Hey guys, Peter Moriarty here. And I'm excited to be here with
you today I'm sharing my journey of going remote how I talked to
a company that was five years old at the time, multiple
millions in revenue, and transitioned it from office work
to a full remote team. Pretty crazy process. And there were
certainly some challenges along the way, I'm going to give you a
little bit of a snapshot. Or get into the meat potatoes of our
journey, I want to share something with you. And that is
the remote working scale. And this is something that I was
shared by shed from a company called buffer, and buffer are a
second social media management app. But they're a full remote
company. And they're one of the first businesses to kind of
start blogging about it and sharing it widely. And the
remote working scale is a really easy way to kind of show what
are the different stages of a company transitioning to remote
work, you can see here all the way on the left, you've got a
completely office based business, everyone comes into
the one place to get their work done, you then have office
based, but like work from home sometimes. And honestly, most
companies don't get past it, too. That's basically it. Even
most corporate businesses in Australia now do not get past
step number two, but there's a whole nother world of businesses
that are running in Step three, step four, and step five. And
that's what I want to talk a little bit more about. So step
number three is different team members in different time zones,
right. And this is typically thought about only as being
accessible to multinationals or large businesses that are really
broken through that small business stage. But it is
available for small business owners now for anyone who
started hiring offshore resources, maybe in the
Philippines, it's really popular, then this may be your
first step into having international team members. And,
and that's kind of like step three starting, then you have
number four remote teams in many time zones. And so that's a disk
that's an actual real distributed team. And they're
the kind of businesses that are you know, opening up for 24 hour
support which we are on the journey of their businesses that
may be from the ground up, have decided, we are not going to
restrict ourselves to talent in just one place. We're gonna open
ourselves up to hiring from wherever, that's pretty cool.
And then step number five here, you can see is a completely
distributed team with nomads. And what that means is there's
there's no offices included, and people not only are working
internationally, but they are also traveling. And that's like
that's black belt level, that's like totally Pro. So our aim has
always been in the work that we do with our customers to help
you move one step to the right, we're not trying to get you to
level five, we're just trying to help you move one step to the
right. And that helps businesses move from traditional
infrastructure like servers. You know, even people using Dropbox
or consumer Gmail accounts for their for their business file
storage, and helping them move into a collaborative platform,
which allows them to get work done. And it doesn't mean that
you have to be nomads, traveling the world running the business
completely remotely, get work done from any device. And we say
at any time, hopefully you've got good boundaries around when
you do actually work. But from any device at any time means
that you have the flexibility to work where and where, where and
when you want to. Now for many businesses, when they work with
us, they're starting at level one, they're all the way on the
left, they're in an office, that sometimes driving to the office
to get work done. They may have like a VPN or remote desktop
setup, but it's usually a pretty crappy experience, because
internet connections are not always great. And Microsoft
Remote Desktop is pretty terrible. And we are moving them
into that collaborative workspace at Google Cloud. And
that allows them to actually seamlessly get work done. And
I'm talking video calls on Hangouts chat using Hangouts
chat, which is a little bit like slack. Google Drive is way
better than Dropbox. It's got heaps more business features.
And then of course, Gmail has all the power of Google's
amazing AI, search algorithms and everything else in an inbox
that will never slow down, never crashed the search and never get
full, you get unlimited storage if you're on the business plan
on G Suite. And so what that does is that enables businesses
to go along this journey. Now once we've kind of implemented G
Suite then it's other products like cloud based phone system,
cloud based CRM system, cloud based task management, cloud
based workflow, automation, all of those things kind of like get
peppered in there. But the basic foundational level is that you
get set up and we help you manage that migration process.
Now, how do you manage your team actually going along this remote
work scale? And how do you take them along that journey? That is
a people journey.
That's a change management journey. And I've got another
framework on change management which I will share in another
video on leading and managing effective change with your team.
