Why a daily standup meeting is pointless, and what to do instead?

In agile marketing management, there's this trend of daily standups for marketing teams. It came from the agile development method. Now, I'm not sold if a daily standup is needed for developers, but I'm 100% sure it is unnecessary for marketing teams. Let me explain why and what you need to do instead.

Frankly, I'm not a big fan of regular meetings in general. My aversion towards meetings doesn't come from my personality, I'm not an introvert or extrovert, and I'm super confident enough to lead a discussion. I've spent years in the ad business, where we had these creative sessions, brainstorming gatherings, and account meetings. Looking back at it, we would have been better off with 90% of these meetings if we had used emails instead. I can't stand if we waste each other's time, imitating that we are working.

So now you know where I'm coming from when it comes to meetings in general. But I have a rational explanation why any daily standup, especially a marketing standup, is utterly pointless. Let me explain.

The essence of a standup meeting

For a start, let's quickly run through the basics of a daily standup. An agile daily standup is not about solving problems but reporting on project progress, delegation, & asking for support. Usually, they cover the three main points: what are you doing today, what are you trying to finish today, and do you have any blockers to achieve your daily work? The daily standup is also short, usually keeps a fast 15-mins format. There can be minor differences depending on how you run your agile team, but that's the gist of it.

The question of independent work

Now, first, and I have to be frank here as well. I think every leader's responsibility is - and as a CMO, you are a leader - to hire grown-up people. People who can manage their time, manage their workload, and if they are stuck, they are proactively raising their hands. They are independent. If you don't have these people on your team, it is time to do some human resources check-up.

The question of remote work

Second, we are talking about remote teams. In a remote environment, the entire company is operating online. It also means that all project management is online, hopefully, run through a versatile and capable online tool. If you are a good marketing leader, your team should have pre-populated tasks already, not for a day but for weeks to come; most of them are regular tasks, such as sending out newsletters, updating marketing channels, etc. If you are a good marketing leader, you also manage the tasks and the individual responsibilities - everyone is aware of who's doing what and who is responsible for specific tasks. If they don't, they can look it up online on the tool you use - it is transparent. Since an agile standup meeting never addresses problem-solving, that's another meeting, just the what you did, what you will do, and do you need support to do it. It is entirely pointless to discuss if everything is up online transparently. It is a waste of time. It also feels like you are checking up on others, making sure they are doing their work.

The question of marketing teams

What happens if you don't have a daily standup for your marketing team? Two problems can occur. One, the task won't get done. You will know immediately if that newsletter won't send it out itself. You will also know from the project management tool who was the one who checked out. Two, someone makes a mistake because they didn't ask for support for their task. I understand that not everyone is proactive in seeking help, but after one mistake, anyone can be reminded to ask for support if needed.

Instead of having daily standup meetings

So what to do instead of an agile daily marketing standup meeting?

You can do three things, very simple.

Just don’t do it

First, you can skip them altogether. If your team has independent, responsible, and proactive people - they not just won't need this meeting, but they will feel that this meeting is entirely pointless for them anyway. You will still have a weekly project meeting, but that will be a more extended meeting with room for problem solving and support. And there will be a feedback meeting at the end of the week where you reflect on the week's results. These are valuable meetings.

Bet of automation

Second, use automation. If you use a project management tool, Trello or Asana, or pretty much anything, they usually have automated notifications for those assigned to particular projects. You can hook up these notifications to any other tool; I would opt-in for Slack or a team chat solution. When you start your day in a remote team, you open up your laptop, then our email, then your team chat. With automated notifications, you immediately see your tasks for the day - and your manager also sees them. No need for the daily standup - it's in the notification transparently. If you need support, you contact those who can provide support for you separately and proactively.

Have asynchronous meetings

Third, have an asynchronous meeting. It is useful especially for those who operate across continents with very mixed timezones. It is also helpful if you are working on an urgent project with a strict deadline approaching. In this case, a face-to-face standup might be more effective than simply relying on the project management tool and its notifications. Now the format can be anything. Since this is still a remote environment, it will be better if you write it down as it will be searchable, and you can document & archive everything. A simple routine of a daily email or chat would do, but you can do recorded video or even audio as well. It forces everyone to think through their day, report on what they will do, and write it down or speak it out. Now, it is still a daily meeting - but instead of gathering into one place at one time, everyone can express themselves without pressure or personal expectation.

Meetings for the marketing team

In general, I feel that marketing workflows are much more hectic and more fluid than a development process. Sometimes you can't segment it into days of work; you have to spend more time delivering some results. Therefore I think daily standups are pointless tools for overengineering the work. Also, in the creative process, you need to discuss ideas - you can't just break them down into tasks.

Because of all of the above, I think meetings for a marketing team should be much longer than 15-mins, and they should be not daily but weekly. Suppose you have a large team of marketers with multiple people assigned to performance marketing, content production, and others. In that case, you can have separate meetings with them, but also not as a daily schedule. If you do so, make sure you have weekly all-hands scheduled for everyone.

There is a lot to discuss on organizing workflows for your marketing team - but I'm sure daily standups are not viable solutions for getting things done. What's your experience? Do you agree?

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What should you do in your first 30-days as a Chief Marketing Officer?

