloom and Avery reach a global audience, which so far has resulted in over $500,000 in new business - just from leaning into the things she already liked to do and building a business that supported who she was as a person.
The final word
“Once I got to the point where I had overcome my own assumptions about the type of business that I was going to build, I moved away from basically copying what I’d already seen, done, and what already worked. I was able to build a company that was right for me.”
Remotely Inclined Chats with Avery Francis
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Avery! Can you share what Bloom does?
Avery: In a nutshell, we help companies build the world’s best workplaces.
You were hybrid remote but decided to go full remote - what was your decision making process like?
We made the decision to go fully remote about four months before COVID hit. It had been something I’d been working toward for about a year and a half since founding my business. I realized a lot of work could be done remotely.
I spend a lot of my time having confidential conversations or conducting interviews, and often I’m working in a startup environment in these big open spaces. There was often either not a lot of office space or not a great desk situation for me.
I’ve also been in a long distance relationship for a very long time and it came to the point where one of us had to make a move - and I’ve always wanted to work in the UK. So I took advantage of my dual citizenship and built a company where I can work remotely and work from anywhere in the world.
How did you adjust client expectations?
I’m really lucky to attract and work with some really amazing companies. When I initially said Bloom is moving to a more fully remote team, there were no questions asked.
There were no client challenges. The challenges that were presented was making an adjustment in the way I structured my business - and that meant hiring more people. While I was running and operating the business from Scotland, I had three people based in Toronto continuing to work onsite with clients, but in a more passive basis versus being on site for eight hours a day.
Did having to hire change you as an entrepreneur?
I needed to rework how I was thinking about the company I was looking to build. Being transparent, I was working with an organization that did - and does - very similar work to what we’re doing at Bloom. And I had structured my business off of the company I was working with prior. As a result, I was building a business that wasn’t the type of business I would want to be working in.
So it wasn’t necessarily external factors that caused challenges, but it was my own way of thinking. Once I got to the point where I had overcome my own assumptions about the type of business that I was going to build, I moved away from basically copying what I’d already seen, done, and what already worked.
I was able to build a company that was right for me.
What were some of the unique elements that worked for you?
When I used to work full time, I would go from one company to the other. What I found in terms of making this transition to building Bloom is that I had complete freedom to mess up, to make mistakes, and to build something true to me.
* The way we structured our days.
* In how we collaborated with clients.
* The way we communicate.
For example, we’re in a busy season but we don’t work Fridays. We’ve had a four day work week for well over a year now. That’s what the team prefers. And we don’t work eight hours a day, we work seven. And even when we answer emails, we set really clear boundaries with clients in terms of when we’re available to chat and when we’re there to support them.
For invoicing, instead of doing everything on a biweekly basis, which is what I was used to, we do monthly. It’s actually influenced us being more profitable.
You also launched new offerings and leveraged new growth channels. Tell me about that
The plan was to launch this new offering months ago, but COVID hit. So we’ve been doing this work, and now get to formally introduce it: Bloom Experiences. It’s for organizations looking to bring in a new approach to corporate training and education for their teams.
At Bloom, we’re all about growth. It’s what we’re best at. We wanted to specifically look at how we were actually helping companies grow. We look at our values and how we’re able to impact growth, and we’re really good at building those systems and structures so companies can scale in a meaningful and intentional way.
So we were able to put in great, equitable hiring systems. But once these people get hired, what were we doing to further grow these folks? That’s where the education and deep learning experiences come into play.
Obviously, with the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement recently, we’ve been doing a lot of diversity, equity, and inclusion learning experiences too.
Most coaches and consultants are on LinkedIn or Twitter. But you’ve found success on Instagram. How did that happen?
Yeah! I have celebrities like Arianna Grande following me now. It’s funny.
What was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek post about what non-Black folks can do to better support Black people … kind of spiraled.
What I’ve been saying is that I take my Twitter energy to Instagram. Instagram is a flex in terms of where you’ve travelled, who your friends are, and maybe a cute photo of your beautiful partner. And Twitter’s where you flex your brain muscles and talk about the things you’re passionate about.
And then I do it in an aesthetically pleasing way. I’m serving up - in some cases hard - lessons from my own lived experiences as a Black woman or some tongue-in-cheek advice.
(She uses Canva to design her beautiful Instagram carousels.)
What’s been the result of that Twitter energy on Instagram?
Just in the past two months, it’s resulted in over $500,000 in revenue. That’s pretty wild. It’s very unexpected. I didn’t know that I’d be able to build these kind of deep connections and relationships on Instagram.
I love sharing ideas and sharing how to do it. I’m happy to share all my tips and secrets and how I navigate what I do. With Instagram, it feels more in tune with who I am. I’m a creative and visually driven person. And the design works for me. You’re confined. You’re forced to break down your ideas and concepts. You only have nine frames in a carousel to work with so you have to be really direct and concise with the ideas you’re sharing.
I found Instagram is a great place for me to test out content before I put it on Twitter, too.
What advice would you share for entrepreneurs choosing to stay remote post-COVID?
The biggest hurdle I’ve come across is just my own mindset and how I think about the company that I’m building as an entrepreneur. Choice is really important in terms of not being totally dogmatic in terms of what’s going to be your company now versus your company five years from now.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Avery on Instagram and Twitter.
Image courtesy Avery Francis’ Twitter.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one) Or just read on…
Buffer makes over $20 million in revenue annually, but they don’t have a sales team. Instead, they have a lifecycle marketing team led by Ashley Hockney. She started working remotely at Zapier, then as an entrepreneur, and now at Buffer.
In this conversation, Ashley shared more about how Buffer grows without a sales team and the tools and processes she uses to lead a distributed, remote team of marketers across the globe.
A remote marketer’s toolbox
→ Buffer is timezone agnostic, so all documentation and collaboration has to be inclusive of people in different timezones. A big way Ashley does this with her team is through Slack threads. That way, everyone can see the core topic and add their thoughts into the thread. When organized properly, threads are easily searchable, so anyone in the company can learn about what’s going on.
→ A powerful “tool” in Ashley’s arsenal is not a tool at all, but being a moderator. Buffer has guides on how to communicate - what type of information goes where, for instance - and Ashley spends some time ensuring those guidelines are followed. Because the team is asynchronous and remote, clean data is critical for team collaboration and knowledge sharing.
How to be a remote marketing leader
→ Remote marketers have to show their emotion, thoughts, and personality through writing. If you’re not a strong writer - and even if you are - Ashley recommends leveraging emoticons, smileys, and other types of content to help express emotions if you don’t have the words to do it. This is often frowned upon in “professional” settings, but can be incredibly helpful at generating connection and understanding remotely.
→ Leadership is about providing your team access to data and information, but then giving them time and whitespace to learn by themselves. A good marketing leader might be smart, but cannot teach their team everything. As well, in order to encourage learning on their own, a team leader has to both demonstrate that for the team and make sure people have time and autonomy to learn.
