This week's training is our remote journey. And I'm going to
be sharing what it was like on our journey going from an office
based business to a remote business where we've been in
business 11 years now. And the first five years, we had an
office in crow's nest, and then or Sydney, and we had staff and
all that kind of setup. And then over time, we transitioned to
being a completely remote team very pertinent right now, a lot
of businesses are being forced to operate remotely or forced to
operate from home and myself, having worked from home, on and
off for the past 10 years, the last five years, pretty much
exclusively has been at home, what I'm going to be sharing
with you is what our journey was like. But hopefully there'll be
some insights there for you. I'm not trying to teach you all that
much in this session. This is more just about kind of sharing
what that journey was like for us. For many people, you'll be
asked to go through that journey more rapidly. Or you may be
leading your team through that journey. Or you may be leading
your customers through that journey. And so hopefully,
there'll be some insights here for you on what that remote
journey was like for us. First up, I
want to talk about something called the remote working scale.
So the remote working scale is all about businesses
transitioning from being purely office based over to fully
distributed teams. And you'll see here number one is, you
know, the traditional office, everyone commutes and comes into
work in one place. Step number two, many businesses have
embraced this, particularly businesses that are on G Suite,
being able to work from different places, offering your
staff the ability to work from home one or two days a week
that's very common, or maybe someone wants to do you know,
school run in the afternoon and work from home in the evening.
And that all works beautifully. Once you're on G Suite, I don't
need to tell you guys on that we then have that number three,
which is the team being remote, so not having an office, but
still being in one time zone. So maybe like you know, also being
in Australia but not having an office. And there's very few
businesses that have actually made it to this step, most
businesses will still have some kind of office or some kind of
setup, I'm seeing early stage businesses adopting this. But
businesses that have been around five or 10 years, this is very
rare for businesses to adopt this kind of working. Now, this
is what people have now been forced into based on our current
economic and global situation, people have been forced many
businesses to go from step one to step three, bank overnight.
And that's obviously a challenge. And it's not just the
challenge of the technology, the technology can be taken care of.
And whether you're Google or Microsoft, that kind of doesn't
really matter. But what's interesting is the people
change, what I know from being completely remote five years is
that you need to do so much additional overhead on the
culture on the team bonding on, you know, making sure that the
team are all rowing in the right direction, or making sure the
team have emotional support, it is a constant constant focus of
ours to make sure that our team are well looked after
particularly that we have 35 people in the business you can
imagine, you know, we've now had to build our own HR team
dedicated to the wellness and the support of our of our
people. And so that rapid shift, I think the most important thing
for you to think about right now is the people and how the people
are handling this shift in their world. Now back to the scales,
step four is introducing additional time zones. So we're
on the journey to offering 24 hour support. So we're starting
to, you know, consider different staff in different time zones.
And then number five is like everyone is nomads, traveling
the world and all kinds of doing their own thing, and they're
creating their own time zones. And you know, there's definitely
some businesses that are there, I would categorize that as a bit
extreme. And the goal of this scale is just to illustrate to
you, you know, the different steps, it's not about getting to
level five, this is not a performance scale, we do not
have any intention of enforcing or encouraging businesses to go
all the way to level five. What I would encourage businesses to
do is take one step to the right. That's it, if we've
encouraged you to, to shift yourself by 10 or 20% of your
current reality to a better reality, then great, we've done
our job. And so for some, they're going from one to three,
I'm guessing for most people here, you're probably going from
two to three, and we want to help you do that. Okay, that's
my working scale. Let's start let's start talking about our
journey. So our remote journey started about six years ago, I
read the book, The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, and I
only talked about getting a VA and I actually thought, Oh,
that's cool thing. But I was pretty scared at the time
because I thought, well, you know, what about if my customers
have a poor perception of me, hiring someone International,
particularly hiring the Philippines, right. And at the
time, Telstra had a really bad reputation for their Philippines
based call centers, any other business that was outsourcing
just got this like real bad kick in the nuts. And you know, it
was really challenging. And what I found was that, you know, I
had all this fear around hiring international team and I have
this perspective at the time, you know, I had this challenge
of, well, what if I started hiring, what will my customers
think? And how would I shift the business? The other challenge
that we had was in our current reality, we were servicing
customers in their offices in our workplace. So we had an
office in Sydney, and we had customers that are coming to us
from time to time, or we were visiting customers, and we had
ambitions to be a bigger business to have a bigger
impact. And because of our reputation of being the best in
Australia at G Suite, we had customers who are coming to us
internationally and saying, Hey, can we work with you from Canada
from the US from Europe? And we were like, Oh shit, you know,