Congratulations, you've just got appointed as Chief Marketing Officer for a growing company - now what? What would be your first steps as a newly appointed CMO? How will your first 30 days look like in the company? 

If you have been working as a marketing leader for years, you probably saw a lot of company setups. Every company is different, of course, but they tend to have similar challenges when it comes to marketing - no wonder why marketing agencies are offering similar services on the market. So just by routine, you probably can guess your first steps within your new role. 

But if this is your first opportunity to act as a CMO, you either learn the hard way or prepare yourself for the challenges. This article gives you an entire process that can be customized or applied to almost any company. 

Who’s this article for?

Now let's start particular 'any company' part. The process I will detail below can help those marketing leaders working for growing companies with dedicated resources and somewhat defined marketing goals. The industry doesn't matter much, but technology, professional services, healthcare, and innovation-heavy sectors are the best where this process can shine. Also, this process is somewhat redundant for those enterprise-level companies that operate in multiple locations with a staff of more than 1000+ people. So in plain English, we are talking about growing businesses with 20-100 people on board and around $1M monthly recurring revenue (MRR). 

One more thing. You have to have reasonable experience in marketing. I tend to see that companies, especially early-stage startups, appoint a head of marketing & CMO staff while their entire marketing team is one junior marketer. I'm all into the fact that it is better to let a senior marketer grow into the position of the CMO within 2-3 years internally. You can't just start your company's marketing team from the top-down. Therefore the process that I detail here can be helpful for the 1-person-army marketing "team" leader; it works better for those with at least 4-5 years of experience in marketing and managing at least a 3-5 people-strong marketing team.

So now that you know the context - let's dive in.

Your first week

Some people tend to skip the first week and focus only on familiarizing themselves with the team, the company, and the internal working style. Usually, the first week has a lot of meetings with a whole lot of meet & greet. If there is any onboarding process within the company, they tend to dedicate the first week for an entire onboarding process. However, as the new hire, you should have your own goals to achieve - even on the first week of the job. 

Find out the why

First, the most crucial goal is to find out why they hired you in the first place.

Why do they need a marketing leader? What are they lack? What is the main pain point for the company when it comes to marketing? Was there a previous marketing leader, and what was their experience? These points will help you understand what the main priorities for the job are. They also help you provide immediate insights for your strategy - these are the points that will serve as the foundation for quick wins. 

Learn more about the current marketing setup

Second, learn as much as you can about the current setup they have for marketing.

What platforms do they use, and what are the results? What tools do they have, and how do they use them? What are the material resources, what's the marketing budget? A simple checklist is helpful to walk through with the leadership. If the answer is unknown or not defined for some questions, there should be a why behind it. For example, if there is no pre-defined marketing budget, or they calculate marketing staff salaries into that budget, there should be a conversation about the proper allocation. The insights on the current setup will help you understand the causes behind the current problems, which will help you form your strategy on how to solve the current challenges.

Meet your marketing team

Third, get to know the people. You probably will report to the CEO or the founder(s) or someone equivalent. How they manage will define the success that you can deliver. Especially at early-stage startups, the founders tend to be micromanagers - they just can't let go of their baby. Learn as much as you can about their priorities. You should also get to know the people that you will be working with directly.

Every member of your team wants two things from you: support for the work they are already doing and support for more growth within their career. Learn what they do and where they aspire. 

If you achieve all three goals within a week, you probably end up with enough insights to form a strategy. You will know what you can do from what resources. You will also understand the internal dynamics, team structure and start to bond with your marketing team.

Your first month

There is a lot that you can achieve within 30-days. However, while the first week detailed above can be applied to almost all scenarios, the first month can be different depending on the company where you work. The process here splits into two ways, but fear not, there is only a subtle difference between the two. 

If you did your first week properly, you are overwhelmed with insights. The number one insight that you should pay attention to is this: does the company have an existing marketing strategy, or do you have to create the first one. If they don't have one, the process is simple. If they do have one, you should review that strategy and come up with improvements.

There are three things that you should do within your first month.

In order, prepare a comprehensive audit on the current state of marketing at the company, prepare a strategy based on the audit, and prepare an annual roadmap on how you would implement the strategy.

If the company already has a marketing strategy, you should review it within the audit and develop your version anyway. That's where the two roads are different, and that's all. 

Prepare a marketing audit

Remember those insights that you gathered during your first week? They will serve as the backbone of the audit. If you think you still need more information, spend the second week on research as well. Sometimes it's worthwhile to invest in user research and other external services, but I wouldn't advise going that deep during your first weeks. 

Simply put, your audit summarizes the current marketing activities, their current results, the current marketing team, and their responsibilities, the existing resources and their review, and finally, the goals and objectives of the company with marketing. The audit is unbiased, factual, so gather as much data as you can to support your statements. Your audit should be a written material, ideally a presentation, and you should present it to all the stakeholders internally. The audit has two goals: it sums up the current scenario and instantly gets everyone on the same page. 

You can choose to prepare the strategy and present it simultaneously as your audit, but I would advise you not to do that. While you can summarize the current marketing ecosystem for the company, getting everyone on the same page might be challenging. I would get everyone's approval first, then go with the strategy.

The audit's primary purpose is to act as the foundation for your plan and show that you have understood the company quickly and analyzed the setup. 