The final word
“[Remote work] is truly something I think is here to say. Allowing life to be a priority over a commute. Letting people get two hours back in their day to say “this is my time.”
Remotely Inclined Chats with Ashley Hockney
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Ashley! Tell me about yourself and your work at Buffer.
Ashley: I joined Buffer as the Director of Marketing and was running this team of product marketers, growth marketers, email, and community. We were looking at our customers and thinking how we could serve them. Traditionally, you might see a marketing director really invested in revenue, leading into growth hacks, etc.
But I’m now the Head of Lifecycle Marketing, which is a bit of a divergence from that. We look a little bit more at lifetime value (LTV) and how we support users, not just at the moment of coming into the funnel, onboarding, or confirming at the end of a trial. It’s what happens after that.
Buffer is famously remote. But you don’t have a sales team. How do you do business remotely without a sales team?
I’ll break it down into parts and explain why it made sense to focus on lifecycle marketing at Buffer.
With a sales team, you’re devoting a lot of time to one-on-one attention, but it’s also very outbound. There is a lot of value in that, particularly in B2B companies or enterprise-focused companies. But when we think about lifecycle marketing, the actions are a little more at scale or data-driven. It’s more about how we can achieve that customization through smart data at scale (Lots of big words, I know).
A lot of this aligns with Buffer - who we are and what we know that people love. When we think about our value proposition and positioning in the market, we think about why we are great at this - and it comes down to our brand, how we do things, and how we think about our customers.
It’s also things like our transparent salaries and our culture. That translates a bit into our product as well - with what we hope is a simple UI. With those things in mind, a business model of going really upscale and trying to one serve someone with a thousand-dollar budget just didn’t feel like us. So when we think about how we grow and scale the business without reaching for big contracts, it became about serving more people at a more accessible price point. It just felt really on-brand for us to say let’s serve a couple more and lean away from a model that searches for a really high price point.
How do you keep the creativity up when you’re remote and can’t brainstorm in one room?
Truthfully, it comes down to your people and investing in them. We hire people who are so thoughtful and considerate, and out of that comes empathy for wanting to do better and wanting to learn more.
Structurally, especially coming in as a marketing director, it was about how I empower my team with smart data and then time and white space to go research and learn so they can make decisions on their own. Communication is part of that as well.
How do you facilitate communication on a remote team?
Slack! Slack threads are key. We use it to asynchronously chart big thoughts and concerns. We also use Dropbox Paper and Dropbox Files. Then, it’s not a tool, but we have guidelines on how we communicate - what goes where, how, when.
When you’re thoughtful about that, you get that kind of inclusivity and cross communication that can get out of hand if you don’t set those guardrails.
What are the most important guidelines people need to set for remote communication?
I think it’s necessary to know what communication goes where. At Buffer, we’re timezone agnostic, which has to be a choice you make as a company. With that, we’re intentional about communicating asynchronously to be inclusive of all time zones.
Another thing I’ve learned is that you have to be intentional about how you want things to go - and if you are going to moderate or not moderate. At Buffer, we’ve seen the benefit from moderation, offering how we communicate in a positive way. Or this is how we use emojis.
How did you get introduced to remote work? What made you choose to stay remote as you became a team leader?
I got my first foray into remote work when I was working at Zapier in 2016. I spent the year travelling around, which was an incredible experience. I’ve stayed remote since, started my own company and was remote from home. Then with Buffer I’ve always been remote.
Remote work is truly something I think is here to say. Allowing life to be a priority over a commute. Letting people get two hours back in their day to say “this is my time.” For me, that’s opened up opportunities. I spent time in Japan. I spent time in South America and now I know a little Spanish.
And staying is huge for parents as well. Perhaps 2016 is a trigger for me as we’re heading into an election. But we think of those boundaries between Coasties and rural areas. I live in Brooklyn, but I was raised in a small town in Indiana. There’s this dialogue about how these worlds are so different and how we don’t communicate. And one of the wonderful things about remote work is you’re not tied to where you are - you can reinvest in those communities. You can choose where you want to live. Boundaries set up by geography just aren’t there.
What’s the biggest lesson you learned as an entrepreneur that helps with your role at Buffer?
For anyone in tech, there’s this comment that people can’t wait to start their own business. That they don’t want a boss. Or that they want freedom. I was totally this person. What I found working for myself is that you have many more bosses, more clients, more partners, more landlords… there’s always a moment where you’re collaborating and co-creating.
Like the Bob Dylan song: You’re always going to have to serve somebody.
What’s your least favourite part of remote work - and how are you handling it?
I’m an extrovert. I love people. So it’s being intentional about getting out with friends after work or joining a coworking space that is easy to walk to.
What’s one thing you wish every remote marketer knew?
There’s this dialogue often in an aggressive growth space that’s about having to do something and push through and force it to come off as confident. That you can’t include emojis. Or no one likes smileys. You have to let people know where you’re at - lean into emoticons to help express emotion when you don’t have the words.
What resources do you turn to for professional development and learning?
I think remote is actually better for professional development. When things are remote and you’re doing it right, there’s a lot of documentation. For example, at Zapier I was trying to figure out if this launch we did had any impact on engagement and adoption. I went really deep in the data with before and after analysis. I could just pop in and spend a little extra time because I was curious reading and learning from other teams.
For anyone who’s curious or ambitious, those resources are there so you can asynchronously learn and absorb. There’s a lot of passive resources for you learn from your coworkers.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Ashley via email or on Twitter.
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Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one) Or just read on…
First: Welcome to all the new subscribers - we’re officially over 650! If you know someone interested in running a business remotely, I’d be grateful if you forwarded them this newsletter.
Today: We’re talking about remote community building with an entrepreneur who’s built a multi-thousand person virtual freelancer community.
Bobbie Racette has been helping businesses remotely for years, but never as much as during the COVID pandemic. Her business, The Virtual Gurus, connects businesses all over the world with highly-trained, highly-educated freelancers and virtual assistants for everything from blogging and social media to data entry and planning calendars. Now, she’s further innovating in the space with askBetty, a Slack app where entrepreneurs can work with freelancers on a task-by-task basis.
As an entrepreneur, Bobbie has built a strong community of over 6,000 freelancers in the Virtual Gurus network. The way she built - and sustains - that community is a lesson for anyone leading remote marketing, community, or sales teams.
In this episode, Bobbie shared what she focuses on when it comes to community building remotely: education, infrastructure, and the human touch.
The power of education
→ A core value proposition of Virtual Gurus is providing highly-trained remote workers for companies. To help ensure the success of gurus on the platform (thus making them more money), the company hired an onboarding team to explicitly work with new gurus to get them up to speed and matched with clients.
→ Another way that Bobbie and the team ensure their community is poised for success is to offer them direct education. The Virtual Gurus Academy offers courses - available to anyone, not just guru community members - on specific skills that Virtual Gurus clients are willing to pay for.
