Unknown: Hello, hello, Peter Moriarty here. Great to be here
with you. Today we're talking about my journey of being a
remote CEO. And that's basically my journey of traveling and
being on the road and living the life of my dreams, which is a
life of travel and adventure and exploration. While still running
a multimillion dollar business with now over 50 employees
across the group have multiple companies. And that's been To be
honest, a pretty interesting challenge. You know, over the
years, as we grew and scaled our business, I decided that I
didn't want to be stuck in one location, I read the four hour
workweek, which is an amazing book by Tim Ferriss. And I
decided that I didn't really want to just go to work in an
office in one place. Until about six or seven years ago, I
started making movements in the business to actually switch for
me to be able to work remotely. And this is a little bit of part
of my story in how I did that. Now, we've only previously
shared this with our customers inside our genius Academy. So
this is the first time I'm sharing some of these things
externally to the public. So if you don't know who we are, we
are it genius. And we're a small and medium business consulting
firm. And primarily, we work with consulting around
technology. And so what our mission is, is to really help
small businesses play a bigger game by getting the right
technology strategy in place, which means that you can grow
and scale, have more flexibility, have more profit,
have more money, have more options. And for you, the
entrepreneur lived the life of your dreams. And we've worked
with literally 1000s of business owners 10s of 1000s of employees
across those businesses. And we've received hundreds and
hundreds of five star reviews from all of our best customers.
And we want to share our messages with the world. We want
to help businesses as much as possible. Now, how do we do
that? Well, we take businesses through our growth roadmap, and
that is, whatever stage of business you're at whether
you're just starting, you don't have any employees yet. Or maybe
you're you know, you've grown up as a business and you're
starting to get some structures in place. We've got different
technology strategies that will work for you different pieces of
software that we think are critical for different stages of
business, and a team that will help to chaperone you through
the growth of your business to help make sure that your
business is successful as the business grows and scales. So
the first section of this video is going to be about the reality
of being a remote CEO. What does it actually take to run a
business remotely? And how do I actually do that inside my
business. So about six months ago, I bought one of my dream
vehicles, which is where I'm broadcasting from right now.
It's called an expedition truck. And this is basically a four
wheel drive camper truck. And this truck is designed to go off
road and pretty much go everywhere. And it's fully self
contained, it's going to bathrooms, got a shower, it's
got a kitchen, you can see my Sinclair behind me. And
basically this truck is my adventure machine. But I also
needed to be able to actually work from it as well. And while
I'm in the stage of being kind of semi retired in the business,
in that we've got enough employees that most of the day
to day, things can be pretty much taken care of. Without my
direct involvement. I'm still obviously actively involved in
the business. I'm the founder, I'm the current CEO of the
business. And so that means there's still a level of
interaction required for me to be a part of the business. And
that means that I have to manage my responsibilities. And so the
number one thing for me to really think about as I balance
out the difference between Well, when am I having leisure time?
And when am I actually having business time is this balance
between work and play. And what I see is for many business
owners, and particularly kind of Boomer business owners, and this
is my parents generation where they would work, work, work,
work, work, work, work, work, work. And then they'd have a
holiday. And then they'd go and work Work, work, work, work,
work, work, work, and then they'd have a holiday. And Tim
Ferriss really kind of broke the mold on that for a lot of people
in his book, The Four Hour Workweek, when he said, Well,
why don't you have lots of short mini breaks, or design your
life, so it feels holiday ish. So you don't have to kind of do
that grind or that long slog. And then you know, go and have a
holiday, which is a bit like a hangover. I know for many
entrepreneurs, they actually get sick on holidays, because it's
the only time that they probably stop. Or maybe you don't stop
when you're on holidays, because you're still in hustle mode, and
you take your laptop and your phone with you. And we're all
kind of connected all the time. And so I wanted to do things
differently. I wanted my life to kind of be like, always on
holiday and never on holiday. And what I mean by that is I
have a work life balance where I'm really doing things that I
love doing every day not necessarily work, or work as
people would call work, which means you know, to me sitting on
meetings or replying to emails, but have a life where I have the
flexibility to be where I want location wise and do what I want
activity wise. And so that was basically My dream is to do
engaging work. That's impactful work with a team that I love
working with, but still obviously have it in a way that
works for me. And I've been able to do that quite successfully.