Prepare your marketing strategy

Once you are done with the audit, it is time to show your strategy. Every marketing strategy is different, of course, but all should have five elements. It doesn't matter what business you are in, the industry, or what the audit showed you - it is the same five elements. Now we can go deep-dive into management consulting terms, strategy matrixes, and whatnot - but I believe in the power of plain English, so let's break it down into these five parts in a straightforward manner.

The first element is all about considerations. It is the part where you recap the insights of your audit, but you go slightly forward: show what we could learn from the audit, what we should consider. What are the pain points, and where is the market going. What should you be aware of, and what are the key challenges? What are the company's key strengths, what can we capitalize on when planning the growth? You should pave the upcoming strategic statements within this section. 

The second element is about goals and objectives. By this time, you had the chance to talk to everyone and learn everything about the company - recap the goals and objectives here. There are two types of goals - business and marketing. Business goals should come from your CEO & founder(s), marketing goals should come from you. These goals are essential to state in the strategy because you will provide KPIs and metrics on how to measure these goals at the end of the strategy. 

The third element is your strategic approach. The core part of the marketing strategy describes how you would meet your marketing goals while taking into account all the considerations.

There's no standard recipe here - it can be a highly detailed marketing funnel, a creative content platform, or anything you fancy. The bottom line is, you have to be precise, sharp, and your approach should deliver a predictable outcome of results. 

The fourth part is your tactical approach. You should be able to describe how you would implement your strategy. It is not a project plan; that is the roadmap - but you should explain what needs to be done to implement the plan. It has to describe the possible fixes of the current setup, providing quick wins. It has to tell the upcoming activities, immediate actions, and it has to detail the exact purpose of the activities. Your considerations and goal-setting are the why. The strategy is the how, while the tactical approach is the what.

The last part is the metrics. Sadly, this is the most overlooked part of every strategic marketing plan. But without proper metrics, you won't be able to measure the results of your strategy. It is different what metrics you should consider using; it all depends on your plan. I always love to provide four types of metrics: hard KPIs, soft KPIs, and hard & soft metrics. KPIs track the results, metrics track the performance of your activities. There should be a hard (primary) and a secondary (soft) for each.

The more important the result, the harder the metrics should be. Once the strategy gets approval, you should track all your metrics from day one. Monthly reporting of marketing activities is all based on these metrics.

Sell your strategy to your team

After you show your strategy, there are two remaining things you should do within the first month. First, you should sell the strategy internally. You need to consult with your marketing team to get their feedback and make sure they are on the same page with you. Being a marketing director is collaborative, so you need to communicate with all the stakeholders internally to finalize the strategic phase. Lastly, you have to present a roadmap - this should come entirely from you, as you are the team leader. 

The roadmap brings your strategy to life - it details the marketing activities as a project. It is an annual plan broken down into quarters, but it starts with a pre-work phase, the quick wins.

By this time, you know the situation with the marketing, what you need to do, and you are aware of the problems. Some problems are easy to fix or amend - you should do so within your first month. These are the quick wins that provide immediate results, plus by improving them, they establish your credibility internally as a marketing director. 

Your first 90-days

After you did everything right in your first 30 days, what usually happens is that you can turn your focus on the long-term results. The following two months are insanely different for everyone. It all depends on your current setup, the company you are working with, and your strategy. 

Most of the time, 3-months are enough to show long-term results. It is enough to set a foundation for long-term marketing activities, launch a new campaign, kickstart a marketing funnel, or create a content platform. You can also make amends to your marketing team as well, hire new people if needed. It is enough time to do experiments and see their results, check your metrics, and see what worked, what didn't. No matter what you need to do, at the end of your 90-days, you should review your strategy again publicly and make adjustments for the next quarter, if needed. 

I hope this article helped you to get more comfortable in your new seat. Share your feedback, or share your first 30-days story by dropping a line here. If you need further support, do reach out - I would be happy to help.

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Why you shouldn't focus on quick wins too much

Quick wins. Low hanging fruit. As a marketer and consultant, these are my most hated words. Let me explain why. As our podcast guest, Chris Kalaboukis from Hello Future said: "The best fruit is way up at the top, but you only go for the low-hanging fruit. And then you just continuously go for the low-hanging fruit. Meanwhile, your competitors are going to go for the higher hanging fruit."

Today, leaders cherish quick wins as they deliver easy-to-see results. But quick wins eat long-term strategy for breakfast.

The bottom line on why leaders need quick results

If you were sarcastic enough like me, you would say that an average user in 2021 has an attention span somewhat similar to my dog's focus on a random wooden stick. Everyone wants instant gratification, not just on social media. And every service provider aims to please their clients with said fast results. It almost doesn't matter what industry you are in—marketing consulting, performance marketing, or simply business consulting. You have to be able to deliver super-quick results now, then worry about long-term goals later. If you are old enough, you remember how a business strategy meeting looked like before the 2010s. We planned out at least a year with quarterly tactical plans. Today we are lucky if we can get into quarterly planning with a client.

But what is the purpose of a quick win anyway? It is simple.

Quick wins exist to reassure you that you are on the right track. It would be best if you didn't plan to pick the low-hanging fruit as a goal - but you need to pick it to know that you are at the right tree.

Three points where quick wins harm your business

If your focus is solely on quick wins, there are some ways they can cause more damage than deliver results.