Communities need infrastructure
→ Whether digital or physical, every community needs the infrastructure to succeed. Current team solutions were helpful, but frequently didn’t allow for the kind of community building that Bobbie wanted.
→ While it’s not visible on the front-end, the Virtual Gurus team built a thriving community platform where gurus can connect to help each other with work assignments, mentor each other, and build their networks.
The human touch
→ Every marketplace has at least two sides, and Virtual Gurus is no different. So they have a customer success team explicitly focused on providing the human touch to both clients and the gurus working to support them. That way, no one feels that they are only working with a machine - and there’s always a direct connection to the core operations team.
→ Part of Bobbie’s mission is to use technology and business as a driving force for good in the world. This was one of the reasons behind founding the Academy, but also drives Bobbie’s further community building efforts. Specifically, she’s working with various underserved and often-ignored communities, including the LGBTQ+ and Indigenous communities in Canada, to teach them the skills necessary to launch their own freelance business, whether with Virtual Gurus or not.
The final word
“The main thing [about remote work] is to trust your team. You trust them in the office. You’re not sitting beside them all the time. You just have to have that same trust being at home.”
I’d be grateful if you shared this post with anyone you know interested in remote work and running a business remotely
Remotely Inclined Chats with Bobbie Racette, Founder of Virtual Gurus
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Bobbie! Can you share a bit about yourself and Virtual Gurus?
Bobbie: Yes! Virtual Gurus is a virtual assistant platform - a marketplace where we provide work to virtual assistants, freelancers, and remote workers. On the flip side, we provide services to businesses and entrepreneurs of all sizes.
We match based on algorithms - we have all the virtual assistants in a database and you can select which assistant might be better for you. Our assistants are all in Canada, but work with clients all over the world in Singapore, the UK, Australia, and all over the US and Canada.
We’re also working on a Slack app called askBetty. Since so many entrepreneurs don’t need full-time virtual assistants, we’re building askBetty as a by-the-task app.
You gave away a lot of free services in response to COVID. How did that impact your business?
I turned it into thinking that panicking isn’t going to get me anywhere. Instead, what can I do to help people?
A few of our clients were quitting and pausing because they were stressed out and not sure what was going to happen. It was all unknown at that point. So we decided to launch a People over Profit program and decided to kick it off with 110 startups across Canada, giving them free service from us.
We took a financial hit from that, but everything worked out because most of the clients ended up staying on because they liked the service. We didn’t even need to do any marketing because it was marketing itself from work of mouth. That resulted in us having 66% month-over-month growth.
How do you manage a growing remote team - now in the hundreds - while still maintaining quality?
One of the things we’ve worked on internally is the management side. There are a lot of moving parts as you grow. So we hired a full-time client success team to manage the quality of the work. We also have an onboarding team and a Virtual Gurus Academy to train virtual assistants, which is available to everyone. We try to help VAs and freelancers to scale up.
We also have a whole community on the backend. People don’t see this, but the community can talk, support each other, and help each other with jobs - it’s all remote workers helping each other.
I love the focus on community. How do you balance synchronous vs asynchronous work with your growing team?
We’re trying to figure out exactly what we’re doing as far as making sure, logistically, how our virtual assistants can service multiple clients at once and how they do it. So we have a few staff in a small coworking space, mainly our operations staff, and everyone else. Most of our upper management is at home.
We also train our contractors on the importance of time management and balance. We work with them on prioritizing. That’s helped us as well with our own skills.
With the Academy, people can take courses anywhere. With askBetty, it will be everyone with a Slack account.
Hybrid remote versus all-remote: what’s your preference?
So I’m at home. Our COO is at the office because she just got back from a holiday. We have full time staff for operations in an office. Sometimes it’s important to be in the same room. Upper management doesn’t necessarily need to be there, but our CSMs found they feel like more of a team when together and more able to focus on the client success side of it.
I’d love to get rid of the added expense of a coworking space, but the CSMs love it there. We also give our VA’s the same option - if they want to go into coworking spaces local to them, we’d be happy to build partnerships with coworking spaces they can use.
But we don’t need a full office. We’re also growing and hiring five more people, but still won’t get an office - they will be fully-remote workers.
What’s your advice for leaders making the hybrid vs all-remote choice for their teams?
The first thing I thought when COVID hit was that it would be a game changer. A lot of people came to the realization that working from home is probably better - you can be just as, if not more, productive from home. And I know expense-wise, it’s better for my company.
But we had the platform for it. It was an easy transition for us. We ended up changing the transition to make sure we could help all the businesses that use our service, and we were able to reach out and give them advice on how to change everything. One of the things I’ve tried to tell people is that everything stays the same, you’re just not looking at their faces all day (other than zoom or something).
Whether remote or not, everybody should know their core responsibilities and should still be able to perform those responsibilities. You just have to over-communicate and set expectations with staff and contractors. Then you should be able to work remotely. I think the main thing is to trust your team. You trust them in the office. You’re not sitting beside them all the time. You just have to have that same trust being at home.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Bobbie on Twitter and check out Virtual Gurus.
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Image courtesy Virtual Gurus
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Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one) Or just read on…
Joe Blair is a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley firm Cota Capital and host of the Epic Human Podcast, but before that he was an engineer turned entrepreneur. His first foray into the concept of remote work was when he invested in an air taxi service back in 2017, which caused him to think more consciously about where people could live and work. At the time, remote work was seen as an exciting new prospect, but potentially more hype than reality. COVID obviously changed things a bit.
In this episode of Remotely Inclined Chats, Joe and I dig deep into how VCs are thinking about remote work, how the whole VC ecosystem has changed from in-person to remote, and how successfully fundraise remotely without “remote washing.”
From opportunity to reality
* When Joe first got into remote work back in 2017 / 2018, a lot of the conversation was how remote was a niche thing that had some potential. COVID forced everyone to try it, and now the conversation has shifted from potential to practicality.
* The first Remote Work Expo that Joe hosted in 2019 had 35 attendees. The April 2020 edition had over 450. The questions focused on the right tools and management practices for remote work.
* Even though many workers are looking forward to returning to office life when it’s safe to do so, Joe says that he’s seen a decade’s worth of acceleration in the remote work movement due to COVID.
“Remote washing” is out, accurate categories are in
* With the rise of remote work came “remote washing” - slapping a “we help remote teams” logo on your business, similar to “greenwashing” when companies talk about helping the environment as a marketing tactic.
* Joe said that most venture capitalists can see through remote washing, so it won’t help your odds of fundraising in this environment just by saying you work for remote teams.
* Technologies that help remote teams often fall into one of four categories: horizontal solutions explicitly for remote teams, vertical solutions for a specific industry that includes remote workers, physical infrastructure to support remote work, and back office functions that support remote companies. You can build a successful company in any of these categories.