how are we going to help you to look after these customers, and
so what happened was, we had to really make some tough choices
about our business model, what I noticed was that recruiting only
in one place only in Sydney, within a half an hour to one
hour commute radius of our office restricted our talent to
only that area, let that sink in. If you're asking staff to
come to an office, or you're only recruiting in a certain
location or a certain city, and that's the downside of
recruiting on sick, is you're going to get people who are
looking for our local jobs, something there. But opening
yourself up to workers who are remote opens you out not just to
Australia, but to anywhere in the world. And like we've only
got 20 million people here, Philippines is 100 million, the
US has 350 million, there are amazingly skilled and talented
workers who will fit your culture, even if their human
culture is a little bit different. Or they might have a
slightly different accent, they can fit your team and your
company culture and location does not have to be a barrier of
them working with you. So we were in this position where our
business was tied to this particular location. And it kind
of felt like a bit of a ball and chain because we had customers
who wanted us to be on site there. And you know, at the time
I was hiring it technicians to actually service that need. And
with those it technicians, I basically had to pay them all
the money that sucked. But then also from there, it was a matter
of us having to keep that business revenue going just to
take care of those staff. And for any of you guys who've been
in a service business, you know, what we found was this constant
kind of battle between keeping the lights on and paying and
having enough labor resources available to service our
customers. So if you're in a service business, you would know
what that's like. And we were paying at 100 $120,000 a year
for salary in it in North Sydney. And we had our staff
members who we were trying to get, it feels heavy, just
talking about staff members who are trying to get 3x revenue on
their on their salary, so that we could pay for them. Three
times rule in a service business, you may have heard
from that fear accountant. And that was tough, it was really
tough. And so what we found with opening up to international
staff members was that the costs dramatically increased, that was
really great. But eventually over time, we were actually able
to get rid of the office. And that was like that was message
we're talking like nearly six figures a year in costs that we
were able to just eliminate from the p&l. Now, is that something
that you should do,
that's a personal choice in the current situation, it's very
likely going to be a six to 12 Month event where we are doing
less working together in person. So it may be something that you
consider to completely get with the office, we've had many
customers who have done that after they switch to G Suite,
they just got rid of the office and they moved to working out of
CO working spaces or you know working in a cafes or having
just like meetups once a fortnight with the team for a co
work day. Rather than actually, you know, having that full time
space, I'd implore you so to think creatively about that the
international staffing is obviously one way that you know,
you can also really decrease the cost that you have in the
business. Now, we had a difficult choice to make, and
that we were transitioning from all kind of like thinking of
working in one location to then opening up to working in
multiple locations and serving different customers, we had
ambitions to serve customers over the east coast of
Australia, we were picking up customers in Brisbane and
Melbourne but we couldn't service them on site. So what I
did was I went on to my sit back to all of my Sydney customers.
And I actually said to them, hey, look, you know, I know
we've been working together for a while you're paying us $1,000
a month for your your IT support. And we come on site
from time to time and blah, blah, blah. But we would like to
reduce our commitment to you, we're not going to come on site
anymore, we can do 90% of the work that we do for you remotely
anyway. But we're going to reduce your bill from $1,000 a
month, down to $300 a month. And so they went on to what is now
concierge Unlimited, which is our premier support product,
which includes remote desktop support, and all the customers
have Yep, fuck yeah, that's great. I'd love to love to
reduce my bill by more than half. And so we basically
adjusted that and adjusted how we delivered to customers. Now,
that was hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year in recurring
revenue, like the even the value of that the value of that was
probably half a million dollars in enterprise value that we say
goodbye to what we open up the door to was working remotely.
And I want you to think about think about right now, you know,
a gym owner, or a personal trainer who has had a space
where people would usually come to very physical type business.
And they've overnight had to change how they're doing
business and they're working now forced to go online. But they're
not just delivering online to the existing customers in the
local area. They also have the whole world as a potential
customer. And that's that's the real shift here. It's not just
how your staff are working. It's how it's what kind of business
are you and how can you deliver to customers. And that will
require some potential radical rethinking, you know, we had a
revenue base, you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year in
revenue base, and that over time, and I knew this was going
to happen, what what that happened over time is that kind
of went down, down, down, down, down and there was some there
was kind of a big drop off when when we caught all the customers
and said right we want to die. Graduate plans, but bit by bit
all that revenue basically dropped off and what we had to
slowly build was the licensing revenue, the recurring revenue
and a new business which for us was centered around implementing
G Suite, implementing dial pad copper, Zapier isotta. And the
other tools that we that we now implement