First, you quickly jump into micromanagement. That is the root of all evil. Focusing on quick wins will make you focus on the details, the small little hinges. And while you might see immediate results that will let you calm down during business planning, the results will fluctuate. You will soon end up with some parallel processes, where you need to balance to see the big picture.

Second, quick wins will tie your hands to focus on things that really matter. If you are constantly chasing short-term objectives, you won't be able to plan properly. Pretty much, you will end up in a constant problem-solving process. Without the vision, the time needed to define the big picture, your focus will shift, and the future will turn grey.

Third, there are others, a precious few, who are still focused on meaningful planning.

Anyone who's reaching for the higher hanging fruit will ultimately benefit for the long-term. They put in the hard work. They put in the time. They stayed committed. They never changed their plan, no matter how hard it was to stay on track.

What should you do instead?

What needs to be done is as simple as it sounds, yet only a very few businesses do the way it should be done.

1. Do your homework and plan. There are fundamentals you need to figure out before you focus on short-term results. Have a go-to-market strategy for your product. Do customer research. Learn more about your market. Figure out your long-term strategy.

2. Never mix-and-match long-term goals with short-term objectives. Your goal should be set and should lead you to the future. Your objectives, though, can be short-term. There, you can have your quick wins to reassure you that you are on the right track.

3. Stay committed. If you believe in your vision and your planning work supports you, never deviate from your plan. Even if you have short-term failures, never deviate and change course. It is the hardest thing to do in business, especially in times like these.

My best example I can give to you is a simple one. Imagine a YouTube influencer that you love to watch now. Now go to their channel and scroll way back in time. In most cases, their first 50 videos are of lower quality, poorly edited, and have lower views. Imagine how hard their commitment was with their message. They continued to produce their videos, one-by-one for months, sometimes even years, meanwhile only their close friends and some bots watched their show. But they stayed committed. Eventually, their channel kicked in and delivered longtail results. It's easy to think that they 'hacked' the system and win the race - but you rarely hear about those influencers who quit producing content after 10 videos with zero views.

Plan ahead. Stay committed. Stay on track. Focus on the higher-hanging fruit first. The low-hanging ones will come to you without any effort.

Watch our podcast guest, Chris Kalaboukis talking about quick wins & innovation. Listen to the whole episode here.

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How to master remote team communication

Work is a form of project management where we manage a project through communication and collaboration and track the results of our work. 

It is the very same in the case of distributed teams and businesses but with some special situations where you need to manage, track and collaborate through time zones with multiple locations. Thanks to the modern internet, we have all the tools we need to pull this off.

Communication as a top priority

People stick to their communication habits. There are two dimensions to this: asynchronous and synchronous communication.

Asynchronous communication is the relay of information with a time lag. Email, chat, or shared docs are good examples of how asynchronous communication is employed in a remote setting. Synchronous means:  working together at the same time. Phone calls, video conferences, or meetings can be listed here. The rule of thumb that we follow is that the more emotional the topic is, the more synchronous the channel should be.

Specific channels make sense, no matter if you like them or not. It helps everyone on the team to spread the work more efficiently throughout the different channels. So, how do you know whether or not a video meeting is necessary? The answer is simple: if you can’t say it in a few sentences, then it’s probably time to hop on a video call. 

So, you have a big virtual team where the members are spread in different locations all around the world. So you somehow have to find a way of working together harmoniously and productively. Now, this can be very difficult especially when you’re working in a team where most members don’t meet very often. As a leader, you have to find a way of making the team here, making sure that when you have your meetings, everybody speaks, everybody gets involved, and that you build the sense of team identity. Of course, it’s not easy even when you are face-to-face with people.

What you’ve got to do in these situations is make communication your top priority. So if we’re thinking about communication, it’s how you structure your messages, it’s how you stick to the main point, it’s how you speak concisely, clearly, energetically, it’s how to keep the team engaged, and it’s thinking about your different audience members as well. Finally, throw the vast subject of cultural difference into the mix.

One of the challenges of working with a virtual global team is that you might have people coming from completely different directions but working on the same thing. So sometimes those differences are harder to spot and harder to appreciate. However, during a video call, it is easier to see the differences. They are visible.

One thing to keep in mind is that written text lacks the subtle cues of in-person conversation. With chat, you do need to be careful about how your words might be interpreted and possibly misunderstood. That’s why there’s an abundance of emoticons and gifs in our everyday chats — they’re useful in conveying the right nuances.

How to have efficient video calls

You want to have everyone being productive from any location they want. That’s the idea. It’s all about focusing on the collaborative infrastructure of the company, like how people work together, or how they collaborate.

If you want to ensure maximum impact and efficiency during your video calls, I reckon these few tips will get you to a good start:

• A rock-solid internet connection. The faster, the better. However, the connections speed is only a part of the whole picture. Connection stability can be even more critical. However, keep in mind that many remote employees like to travel to places where fast internet isn’t always guaranteed, and Wi-Fi might be spotty and unpredictable.

• Mind your background. Remember that the camera is not just focused on your face but shows parts of the room you’re in. Pre-check the frame before starting the video call and if your kids are at home, make sure they know when they can’t disturb you.

• The perfect angle. Another piece of the puzzle would be to adjust the positioning of your webcam. Weird camera angles can be very distracting. Keep it along the same line of sight as your eye level. It is generally the best possible angle that feels the most natural––and looks the best.