Building VC relationships remotely
* VCs are adjusting to the new reality of becoming remote workers, said Joe, and a new study found that 69% of VCs are giving all-remote deals the green-light. Joe’s VC firm, Cota Capital, just finalized its first all-remote deal, investing in medtech startup Proprio.
* If you want to fundraise remotely, you need to work on digital relationship building skills and focus on authentic reach outs. Whatever you do, don’t copy-paste a generic blast out to every VC you can find.
* Warm intros are still the best bet, but if you can’t get one, then anchor your efforts in a genuine connection to what the VC is interested in personally. You’re far more likely to get a response if you’re talking to them about blogs they’ve written, podcasts they host, or other ideas they’ve put out into the world versus just talking about what their fund is doing in that particular moment.
The final word
“I think we’ve accelerated this transition to remote work by at least a decade.”
I’d be so grateful if you shared this article with your colleagues and friends who are interested in remote work
Remotely Inclined Chats with venture capitalist Joe Blair
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Joe! Can you share your journey with remote work?
Joe: Sure. To put it into context, I’m from the New York / Connecticut area. I was originally an engineer, turned entrepreneur, turned venture investor. I’ve been doing venture investing for the last seven years after graduating from Harvard Business School.
I came to remote through my interest in mobility. About three and a half years ago I started getting interested in the future of aerial mobility, which led me to an investment in a company called Lilium, which is an on-demand electric air taxi company. It’s a new transportation paradigm where you can get from city to city in the air, on-demand like you would with Uber.
I started thinking harder about if this new transportation dimension were to manifest, where would people live? I then started thinking about what if you don’t have to commute at all.
Then I found myself in Wyoming at a round table discussion with the then governor. We were talking about mobility and he was asking how we bring San Francisco-based tech companies to Wyoming. I was in this beautiful log cabin style mansion, snow-capped peaks all around me, and I started thinking that it was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been. I was struck by the irony that they were asking how to get people to live there, meanwhile in the back of my mind I’m thinking I would love to live here, so how can I figure out how to work remotely and live here?
So I started thinking about it from first principles as an engineer. The internet exists. Remote conferencing exists. Cloud-based productivity tools exist. Why can’t people work remotely? It didn’t seem to me like there was a technology barrier.
What barriers were holding people back?
I put together a summit to explore this topic back in 2019. Remote Summit. It was a virtual conference - we had 35 people show up, and we powered it with Remo.co.
We had some thought leaders, including Laurel Farrer from Distribute Consulting and the first head of remote at AngleList, and some of my VC friends showed up. And we talked about remote - I think the title at the time was about whether remote was hype or a huge opportunity. The context was all about that remote is happening, but is still kind of niche and a futuristic concept. It would probably take us 10 years to progress and there are probably a few dozen companies that have started innovating in this space.
I remember thinking it would probably take a long time but maybe there are early investments to be made. And then COVID hit and the world flipped upside down. All of a sudden, these companies had to go fully remote. They were forced to do it. Then people realized they could get by. Maybe they needed different management styles, but there’s good arguments out there for if remote work is at parity with working in an office. I think it depends on management style.
But if you look at the big picture of this Black Swan event for remote work, let’s say 2% of knowledge workers were working remotely pre-COVID. Now it’s about 80% to 90%. Then when things “go back to normal,” let’s say that number goes down to 20%. That’s still a 10x jump in a very short period of time.
I think we’ve accelerated this transition to remote work by at least a decade. It’s been an extremely exciting time. You have announcements from companies like Coinbase, Twitter, Square, and Shopify, saying this is working for us and we’re going fully remote - at least an an option - in perpetuity.
And it’s a huge shift in mindset of employers, because they are realizing that many employees really value remote work. They get to spend more time with family and friends, reduce time commuting, and live life on your schedule.
What are you seeing in VC conversations about remote work now?
At the beginning of April, I had another conversation with Laurel Farrer, and we decided to do another summit. The conversation was around managing a team remotely - what tools are available. Many entrepreneurs had been working on these products for years and now they’re making their products available. So we did another Remote Startups Expo, about the tools, software, and platforms that are going to enable this transition to remote work.
I think there’s excitement in the air. And an acknowledgement all around that the tools we have are not optimized for the needs of managers and employees alike.
I tend to split the category of remote work into four different categories:
* Horizontal collaboration tools like Tandem chat.
* Vertical collaboration tools around a particular industry, like Pendo Health out of the UK that’s effectively Slack for medical professionals.
* Physical infrastructure. Having some sort of location to go to whether it’s a home office or a third place.
* Back office for things like hiring remote workers across the US and different countries.
Entrepreneurs are taking advantage here in a good way. They’re providing solutions that are really needed. It feels like we’ve been talking about remote work for a long time but it’s really only been a couple months. We’re still at the very early stages of this game.
How are VCs shifting to remote and assessing deals remotely? How do you avoid “remote washing”?
I think Brianne Kimmel makes a good point about remote washing. With any hot trend, you’re going to see this. Like greenwashing or what I called block-washing for blockchain.
Any good investor can see through that almost instantly. What I think the nuance here is that there are tools built specifically for remote teams and then there are tools that are horizontal by nature that are good for centralized and remote teams.
There are legitimate businesses built in all those four categories I mentioned before that would not be considered remote washing.
But VCs have a very old-school mentality. They want to meet in person. To shake hands. They say ideally people live in my zip code so I can visit their office. But I think that’s starting to change.
Like in every other industry, VCs are coming to grips. The reality is it doesn’t matter if your company is in Santa Clara, New York City, or Hong Kong. I’m not going to be able to meet you in person any time soon. So what’s the difference?
I’ll speak for Cota Capital, my firm. We just made our first remote investment a few weeks ago called Proprio, an exciting company out of Seattle, Washington. We met them virtually, did all our diligence virtually, and couldn’t be more excited about the investment.
VCs are challenging their own assumptions and are having to deal with this idea of becoming remote workers themselves.
What’s your advice for a founder looking to fundraise remotely?
The hardest part is making that connection when you don’t have it already. So of course warm intros ar egreat, but those aren’t always accessible to everyone. So for the folks who don’t have warm intros or existing relationships, I advise people to read up on the investors that you find personally interesting. Go to their Twitter, Instagram, podcast, read their writing. Get a feel for what they are interested in.
If you’re building something that fits their investment categories or things they get excited about, I would suggest reaching out directly in an authentic way, saying ‘hey, I read your article. I’m building something that I think you’ll find interesting in this category.
I love to jump on the phone when people do that for me and I can tell they’ve actually read up on me and done some homework. It’s not always a fit, but I almost always get back to them.
I don’t advise you just copy-paste your email and blast every VC in the valley and see who gets back to you. I don’t think that’s a wise approach.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Joe on:
* Twitter: @joeblairvc and @epichumanpod
* Instagram: https://instagram.com/epichumanpodcast
* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joealanblair/
* Website: https://www.epichumanpod.com/
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Take this short survey. Or just read on…
As this audience is well aware, I’m pro-remote work. But I also don’t pretend it’s the solution to every work problem. In previous Remotely Inclined Chats episodes, I’ve talked with leaders about the ways that remote work isn’t perfect - or ways it’s downright annoying. For Floyd Marinescu at C4 Media, it was around creativity. For Andrew D’Souza at Clearbanc, it was about culture.
