- I'm just genuinely curious,
I've been on so many video chat calls,
I'm just curious how many of those people
weren't wearing pants.
(upbeat music)
How to build a killer remote team for your startup.
You know,
I think that the biggest challenge in today's businesses
is literally hiring great talent.
If you live in a small town like I grew up in,
you probably have nobody in your team,
in your vicinity,
in your region for that matter
that have specialized expertise
around marketing and product and engineering
and all these really unique aspects
of building great companies today.
So if you're trying to hire and you don't have the budget
or you're trying to find specialized skills,
it's super tough.
Now imagine if there was a world
where the talent was plentiful,
that you could reach out and connect
and have your problems solved.
That you were able to hire people at a third of the cost.
This reality exists,
it just requires you to build a team
in a distributed fashion.
In today's video, I want to share with you guys
the five specific strategies that you need
to build an incredible, world class distributed team.
Now, I've been building companies
with remote workers
ever since I started my first company Spheric.
We are an enterprise consulting company
and we literally had people
working in every province in Canada.
Yes, I'm Canadian for those that didn't know, surprise.
I do say eh and about from time to time
but we literally had people all over Canada
working with our customers in the U.S.
So that was the beginning of me at 24 years old,
building that team,
scaling it up to 30 employees in a four year period
of just understanding how all this comes together.
And then when I moved to San Francisco
and started my venture backed company Flowtown
and really trying to build that initial product
and scaling out the team,
in a city like San Francisco,
the talent is fierce,
the competition for world class people is real.
So if you can build a strategy like SlideShare
where they had most of their engineering in India,
you can build a competitive process.
Companies like GitHub, Automattic who build WordPress.
All these companies now have have huge distributing teams.
Some of you guys might know of BaseCamp, 37 Signals,
distributed team.
Even more recently with Clarity
because our marketplace was kind of global in nature,
we had people doing calls every day,
thousands of calls every day across the world,
we had to build our team with a distributed structure.
So I'm gonna walk you through
exactly how we've done that,
how we created a culture
that not only was I think incredible,
I think it was as competitive,
and the process is really simple.
So number one, you gotta hire self starters.
I don't care you who are,
there's literally people
that can't work from home.
They can't do it.
Every time they walk by the kitchen,
they want to get something to eat
or they see a sock on the ground
and they go, ding dong, I gotta go do my laundry
or somebody comes to the door
and they stop what they're doing
and they rush to the door and answer it
or they have their kids around
or their spouse or whatever it is
or they decide that they just don't feel like working
so they're gonna jump in their car and go get some food.
Literally some people cannot work from home.
Those people are not a good fit for distributed teams.
So I just really just boil it down to self starters.
Does this person take initiative, look for ideas,
can get hyperfocused,
can grind, can put their heads down
and produce work?
Now, I'm gonna give you the structure to manage those people
because asking for that
without actually providing them clear direction
is not gonna work either.
So number two is being able to hire specialists.
So the other thing that I think about distributed teams,
remote teams,
is that you can hire people that have a specialty.
You don't need them full time.
Whereas I feel like when you hire somebody locally,
if they're not employed,
they need employment,
they need full time work.
What I love about remote,
especially consultants,
is that you can just bring them in for a special project
or you can bring them in for like 10 hours a week
and they can keep working with you for that long.
So second thing that's really powerful
is hiring specialists.
Now third, you gotta make sure
that you have clear objectives for them.
If you hire somebody
and you're just like,
"Oh, go work on the website
"and let me know how things are going,"
you're gonna get frustrated.
You're gonna be six weeks in, two months in
and go what have you been working on?
I've been paying you every two weeks
but I'm not really seeing any output or product
because it's different when you work in a company.
When you're in the office and people are working
and you see them whiteboarding
and they're in meetings
and you talk to them at the water cooler
and you see them at lunch,
you're kind of keeping pace.
If you don't build a structure
where you can get that feedback loop
of where they're at, where they're going
and what they're stuck on,
so you need a clear objective
when you work with a distributed team.
I'm gonna talk about the tools
and the communication strategy
but just understanding where they're at
and what they should be working on
that is key.
Number four is use video.
I do this in many different ways.
Sometimes I'll use GoToMeeting
if it's a bigger team meeting.
More recently, I've been using Zoom
'cause Zoom is an incredible product,
especially for distributing.
You can do up to 100 people.
Imagine team meetings, you can get up to 100 people
on one Zoom session
and have somebody present,
somebody else jump on
and their videos keep switching and swapping,
it's recorded
and it's distributed and it's fast and it's easy,
it's mobile.
So you can have 100 person video distributed meeting.
But to me video is important
because you can see somebody eye to eye.
You can see their face,
you can have that conversation.
Now it does not replace in person.
I'm gonna share a tip at the end of this video.
But I highly recommend that you try to use video
as much as you can.
Now, the fifth area
is you have to have project management software.
See, even if you have 80% of your team distributed
or remote or virtual,
whatever word you want to use,
if you're working in an office,
you still want to act like you're not together.
Meaning that if the person just stops by your desk
and says, "Hey, do you got a minute?"
You got to start asking yourself,
well, if we have this conversation,
what about the other people that aren't here,
that probably need to be aware of this?
So maybe we don't have the one on one conversation
and instead we push it to the project management software.
Maybe we push it to a Slack channel
or a HipChat channel
or some kind of chat software that you have.
Again, it sounds funny
'cause you could be literally sitting in front of the person
at a desk
but you got to think it's not about that conversation.
It's about capturing those concepts and discussions
and the results or the outcomes or the decisions
and putting them in a place where other people can see 'em.
So having a project management software.
And you can use an Asana or Trello or BaseCamp
or whatever you want to use,
but having something online
that the whole team has access to
where they can see everybody, what they're working on
and having a simple communication process
where you just let people know,
if you start working on something,
you log it in the chat.
Wherever the project sits, you log it.
So you say, "I'm starting on this,
"here's where I'm at,
"I'm done for the day."
And it just creates a very simple activity log
of what everybody's working on.
As a manager, number one tip,
okay, I want to leave you guys with this,
you need to ask your team what are they waiting on,
from who or what information,
and are they blocked?
So a lot of people do daily stand ups
asking the question are you blocked?
The leader's role,
especially in a distributed team,
remote structure,
you need to ask people where they're blocked
so you can help them get unblocked,
move things forward,
and really continue to scale the business.
So real quick recap,
you want to make sure that you hire self starters.
Don't hire people that need to be monitored and cajoled
and you don't trust.
You need people that are self starters.
You need to look at specialists,
not always full time
because full times cost a lot of money.
A specialist might come in for five to 10 hours a week
and still get you moving forward in your business.
You've got to use video to connect,
to really ensure that the person on the other end
understands the communication.
A lot of things get lost in text
so use video.
Four is have clear objections.
The objectives, objections,
you need to have an objection,
it's like no, objectives for your business.
So there's start here, this is where they're going
and you monitor their progress and chime in.
And finally, you've got to use project management software
to connect, to collaborate, to communicate with your team
and make sure everybody's on the same page.
And as I said before,
leaders unblock their team players.
It doesn't matter if they're local or distributed,
that is your job as a leader.
As per usual,
I want to challenge you to live a bigger life
and a bigger business
and I'll see you next Monday.
If you like this video,
be sure to subscribe to my channel
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See you next Monday.