• Look into the lens. It is also essential to make sure that you are looking into the camera lens directly and not on your computer screen. When your eyes are off access with the webcam, it is much less compelling.

• Out of the dark. When using a webcam, remember that the human eye sees a lot more than a video camera. Just because you can see everything clearly with a little bit of natural light, doesn’t mean that on video it will look good. It is why you should always try to add additional light when using a webcam. You’ll be surprised at how much eliminating shadows can add to your video’s overall look and feel.

• Make yourself heard. If you are using a webcam, you need to pay attention to how you capture audio. The first step is to avoid having your speakers on when talking or your audio will come through with an echo and a harsh reverb tone to your voice that makes you hard to understand. I recommend you to use some external microphone connected to your computer or laptop, and be sure to place that microphone as close to your mouth as possible. By moving the mic close, you lose much environmental noise and get a crisp, clear audio track that helps to keep people listening.

As you can see, virtual meetings don’t have to be labeled as a waste of time. They can be more valuable than traditional face-to-face meetings. These video calls are the best way to create concrete weekly goals for workers and set your business up for success. However, avoid constant emergency or ad-hoc meetings, as these can break flow during an employee’s regular day.

When setting up your meeting, you need to keep in mind that not everyone can make the time that suits you. No one likes having a meeting at 6 am or 10 pm when they have commitments to family or other interests outside of work – like sleeping.

Also, after your meeting, you’ll want to follow-up to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Considering that it is more difficult to communicate as a remote team in comparison with in-person groups, your follow-up note should be as clear and actionable as possible to avoid time-consuming email threads that are inevitable if there’s a misunderstanding.

As I’ve already mentioned, communication is the backbone of a well-functioning distributed business model. Remote teams must have excellent communication strategies to survive and thrive. Just as there are different types of groups, there are several different reasons for groups to engage in video calls. Let me show you the most popular formats for meetings.

How to master distributed meetings

There are several types of meetings you can have with your distributed team. Here is a handful of these and how to master them.

• The daily stand-up. Running virtual daily stand-up meetings is a great way to make sure your entire team is communicating and on the same page. Each person spends a very brief amount of time (5-10 minutes max) saying what they did yesterday, what they’re doing today and what’s in their way. These meetings can help you identify roadblocks or obstacles that are preventing a team member from doing their optimal work.

• The regularly scheduled one-to-one meeting is one of the most powerful tools that any manager can use to improve team productivity. A one-to-one session is a regular meeting that occurs at the same time each week (or less frequently, depending on your preference). It’s the place where you and one of your employees meet and no one else. It’s the place where you can communicate with each other and follow-up with each other on the things unique to your working relationship. The one-to-one meeting is a place where both parties should feel respected and valued, and it’s the place where you can ask each other questions openly. I don't say you won't have occasional emergencies or problems that need to be dealt with outside of this meeting. However, when you have a recurring schedule, you’ll find that you can wait to ask those questions until the recurring meeting – freeing both of your time, increasing your productivity, and reducing the stress of workdays.

• Pairing is the practice of giving two teammates the opportunity to work together on solving a problem. Qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests that when employees work in pairs, they work much faster and make fewer mistakes. Additionally, when people are paired up, they learn to communicate more efficiently and often, and to share (rather than hide) problems and solutions — all of which increases overall information flow and team alignment. As a leader, one of your tasks is to help your team create a shared vision, build team identity, and bring your employees closer together. Virtual teams with a strong character are more capable of coordinating, performing and overcoming conflicts, irrespective of locational, cultural, or individual challenges.

• Weekly sessions are the form of a meeting where you generate ideas and solve problems. However, sometimes the extroverts dominate, and shier team members can have trouble being heard. Some people also have difficulty staying focused, maintaining their enthusiasm or confused why they’re in the session. To overcome these barriers and run an excellent brainstorming meeting, always make sure to send out the brief 24 hours beforehand so that everyone can prepare. The brief should outline what the challenge is, why it is crucial, and why each person has been asked to take part in the brainstorming. Ask everyone to come along with three ideas: one general idea, one idea that is different, and a radical one. If your distributed team is diverse enough, you can count on a range of perspectives and experiences. Encourage your employees to be bold and imaginative.

You can hold a weekly group chat session with your distributed team to reflect on the progress, issues, and actions. These meetings should have an agenda communicated in advance. A standard agenda for regular team meetings also helps set consistent expectations for types of information the session will cover. The goal should be a meeting of no longer than one hour to quickly review where the project is, highlight issues, look ahead to looming milestones, and make sure everyone has what they need. Meeting frequency depends on several factors: the size of the team, the priority of the project in question, an.

You are free to use many tools or platforms, but I suggest you give each communication channel a specific purpose. For example, use Zoom for live calls or crucial conversations, and Slack for messages that aren’t pressing, with a designated water cooler channel for fun or informal conversations. When your employees have a plan for how to best get in touch with teammates for each situation, everyone can avoid wasted time, frustration, and missed connections.

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How to get the most out from working from home

Working from home is very different from anything. It is also amazingly hard to write about this topic for me as I feel, it is about home, a very personal matter. As a personal matter, it is different for everyone. I am going to approach this with a mix of my own experiences, as I am mainly working from home and not from coworking offices and I will also generalize the topic as I don’t think we are very much different at all. Treat this article with a grain of salt though and only apply the tips here if you feel them personally working for you.