Andre-Paul Johnson, the head of growth at Breaking Walls, is also pro-remote, and has been working remotely on and off for a decade. He even left Breaking Wall’s Montreal office to work remotely from Jamaica in 2019. He also writes a newsletter about remote growth. But despite its benefits, he noticed a key weak point in remote work, and that’s what we talked about on this edition of Remotely Inclined Chats.
So whether you’re pro-remote and want to avoid a serious pitfall or hate remote work and want some schadenfreude, keep reading.
A hybrid failure
→ As more companies announce their post-COVID remote plans, the vast majority are picking a hybrid arrangement. People often think that a hybrid arrangement with some in-office employees and some remote employees is the best of both worlds. In Andre-Paul’s experience, it could end up being the worst of both worlds instead.
→ When companies have a hybrid approach to remote work, a two-tiered culture can appear. Suddenly, a lot of work gets done in the office that remote workers don’t see, and vice versa. In Andre-Paul’s experience, companies will often default to the culture and communication style of the founders and leaders. However, in-office employees benefit from good remote cultures while remote workers don’t benefit from in-office cultures. So there’s a disconnect if leadership or company founders work in offices.
→ A key issue Andre-Paul noticed in his hybrid remote arrangement as asymmetric information flows. When you aren’t in the office, you don’t see what people are casually working on and you don’t have random ‘collisions.’ This isn’t as much of a problem in all-remote environments, since information flows become entirely virtual. It’s a significant challenge in hybrid environments since a lot of work happens that isn’t documented when you’re in an office, leaving out remote workers.
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Seeing the trees and the forest
→ Addressing this challenge, for Andre-Paul, was a matter of communicating in the open as much as possible. When work is documented (a regular management best practice), then it doesn’t matter where the work happens. For this to be successful, leaders of hybrid teams have to default to virtual information sharing regardless of if work is done in an office or remotely.
→ One solution that Andre-Paul particularly liked was Quora’s announcement about going “remote-first.” While employees can choose whether to work remotely or come into the office, all of Quora’s leadership must be remote. This will keep information and culture flows happening virtually, so both remote and in-office employees can plug into what’s going on.
→ Despite the negatives he experienced, Andre-Paul is still pro-remote. He sees the benefits of location freedom and building deep relationships with people online as well worth the nuisances of asymmetric information and broken information flows.
The final word
“The thing with remote is that it’s not that different, in the end, from in-person management.”
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Remotely Inclined Chats with Andre-Paul Johnson
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Andre-Paul! Tell me what you’re up to at Breaking Walls.
Andre-Paul: Breaking Walls is a video startup based in Montreal. I’m the head of growth on our small team. My job is to make sure whatever our devs are making ends up in people’s hands. That means a lot of things when you’ve got a small team - but it’s one of the cool parts of the job since you get to touch a lot of different aspects of the business.
You went remote for love. What happened?
I’ve been working remotely on an off for the past 10 years on a wide variety of products, small teams, big teams, some hybrid, and some fully distributed. I’ve kind of run the gamut of what it’s like to work remotely.
But this past year and a half has been extra unique. Our team is based out of Montreal. I used to live in Montreal. Then early 2019 I moved to Jamaica to be closer to my girlfriend, which is a pretty big move. A big part of that also meant a lot had to change with how I did my job because our team was co-located. We still had the office in Montreal. Working as the lone remote work on the team means you need to implement new processes and adapt how you work to the new situation. Luckily for me I was able to be in a job that allowed me to work remotely.
I’ve always wanted to travel, so I took the plunge. About a year and a half of travelling later, I’m back in Canada but still working remotely - currently based out of Toronto with the team still in Montreal. And now, of course, everyone is remote due to COVID. That has added a new dynamic to the team.
You said that hybrid remote work is like the worst of both worlds. Can you elaborate on that?
One of the big issues with hybrid remote work is managing the flow of information in a way that seems fair to everybody. Typically in a co-located team, or a team where everybody’s in the office, all the conversations happen in person: information exchange and information flows.
It also all happens in the same place in fully distributed teams - all online, on Zoom, or in Slack.
But when you have a team that has both people in an office and people working remotely, you end up with a fragmented flow of information. Oftentimes that flow of information happens wherever the leadership team is. I can tell you from experience that most leadership teams on hybrid teams end up in the office. So what that means is everyone in the office has access to those informal conversations with the leadership team. They’re privy to the decisions being made and the processes behind those decisions. Meetings happen in the office and remote colleagues aren’t included, or it’s an afterthought.
People who work remotely on hybrid teams often end up feeling like second-class citizens within their own team. And that impacts not only team productivity but team morale. And the result is a lot of hybrid remote teams don’t perform up to the level that they could, and there are different ways to mitigate that.
How did you mitigate these challenges?
Before jumping into what I did, one thing I read recently is what Quora did when they announced they were going hybrid remote-first. They’re allowing anybody to work remotely while keeping headquarters open to anyone who wants to come into the office.
But what their CEO did that I think is brilliant is that he said the leadership team has to work remotely. As I mentioned, the information flow happens wherever the leadership team is. And in this case, leadership is remote. So the information flow would happen online. If people chose to work in the office, they still have to log into meetings through their own video chat and camera.
Everybody ends up on equal footing and there’s nobody who is at an unfair advantage over other people in the company. And I think that is an extremely thoughtful way of implementing hybrid remote work in a way that actually works for your team and allows your team to remain productive and everybody feel valued.
In terms of information flow stuff I’ve done with my team, we’ve been working on a lot of challenges that remote work has. I think a lot of remote managers will be able to relate with this.
If you look at teams in an office, a lot of information flows relatively freely and you don’t even realize it. Informal conversations, team lunches, looking over at someone’s computer, or even just the physical space element of knowing someone is there if you need help. On top of that, you get body language, which is huge. It has its pitfalls, but a big advantage is that all the information flows freely and you can get away with a lack of structure and poorly defined processes since so much information is implicit.
With a remote team, there’s basically no implicit information exchange. It’s harder to build trust and harder to empower teammates or get timely feedback.
Here’s what we’ve done in our teams over the years to try to fix these issues:
Over communicate: you have to communicate absolutely everything. Every decision that gets made. Every conversation. You have to make sure nothing is left to chance and make sure all information is conveyed explicitly so expectations are set properly.
Document: it’s not only communicating, but making sure that everything gets documented. We have meeting logs for every meeting, which I know a lot of teams do in-office but it’s crucial to do that on remote teams. Same thing with decision logs, making sure that the reasoning behind every decision is documented.