We've grown and scaled our business it genius to quite a
large team. Now there's over 50 employees, and I've got
basically as much freedom as I like now I'm able to take time
away from work last week, I actually did have a full 10 days
off because I was at a festival and a training there was
completely like phone off and in the wilderness and no reception
and I wanted to take that time off. But for the most part, I
have all the freedom that I desire. But I also still retain
all of the responsibility of the business and I think this is
really
The The Balancing Act for business owner is not to
abdicate any parts of the business, you still have to
actually keep the responsibility of managing the business, but
also having the discipline and the diligence to have time to
yourself. So let's talk about what things work well, when I'm
on the road. And what are some of the things where I have some
challenges? Well, first off, what things worked well, for me
actually sitting down and doing work, sitting in a combat truck,
and I'm sitting at my kind of kitchen table here at the
moment, works pretty darn well. For me, I spend most of my time
on meetings during the day. And when I spend most of my time on
meetings, what that means is that I'm just sitting here
chatting away to my team. And it's pretty straightforward to
do that. Now I've got a little iPad Mini setup here. Actually,
it might even be an iPad Air, I think it's the latest one on one
of the smaller ones. And I've got my laptop here, which I use
to do my work. And effectively, this setup means that I don't
have to invest in having something like multiple
monitors. And for me, I can just have my meetings dedicated on
one device, and then actually do any work that I want to do on
another device. What I often find is when I'm in a meeting
talking to my team, I'm also going to be making notes in one
of the apps that I use a sauna for maybe meeting minutes or
maybe I'm you know, dishing out some action items in there. Or
maybe I'm reading an article or I've got a presentation and I
want to actually present that into the meeting. It's nice to
have a second device there. So I'm not flicking between
different tabs. So that's kind of like the the first thing and
to be honest, because most of my time is spent on meetings and on
calls, I'm pretty comfortable to sit here for most of the day.
Now at home, there's one thing that I do miss and that's it, I
had a great stand up desk at home and an anti fatigue mat
that I can stand on all day long. And that kind of keeps my
body a little bit more active. And so I'm in the process of
setting up a monitor and a stand up desk set up. So in my truck,
I'll have a stand up organization of some sort, and I
will keep you posted on how that goes. But for now, this is this
is how things work. So what hasn't worked? Well, what's been
the most frustrating part about working on the road? Well,
that's the obvious one is the connectivity issues, actually
making sure I can somehow stay connected to my team, when
there's potentially not great service. And this is this is
honestly the balancing act of being on the road. Obviously,
I'm reliant on 4g for me to do my work. I'm not going to
internet cafes or you know Wi Fi hotspots or anything like that
I'm working from mobile internet. And so internet
connectivity is a big one. And really important. And I'm going
to take you through some of the specific tech that I use to do
that. Now, the easiest way for me to manage sometimes being
offline. And sometimes being online is basically for me to
choose my workdays basically Tuesdays that I know that I'm
going to be available to my team. And when I set that
expectation, they know that for me on Mondays, and Fridays, I'm
probably not really going to be available, because they're my
non work days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, my work
days, the other times where I'm going to be active and
available, I'm usually starting my meetings from around 10 or
11am. And I'm wrapping them up by three or 4pm. And they're
basically the days that my team can expect me to be active and
expect me to be responsive. And what that means is if they drop
a task to me on a Friday are probably not going to get to it
till the Tuesday. And so things that have a regular cadence,
like maybe approving payroll or approving supplier payments, or,
you know, jumping into meetings with suppliers, or, you know,
jumping into a strategic type meetings, they're going to need
to be scheduled on the days that I'm actually available for
working. And so my calendar literally looks like it's only
got those three days free. And then either side, on the other
days, I can actually set my Google calendar to be out of
office, and it's automatically just going to decline any of
those meetings. The other cool thing that Google does is when
you set your calendar to be out of office, it actually puts a
little message in chat. So if someone wants to send me a
message inside of Google Chat, it'll say Peter is out of the
office. And he'll be back on the next Tuesday makes it super
duper obvious for anyone who's maybe trying to get in touch