I am working from home since mid-2014. I tried coworking offices, and I still pay some regular visits to them, plus I only work from coworking offices when I am on the road. I hate to work from cafes and public spaces, they are not my thing, they are too much distraction and they are not tied to a working environment. Sure you can work from a library but what if you need to take a call with a client or coworker? Sure you can work from a café but what if the WiFi goes down and the noise is too much? I only work from a café or public space if I have to and there are no other alternatives. I only work from a coworking office if I miss the office environment and want to meet new people. However, I stick to my home when it comes to deep, meaningful, and focused work. 

So the critical challenge of working from home is how to stay productive. Here are my tips on how to achieve and overcome this challenge.

• Have a routine and stick to it. It depends on your schedule or the work you do. If you are a morning person, do fantastic work early in the morning, so no one disturbs you. If you are a night owl, do the legwork after 9 pm. It is your schedule and your preferences, and you are at home, you have the freedom to stick to your plan. Have your routine, figure it out for yourself and stick to it, protect it and embrace it. 

• Go to work mode on-demand but go to home mode if needed. When you work from home, the work-life balance becomes a sort of irrelevant, and it is under heavy pressure. There is only one great thing about commuting to an office: getting yourself ready to enter or exit from work mode. When your home is your office, this getting ready feeling comes instantly. To switch between modes, have a trigger. To me, there are two things. Space and tools. I have a separate room, a study, where I do most of my work. When I enter that room, I am in work mode instantly. When I open up my laptop, I am semi-work. These are my triggers, but I think it is essential for everyone to establish a trigger system that tricks their brain when they are at home working or just at home living. 

• Invest in tools and equipment. It is your home so you can do whatever you want. Buy the best and most reliable laptop or computer you can. Buy the best and most ergonomic chair you can. Buy a desk – I recommend an adjustable table that can be converted to a standing desk if needed. Subscribe to the best internet connection you can get. Buy the best alternative mobile internet tools you can get, in case the cable is down. Have the proper tools for conference calls, a steady mic, and great headphones. Seriously, you can optimize your workspace as you need, this is a luxury you won’t have in an office. 

• Have a low-maintenance hobby, so when you need to step away for a few minutes, you can comfortably relax and recharge and get on your feet again. If you are doing the Pomodoro technique or you work with hourly short breaks, it is great to have a reliable hobby that you can do every time. The hobby should be non-pixelated as well when you are doing a 10-mins break, and you want to step away from the screen.

• Let everyone know about your schedule. Your coworkers will know, but let your family and friends know too. It is easy to get distractions when others know you are at home. To this day, people still don’t think that working from home is working. Let your relatives know that they can’t just phone you up or ask some stuff to sort out, just because you are at home.

• Enjoy your time! You are working from your home for God’s sake. You are pouring your coffee from your espresso machine – I love my espresso machine! You are listening to your music. You wear what you want, and if you want, you can live up to the stereotype and wear only pants at work. Enjoy your time, and you are at home. Save thousands of dollars on working from home. No need to spend on public transport or gasoline, no need to spend that much on lunches and snacks, and not much to spend on your office look. Enjoy the reclaimed time, no need to commute and spend hour-long breaks for lunch. Enjoy the absence of pointless marathon meetings and small talks. Spend your freedom, time, and money well with this newly found luxury setup.

• Get social – not just on the net. This is the biggest challenge, at least for me. Since you are working from home, you are not spending time with others mandatory. You have to be proactive if you want to meet others. You can always go to a coworking space for a day if you need the noise and people. Do some team sports to meet non-work related people. Go to meetups based on your interests.

Working from home is amazing, and I don’t believe the statement that ‘it is not for everyone.’ If you do it right, you can enjoy the benefits and overcome the challenges, even if you thought ‘it is not your thing.’

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3 Ways You Can Hire Someone Remotely

Every business comes to this point eventually – when they hire their first employee who is not a founder or owner of the company. Hiring is often the most neglected issue when it comes to running your business. However, I would argue that it is by far one of the most critical parts of your business. Many companies just straight-up outsource the hiring process, which I can relate to if they have large teams, the retention level is low, or it is harder to find people with the necessary skills. However, for small- and medium-sized businesses or startups, hiring shouldn’t be outsourced, and it always has to be done at the managerial level. Your people are vital to your success. 

Now when it comes to remote hiring, it’s not that much of a difference compared to hiring someone locally and in person. There are some subtle and minor tweaks you should do though. When you decide to hire remotely, you need to consider three factors: 

1. How much time you can spare on the hiring process?

2. How much time do you need from the new employee to work for you?

3. How urgent is it to fill the position?

First, you need to check your calendar. How much time can you dedicate to the hiring process? You need to make a decision, on average, a daily 1 hour is required to find the best candidate, and you need that hour for a couple of weeks. Second, do you need someone to jump on a project and then leave, or do you need someone for the long term? Do you need him to do only one thing, a couple of hours of work per day and that’s it, or do you need someone full-time? Last, how urgently do you need someone? These are the questions you need to ask yourself before jumping right into the hiring process.