But even with communication and documentation, it’s harder to build trust with your team. It becomes a challenge because all communication ends up being very intentional and explicit. You lose those serendipitous moments of running into a colleague or going out for lunch or drinks. You have to plan for everything.
On our team, we’ve started making room for non-work bonding. That means anything from a daily non-work video chats (or weekly) to talk about anything and get to know each other as people. We also have informal Slack channels or activities like book clubs or movie nights, or even team offsites (in non-COVID times).
How do you balance getting work done and travelling?
A big part of that comes down to how your team structures work. I’m on a team that allows a lot of asynchronous work from the get-go. Our team has synchronous periods, like working at similar times, but people will come into the office at different times during the day or something like that.
In remote teams, it’s a great opportunity to take this to the next level and try to find the right mix between synchronous and asynchronous work.
That way, unless we had scheduled meetings or other scheduled activities, I’m free to make my own schedule. And that freedom makes a huge difference in team productivity. On the flip side, asynchronous work has its pitfalls as it’s harder to build trust or culture, but that’s where synchronous communication and synchronous work comes in.
In my experience, 30% synchronous and 70% asynchronous time seems to work really well. We don’t measure exactly, but that’s approximately how we’ve done it with our team for the past couple years.
What’s your advice for a remote leader struggling to build information and trust systems remotely?
The thing with remote is that it’s not that different, in the end, from in-person management. Management always comes down to giving space to your best people to do their best work, and making sure you facilitate information flow within the team.
So whatever you can do to improve that on your team, wherever your feel your team is lacking, it’s your job as a manager to facilitate a solution. A lot of the time that is the same in a remote setting as it is in a non-remote setting. It’s much harder than it sounds, but it’s as simple as that.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Andre-Paul on Twitter or on his newsletter.
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Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter for people who run businesses remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Take this short survey. Or just read on…
Aaron Orendorff learned to be a content marketer from the church. After getting a masters of divinity and working at a multisite church in Oregon, he learned the basics of storytelling, creating emotional connections with people, and public speaking and writing. He spun that experience into a content marketing agency called IconiContent, and he ran editorial at Shopify Plus remotely for years.
Now a VP of Marketing and a partner at Common Thread Collective, a digital growth agency, Aaron helps ecommerce and direct-to-consumer companies tell their story with high quality content.
In this Chat, Aaron shares how he cultivates close relationships remotely and how he builds a sense of emotional connection with people he’s never met in person.
Creating emotional connections remotely
* When he joined Shopify, the company was vast majority in-office (this was years before Shopify’s major remote work announcement).
* To build emotional connections with people, Aaron focused on being present in every digital channel possible.
* The tactics Aaron used are:
* Starting in Slack, offering encouragement, praise, ideas, or comments in random channels throughout the company.
* Working on a multi-platform “stack,” he would then connect with people on LinkedIn that he talked to on Slack, sending them a DM with an interesting note. From there, he’d do the same thing via email.
* As the conversation continued, he’d look for opportunities for a phone call, which meant he’d get access to their phone number.
* Once he had their phone number, he’d send a text message to continue “showing up” in different ways.
* This strategy, though, can get annoying for people. The key is to ensure that you’re truly helping the person, not just messaging them. Focus on their problems, issues, or questions.
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Building a brand
* Aaron’s experience in the church taught him the power of being as present as possible. When he left the church and wanted to get into content marketing, he focused on guest posting in as many blogs as possible.
* He would write anything he could about marketing principles to be published anywhere possible - he didn’t question whether it was a small or big publication.
* Over time, publishing in small blogs and building a network helped him land major publications like Fast Company and Entrepreneur. This work became cumulative, helping him connect with people like Tommy Walker who connected him to his opportunity to join Shopify Plus.
The final word
“There’s power in appearing more present and more real than you really are when you diversify your channel approach to interactions.”
Remotely Inclined Chats with Aaron Orendorff
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Aaron! Let’s kick it off with what you’re up to at Common Thread Collective?
Aaron: I joined Common Thread Collective in February 2020 as the VP of Marketing. I’m also a partner. It’s a digital growth marketing agency for ecommerce and direct to consumer companies. I fell in love with it based on my past experience at Shopify Plus.
You were in the ministry before getting into tech. What was that transition like?
I’d love to say it was a calculated move, but that’s a lie. I invested myself wholeheartedly in my first career. I went to seminary, got a masters in divinity, focused on public speaking and preaching, and worked at a multiside campus church in Portland, Oregon. Then I proceeded to burn that career down. I found myself unemployed and unemployable in rural southern Oregon.
I’d cut my teeth, mentally speaking, writing in church ministry. Which is where I learned, as crass as it sounds, that it doesn’t matter if you’re right, it matters if you create an emotional connection with your audience. When you’re able to articulate their objections and point of view better than they can, they turn the corner and think maybe there is another way. And whether we’re talking bout conversion in the religious sense or in the way tech uses it, the principles are the same.
All communication is sales - trying to get what’s in my heart and mind into someone else’s in a way that makes them say “yes”.
So I found these incredibly transferable skills. I had a suspicion that was later confirmed that people were selling things on the internet, but couldn’t write or communicate well. So I jumped primarily into content marketing, and one thing led to another. Over the past 7 years.
You mentioned that when you joined Shopify they weren’t as open to remote work as they are now. How did you build relationships remotely?
To get to Shopify, I wrote like a madman - anywhere and everywhere - for a 2-3 year period. I tried to get my name on as many sites as I possibly could, from niche marketing to mainstream like Business Insider, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, or Mashable. This was to essentially trick the world into thinking that I was somebody. And this is even more important today in a remote working environment.
What I used to do is every time an article would go live, I would tag people who were featured in the article, asking them to check that I quoted them right. Not a big ask, just for a bit of curiosity. I cast these wide nets over and over again. And when you do that enough times - when you show up enough - one of them hits. That’s how I ended up connecting with one of the most influential people in my life, Tommy Walker, who was at the time the editor in chief of Shopify Plus.
How did you cultivate relationships at Shopify remotely?
When I was writing in other publications, I was in multiple places and multiple sites. It creates this powerful social proof illusion in someone’s mind. It’s the same principle when it comes to remote working, especially when it comes to working in a company that’s predominantly in offices.
What I found was the more involved I got in various Slack channels that I didn’t necessarily need to be a part of, the more I went out into those channels and started mixing it up in the comments. Then I would track down the people I really liked. I could find them on LinkedIn and send them a DM there. Or I’d find any excuse to relevantly email a few people at once or doing one on one.
Then I always look for an opportunity to actually call somebody to get their phone number. Then try texting them. What I did was the same sort of experience where suddenly I was in all these different places.
It feels more like I’m a real person with a much deeper relationship than I genuinely have simply because of that multiplicity of touch points.
I then thought about other days to do this. And my new favorite one: Rather than writing out long instructions to my team or a long request to other people, I’ll do a Zoom recording / screenshot. That way my face is in the video and it’s 3-5 minutes long.