But you you need to learn and you need to learn yourself first
and then take your team on that journey of change in
transitioning from a local, you know, everyone's in the same
place type setup to being able to work remotely or working
differently. Now for some people. They've said up until
recently, Hey, you know what, that's fine. I'm really
comfortable going to the office. I like having you know,
separation between home and in the office, and that works for
me, and I really want my staff to be in the office. So either
customers can meet with us, or I can see what they're doing. Or,
you know, we feel more collaborative when we're in the
office. However, current times have changed. And many are being
forced now to work at home, which is great for us, because
we're in a great position to actually educate. But it's quite
a challenge. And you know, we've really had, we've really heard
that challenge from our customers, that right now it is,
it's a bit of a shock to the system. And so we're trying to
make it as easy as easy as possible. So my point was
sharing the remote working scale for you, is just try and move
one step to the right, that's all you need to do, don't try
and get to Step five, you don't need to just try and move one
step to the right, or you might have to go two steps, who's
everyone's gonna be working at home. Okay, cool. So I want to
move on. And I want to talk about our remote business
journey, and how we kind of went from being in an office to
completely switching over to being remote. And so we had an
office in law, Sydney, we had five staff in that office,
before that we had an office in crow's nest, and I think we had
six or seven people there and the business had kind of gone
up, up and down. And being a service business. For anyone
who's in a service business, you would know there's this constant
challenge of making sure you've got enough working work coming
in for the consulting dollars to pay for all of your labor,
because the biggest cost is the labor. And then second biggest
cost is the office. And there's a general rule, I think it comes
from accountants that you want to have h full time staff member
generating about three times their revenue, three times their
salary in revenue, so they can pay for themselves. So a third
of that revenue goes to their salary, a third of the revenue
goes to outgoings, and a third of that revenue goes to profit,
right. But that's hard to see in a growing and scaling business.
To see that profit,
I shared a post recently on my Facebook page and LinkedIn of
how I was in $350,000. of debt by the time I was 24. And how I
kind of navigated that journey. Now we were in this up and down
this constant challenge of making sure we had enough
dollars coming in to pay for the labor for our service business.
And around that time, four or five, six years ago, I read the
book, The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, and he talked about
getting a VA in the Philippines, someone who can help you get
some of your stuff done, but most importantly, have a cheaper
cost of labor for the business. And I was like, that's
interesting. Let me see if I can get that done. And initially, I
was really scared, because I thought, well, what if my
customers find out? You know, at the time, Telstra call centers
had a really bad reputation of outsourcing to the Philippines.
And I think there was a lot of real anks from Australian
customers and Australian business owners and just
Australians in general, with offshore call centers and what
that meant. And so that was challenging for me to get
through on a mindset level of well, if I start hiring in the
Philippines, you know, what does that mean for my brand? What
does that mean for my business? What does that mean for my
customer experience? And how would that change us as a
company? So we started, the first step of the journey was
just hiring back office positions, so non customer
facing. So data processing, data entry, managing other things
that I deemed, well, this is safe. And what I found over
time, was our international team members, were coming from quite
prestigious roles. And I was like, Oh, that's, that's really
interesting. Some of our staff were ex Microsoft, some of our
staff were ex Google, some of our staff, were ex apple. And I
was like, wow, that's that's really interesting. And what I
learned was, the staff that had worked through the bpos, into
these larger companies had actually had amazing training,
were extremely well qualified. And were excellent, excellent
workers. And I was like, wow, bloody hell. That's, that's
really awesome. And it really broke down my perception that
someone overseas, someone who's not Australian, can actually be
a great worker. And I guess at the time, I had subscribed to
the collective thought that someone who was of a different
culture or born in a different country was different in their
ability to work. Now, there are long standing differences in
culture, that's a reality, and language and accent and those
kind of things. However, it's no different to working with
someone from the United States or another, or, you know,
another country that speaks a different, you know, closer
level of English to us with maybe like a different accent. I
think what was interesting at the time, is what I discovered
was how I saw our country versus developing countries and what my
perception was there of working with different people. And so as
that perception slowly over time, broke down, and our team
excelled more and more and more. I allowed myself to say, Okay,
well let's put some of my team in customer facing positions and
see how this goes. And what I found. Not so much from a
customer perspective, because customers, I guess, didn't
really know the difference. That was pretty cool. We did most of
our work delivered to customers remotely at the time, we're
doing remote support and all those kinds of things. What I
found was really interesting on a performance perspective, our
international team members were performing better than local
staff. And I went, Wow, holy crap. That's a big one. Someone
who has a dramatically dramatically different economic
cost to the business is actually outperforming stuff that I have
locally and that was that was like, that was the moment that
made me go, Wow, okay. I've, I've changed my perspective here
and things need to be done differently.