Option 0: Bet on locals first 

The first move you should consider is to hire locally. I know it sounds weird, as I’m advocating remote business here, but trust me, hire locally first. Hire in the usual way but this time offer the work-from-home option. Who knows, you might find someone not far away from you who wants to work with your company but doesn’t want to relocate or go to your office. Work from home option is a good call here. Run through your peers, friends, co-workers, their friends, and local networks. Anyone who comes with a strong personal recommendation is better than anyone straight out from the internet. Go to local meetups and hire from there. If you already have a user base, hire from there. They are a comfortable cultural fit as they know your business in and out, and if not the best applicant, they can recommend someone. If you couldn’t find anyone locally because of the scarcity of talent, then you can go online and hire remotely. 

Option 1: Remote freelance sites

Most entrepreneurs would argue that they need someone right now and they don’t have too much time for the hiring process. So let’s see that option first. If you don’t have time to hire someone, but you need someone pretty much now, you have two options: remote freelance sites and remote recruitment companies. If you need this person for a short term to solve one specific problem, go to remote freelance sites. If you need this person for the long-term to work with you on several projects, contact a remote recruitment company. 

Remote freelance sites are sites like UpWork, PeoplePerHour, Fiverr, Freelancer, and countless copycats. Most of them have the same features: they list freelancers and their services, pretty much their skills based on a public profile. Everyone who hires them can leave a public review. All payments and paperwork are done through the freelance site from which they chunk out a small percentage. Most of these sites are charging employees with these fees, but some, like UpWork, are charging employers also. 

What’s great about these sites is that you can get someone onboard in a matter of hours, plus you have all their references listed publicly on their profile. 

The bad news though is most of those who are featured on these sites are cheap low billed soldiers of fortunes, with mediocre skills. If you need someone for not-so-complicated work, that is fine, but if you are looking for a senior-level type of work with high added value, you should look elsewhere. 

Of course, there are some gems in here too, there are some talented people on these sites, but you have to fight your way through hundreds of mediocre applicants to get to those few shiny ones.

Option 2: Remote recruitment services

Remote recruitment services might be your best bet for long-term employees with high-end skills. Companies like Toptal, FlexJobs, StackOverflow, Coworks, and many others offer sort-of-like traditional recruitment services. They pre-screen applicants for you and deliver only the best for your job post. Some of them work like outsourcing agencies where you can “borrow” contractors for short- or mid-term projects. Not all of them but they tend to manage the paperwork for you as well during the employment so no worries on contracts and payments, you pay only the recruiter as an umbrella company for freelancers. These solutions are great because you can have instant access to a pre-screened high-end workforce, but I wouldn’t recommend them to those who are planning for the long term. First, these companies are a bit pricey, which is understandable, considering they do a lot of legwork for you. Second, most of them “borrow” or “transfer” employees for you, but the employee will stay within their umbrella. To me, that only works, if the project needs immediate attention, but it’s not for the long term. Loyalty is crucial when it comes to employment, anyone who’s “lent” through a network cannot be loyal to a business. If you need someone for a short period, but do a tremendous high-value job, fine though.

Option 3: Remote job boards

As you can see, these solutions are closely related to the term outsourcing. You need someone for one task, you need it fast, and you look for external, offshore sources. However, if you want to build a genuinely successful distributed business, you need someone not just to do one task or job, but also to bring new insights and culture to the table. You need someone full-time, and you need to make sure they are a good fit for your free current team and your future dreams. For that, you don’t just need someone “borrowed” or “jumped in” – you need someone with dedication, loyalty, excitement and plans to work with you. Well, that needs to be worked on by you too. You have to dedicate time to hiring someone online. You have to put up a job specification for your site and some of the most relevant remote job boards and wait for a catch. Job boards like JobEspresso, Dribble, AuthenticJobs, RemoteOK.io, WeWorkRemotely, Remotive, or startup sites’ job sections like Angel.co/jobs are an excellent way to start. However, in the end, you need to market your post to get the best candidates. 

The first action you need to do is to write an excellent job post and use it as your outreach platform. 

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3 tips on how to sell your professional services online

I got my driver's license at the age of 33 - never needed it, always lived in the central hubs of European capital cities, plus I'm working from home, so no need to commute anyway. However, my childhood dream was to own a Jag - an old, rusty, V6-monster with a cherrywood-interior, leather seats, and the comfort of a luxurious battleship. So my very first car was a Jag - and I loved it. A true weekend-car, we had unique experiences together.

I sold her a few months ago, though - with a shameful 20.000 miles extra in her within four years of usage. Most of the time, she was sleeping in a heated garage.

I realized I cared more about the experiences of driving a great car than the actual car itself. Tools and things are not the ones where one should look for happiness, obviously. Relationships inspired by experiences are the ones that make us happy. To realize that, I had to own a 'thing' that I was craving since my childhood.

Why do I tell this story to you? Because your customers will pick you above others, not because of the brand you project for them, but the relationships you build with them. You are in the experience/relationship business, where titles and your background have nothing to do with your sales and marketing efforts.

I believe there are fundamental changes in the way we sell professional services.

Don't be the Jag in the room - stop focusing on yourself

In the people's business, things are your titles: background, skillset, pedigree, brand. While they are, of course, important, but not as important as you might think, if you are a lawyer, for example, the number of clients who work with you based on the family tradition is shrinking.