Is there a limit to this? Does it ever get annoying for people?
It can. But at first, I would say 70% of my time was spent going out into their world. I would go to their channels, pay attention to what they are saying, and offer solutions to their problems as much as I can.
The vast majority of the time I’m showing up, I’m not coming with a problem or a request.
What’s your advice for newbie remote entrepreneurs?
There’s power in appearing more present and more real than you really are when you diversify your channel approach to interactions.
Perhaps the crowning achievement of this is building up to the sacred phone number. People are incredibly busy. So I am always building up to the excuse to ask for a phone number, not to call them, but to cross into the intimacy of text. I want it to be something where I intrude, but to cross that final barrier. So maybe I can possibly send them a phone recorded video of me celebrating something. It’s building this good will.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Aaron on Twitter or LinkedIn.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Take this short survey. Or just read on…
Rebecca Jacobs and Cailey Gibson have never met in person. Yet they are co-founders of Anika Works, a platform that helps nonprofits connect with impact-focused businesses. Their journey is one that seems odd when you consider the lore of co-founders meeting in college, or being high school buddies, or a chance meeting at a tech event. However, they are one element of the new reality: building a remote business does not require knowing someone in-person beforehand.
Despite not meeting in person, both were adamant that they built trust and vetted each other before agreeing to work together - there couldn’t be a “let’s try it and we’ll see approach.” Further, both care deeply about wellness and self-care, something that gets harder when you are working remotely and prone to feelings of isolation.
In this Remotely Inclined Chat, Rebecca and Cailey share how they met, how they vetted each other to build trust, and how they ensure wellness is built into the fabric of their business.
Vetting a co-founder you’ve never met
* The two met in a facebook group, when Rebecca was looking for some social media and marketing help for Anika Works (initially, Rebecca was a solo founder).
* Cailey did some work, but found that she wanted to get more involved -- that led to the co-founder conversation.
* A big part of vetting for both Rebecca and Cailey was checking self-awareness and learning about who the other person becomes under stress. The key resource they pulled from was the Founder Institute’s 34 Questions to Ask a Potential Co-Founder.
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Taking care of yourself: Wellness as a remote entrepreneur
* Taking care of yourself has been critical to Anika Works’ mission from day one, so the team prioritizes it.
* Rebecca loves Ink Blot Therapy and the community of founders she built through the Founder Institute accelerator.
* Cailey shared that the company has a #TeamWellness Slack channel where they hold each other accountable to personal wellness and the company has an open calendar for the team with different meetups, suggestions, and wellness tips so people don’t have to spend time searching for insight.
The final word
“Get comfortable with vulnerability. It’s scary, but that has been the source of so much of my growth and ability to succeed in this business.”
Remotely Inclined Chats with Rebecca and Cailey from Anika Works
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Rebecca and Cailey! Can you share what Anika Works is all about?
Rebecca: Thanks for having us! Anika Works is a matchmaking platform where we help connect small nonprofits and grassroots organizations with service providers and corporate sponsors that help them prepare for fundraising, connect with the right donors, and help their organization so they can do more good.
But you two haven’t actually met in person? Tell me about that
Rebecca: Absolutely. What happened was that I was a solo founder to start. I came in with this idea. I went through the Founder Institute in Toronto. I noticed that in the trenches, it can be tough to be alone through all of it. So I knew that if I wanted this to work I’d need to find people better than me at everything except for the few things I could focus on and engage with.
I found myself in facebook groups. It was also my first segue into remote work because it was something I was curious about. One group, for female founders, I stumbled across Cailey as I was requesting help for marketing. She was a fantastic service provider for me, helped me set up our own facebook group that is now thriving.
We’ve now known each other for about six months and have been working together, but we’ve never met in person.
How did you vet each other without meeting first?
Rebecca: There needs to be some meaningful conversations happening. I want to make sure that my co-founder has all the information available and make sure it’s a fully transparent process. Ultimately my mindset was making sure she feels that she’s getting as much out of this as I did.
Cailey: We did a 3 page questionnaire - it took us about two hours to do it. If someone’s not willing to spend that kind of time to get to know you, then there’s a question of how you will manage when times get difficult.
One of the questions I remember was how you handle stress and what your conflict management style is. I let her know that I’m the type of person who mirrors the other person. If they are being passive aggressive, I’ll be passive aggressive. It’s definitely not one of those things you think is a great quality about yourself that you can’t wait to share, but it helps both of us realize that when you know the other person’s style, you can pick up cues and support each other.
Remote work can be lonely. Has that been a challenge for you?
Rebecca: Absolutely. It has been at the core of what inspired Anika Works and hopefully what will continue to inspire our culture as we grow. Founding Anika Works came from my experience working in East Africa in social sector work. One of the things that came up for me early on in the process was the struggle to balance what it means to take care of yourself and to give to others in your organization. It was something I noticed across the board that people were struggling with in this sector.
How do you address wellness at Anika Works?
Rebecca: As we now enter the entrepreneurship and tech space, it’s become very apparent to me that this is not something that’s sector agnostic. It is something everybody experiences. From the beginning it was a personal mantra that I can only do my best. I can only bring 100 percent of myself to work. And I can’t help people if I don’t first fill up my own cup and take care of myself to the point where I’m not worrying about burnout or worrying if I can get out of bed today. It’s been part of my journey from the get go.
For me, Founder Institute helped because I connected with a community of entrepreneurs. I also connected with Ink Blot Therapy, which has been a huge part of how I’ve maintained my wellness. I also think about putting myself out there, however scary.
Cailey: We have a #TeamWellness channel in our Slack. It’s almost an accountability channel of making sure that everyone’s prioritizing their wellness and making it easy for people. Finding time to scour the internet, especially with a lot of things being closed, isn’t good.
We also created a Wellness Calendar that people can quickly scan for things like a daily yoga class to check out. It just gives them something easier to plug and play rather than taking more than 30 minutes to go search for something.
What’s your advice for new entrepreneurs that want to hustle but also prioritize wellness?
Rebecca: First, congratulations on taking that risk and that step. It’s a hard path in a lot of ways, but also beautiful.
Then I would say get comfortable with vulnerability. It’s scary, but that has been the source of so much of my growth and ability to succeed in this business.
Cailey: Don’t try to control everything. You can’t ever be fully prepared. Just do as much research as you can, then start - with someone holding you accountable (whether a family member, friend, or Facebook group so you know you have a deadline).
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Rebecca and Cailey in the Anika Works Facebook Community or on Twitter.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com -
Hi,
Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Take this short survey. Or just read on…
Shelly Spiegel’s company Fire Engine RED has been remote since she founded it in 2001. However, she didn’t feel she could talk about it for 10 years, worried that people would judge her company for not having an office space. Things changed in 2011 when Fire Engine RED won an award for its culture, noting they were the first remote company to win the award. Many people were shocked at the idea that a remote company could have a culture, let alone an award-winning one.
Since 2011, Shelly has been more vocal about her all-remote company, writing a book on her methods called Fully Remote (formerly Virtual Possibility) and regularly commenting on the remote work world, including putting together one of the first directories of all-remote companies.
In particular, Shelly is proud of Fire Engine RED’s culture. The 80+ person company has an impressive retention rate and average tenure of 6.5 years, nearly 50% higher than the American average.
In our chat, Shelly shared the tactical ways she builds culture remotely -- and explains how other companies can adopt the practices for themselves.
Remote culture tactics
I believe our culture is why our team member retention rate is 92% and the average team member stays with us for 6.5 years. Some of our team members are even moving in 7-10 years.
I always say that being CEO is not just being the Chief Executive Officer but also the Chief Entertainment Officer. You can’t just focus on growing the business, you have to focus on your team as well.
Transparency
You name it, I’ll answer the question.
I also have a feedback system where people can participate - they can ask me any question anonymously and I will respond within 24 hours, and share my response with the team. So people know I will answer the question and take action if need be.
For example, we used to put people’s phone numbers on our website, and I got feedback that people were getting tons of spam calls. Within 24 hours, they were removed.
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Fun
Something else that’s popular is what we call Walking Wednesdays. It’s a phone call (totally voluntary) with a topic that has nothing to do with work. It could be about your first car or your first job’s team members, or something else.
It’s optional, and people go for a walk wherever they are (our team stretches across 26 states and 5 countries). I kick it off then it just becomes a conversation. It works even though we have a team of 80 people -- I would say we have about an 80% of our team that joins each week.
Recognition
We have a Slack channel called REDcognition, where we recognize members of our team for the good work they do for one another. We also post when good client feedback comes in because I want the team to know about it.
Civic duty
Since we’re in an election year in the US, we set up another Slack channel called I Voted, where people can post messages with them voting or with the I Voted sticker on them, their pet, or their kids.
We also joined an organization called Make Time To Vote, which is an initiative in the US where companies commit to letting employees vote on company time, so the time is respected and paid. That’s one of the reasons we started the I Voted channel, and it’s very popular.
An aside: A big part of culture is music. For me, that’s country music (don’t judge). But I also like discovering new music, and I recently learned about Album Daily, a newsletter dedicated to helping you discover - or re-discover - great music.
If you’re a music lover, this newsletter is worth checking out.
Family and COVID
With more family members home than ever before, we’re in the process of putting together a company-wide talent show to showcase our team members’ talents and the talents of their family as well.
Everyone’s excited because it’s not just the team, but also families. And for children especially. In fully remote companies, too, every day can be bring your pet to work day, so one of the things we’re doing with the younger children of our team members is having a pet show and tell call where they can introduce their pets to our team.
The final word
“You can’t just focus on growing the business, you have to focus on your team as well.”
Remotely Inclined Chats with Shelly Spiegel
Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.
Stefan: Welcome, Shelly! Can you share what you’re working on and what Fire Engine RED does?
Shelly: Absolutely. I started Fire Engine RED in December 2001 and from day one we were a fully remote company. We’re coming up now on 20 years.
We primarily serve colleges in the US and work with admissions offices helping them market their institutions to prospective students. On the technology side, we’ve developed a CRM product to help colleges manage their interactions with prospective students. So we’re a hybrid company - marketing and technology.
How has it been growing a remote business in the education field?
Back in 2001 we were an anomaly being remote. We didn’t feel it was in our interest to share that we were remote with our prospective clients for the first 10 years. If people asked, we’d be honest, but we didn’t just talk about it.
In 2011, we applied for an award through Inc Magazine as a top place to work that had a great culture and good values. I was thrilled were one of the 50 companies selected. And in fact we were the first fully remote company to be selected for this award. The judges were shocked that a fully remote company could have a culture.
One of the reasons we went and stayed remote was the ability to hire top talent - and educators became impressed with the team we put together. I would always tell them we were able to do this because we’re fully remote, and thus they became more and more comfortable with that fact.
Should people speak loudly about being remote now, or should they keep it silent?
They should very much talk about it. It’s a positive. It really is. It gives companies the ability to hire top talent.
And when COVID hit, it proved that further from a business perspective.
My worlds collided. We had so many processes in place to work remotely that we could continue working without skipping a beat. And then I gave several webinars to colleges and admissions offices, specifically teaching them how to lead a remote team, since my clients found themselves in this position overnight.
2020 has been the year of change. Now people realize things can change at any moment.
Can you share what you’ve done to build such a strong culture remotely?
I believe our culture is why our team member retention rate is 92% and the average team member stays with us for 6.5 years. Some of our team members are even moving in 7-10 years.
I always say that being CEO is not just being the Chief Executive Officer but also the Chief Entertainment Officer. You can’t just focus on growing the business, you have to focus on your team as well.
Transparency
You name it, I’ll answer the question.
I also have a feedback system where people can participate - they can ask me any question anonymously and I will respond within 24 hours, and share my response with the team. So people know I will answer the question and take action if need be.
For example, we used to put people’s phone numbers on our website, and I got feedback that people were getting tons of spam calls. Within 24 hours, they were removed.
Fun
Something else that’s popular is what we call Walking Wednesdays. It’s a phone call (totally voluntary) with a topic that has nothing to do with work. It could be about your first car or your first job’s team members, or something else.
It’s optional, and people go for a walk wherever they are (our team stretches across 26 states and 5 countries). I kick it off then it just becomes a conversation. It works even though we have a team of 80 people -- I would say we have about an 80% of our team that joins each week.
Recognition
We have a Slack channel called REDcognition, where we recognize members of our team for the good work they do for one another. We also post when good client feedback comes in because I want the team to know about it.
Civic duty
Since we’re in an election year in the US, we set up another Slack channel called I Voted, where people can post messages with them voting or with the I Voted sticker on them, their pet, or their kids.
We also joined an organization called Make Time To Vote, which is an initiative in the US where companies commit to letting employees vote on company time, so the time is respected and paid. That’s one of the reasons we started the I Voted channel, and it’s very popular.
Family and COVID
With more family members home than ever before, we’re in the process of putting together a company-wide talent show to showcase our team members’ talents and the talents of their family as well.
Everyone’s excited because it’s not just the team, but also families. And for children especially. In fully remote companies, too, every day can be bring your pet to work day, so one of the things we’re doing with the younger children of our team members is having a pet show and tell call where they can introduce their pets to our team.
What is your advice for a remote entrepreneur who is feeling in over their head?
Only hire people who share your values.
You can have all the processes in place with the right clients, but it comes down to people. You just can’t focus enough on your people.
Not everyone’s cut out to work remotely, and not everyone’s cut out to work for you. So you’ve got to define your values and find people who share those values.
Amazing, thank you for your insights!
You can get in touch with Shelly on Twitter or LinkedIn.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com - Se mer