The new generation of customers doesn't care about your titles, your qualifications, and your background. They only care about their needs and the relationships you can build with them. Instead of focusing on selling you as the service provider, focus on selling your service's impact. Focus on how you can solve your customers' needs, instead of just appeal as you are.

In practical terms, lawyers/accountant/financial experts won't call themselves "lawyer"/"accountant"/"finance expert" anymore - they will focus on how they help others with their specific skills.

Be specific with how you can help others

It's not enough anymore to pick a niche and operate within. You have to be super specific on how you can help others. There are millions of lawyers out there who are practicing family law. Very few of them can help with particular divorce issues that appeal to specific demographics. To market your services, you have to be super targeted and extremely specific in helping others.

Besides the extreme targeting, focus on the outcome as well. If you can coin how your prospective clients feel when helping them, it would be a more natural choice. Professional services are all results-driven - why wouldn't you communicate these results to your prospects then?

It starts with a simple tagline on your professional profile. From "John Doe, based in Chicago, Attorney-at-law specialized in Family/Marital law" to "I'm John Doe, I help young families in the Chicago area to get through their most challenging times." It's just a tagline but can ultimately define your whole marketing strategy.

Battle the shortened attention span further with precise offers and education on your services

I bought my Jag way before I purchased it. As a teenager, I had a poster in my room featuring the particular car. When it was buying-time, it was inevitable to buy that car. However, the world has changed; people don't have years, not even minutes, to decide.

Focusing your services on the results they generate for your clients is the most crucial part. But it is still not enough - you have to make sure when they are interested, they will understand your offer immediately.

For most professional service providers, hourly rates are the go. That is not the case anymore - a packaged service is more natural to comprehend and much more straightforward to buy. Try to package your services - ditch the hourly fees. You won't lose a dime, I promise. You will gain a lot in the long-run.

Some services need the knowledge to understand. Sometimes, the need is not yet there - that is why informing your prospects should be your number one marketing priority for you. On-site, inbound content and marketing activities should be your key activity. Wasting too much time on social media marketing might kill your marketing results instead of focusing on creating compelling content that drives relationships with your prospected clients. Remember, most of your clients will seek out your help proactively - your job is to be there when they need you with a simple offer, a killer results-driven message, and a searchable background for those who still doubt you.

The next few years will be exciting for those who haven't changed their marketing goals in the recent decade. But it is now or never - because those who buy off the shelf because of traditions, childhood dreams, or brand loyalty will be switched off by those who purchase services because they need to solve a specific problem in their life. Be that professional service provider who helps others to live better - to build better, long-lasting relationships.

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How to create a remote company culture

Employees tend to stay with companies that they know and understand. If people can’t understand how the business operates, they tend to fall off and leave the company. Having a clean, transparent and straightforward work environment helps employees to feel integrated into the team. Transparency defines everything here, so let’s start with that one.

Transparency is a must to be implemented across every, literally every aspect of your company.

It helps businesses with an in-office team as well, where all the business decisions and management are transparent, and everyone knows where the company is at. However, it is a must for distributed teams for one simple reason: there is no office. There’s no space that is visible for everyone and where everyone can walk into. You have an online space only. You are in ‘work mode’ when you open up your company’s Slack channel, or you open up the company’s email on your laptop – even if you are still in your PJs on the couch. You have to have a transparent setup for everyone, so they will know what’s going on from the minute they log in.  

Transparency can be implemented in various aspects: from project workflows, business processes, business decisions to finance.

Some companies have a public online channel where the management discusses current business issues and new alignments for the future of the business. Anyone, even the newcomer trainee can join the channel and check the conversations happening there. Some other companies have a simple, transparent formula for how they calculate salaries and everyone is aware of how much others get, plus how much the company earns actually. Even some others have a transparent dashboard on how many leads they have and how the sales are going – again, anyone, even the newcomer trainee can see it. It gives zero room for business owner to bullshit on how the company’s performing when it is visible that it does not perform as it should be expected. It also gives considerable relief to owners and managers that everyone is aware of the situation. So it also helps new team members to integrate into the system and retain their jobs with the company. After all, they know everything, they feel the whole business from day one. Throw in some in-time earnable distributed company shares, and on paper, it is their business too. 

If transparency is the glue for integration, then clear processes are the structures for an integrated system, and simple workflows are the interior design setup for your business.

Clean here means one thing: straightforward and transparent. Everyone knows what to do, why to do it, how to do it, who’s doing it, and who’s responsible for the delivery. Rules are simple too: visible, clear solutions for everyone and nothing is overcomplicated. 

Transparency together with simple, clear workflows will bring you distributed business culture, which will help you to hire, integrate, retain and motivate your team members.

How to align common goals 

Keeping everyone on the same page is essential for every business. There are three types of goals for every company: 

• Long-term goals: here goes all the financial goals and annual plans. We are speaking here about corporate strategy. 

• Milestones: there are certain limits that you can accomplish and exceed to achieve the long-term goal(s) of your business.

• Short-term goals: these are more like reports, small achievements, and daily project management task accomplishments also goes here.

First off, before you can make sure everyone is aligned with your goals, you have to define these goals for yourself. Make sure you have a solid business plan with a strategy you can execute. I rarely describe a strategy with more than a year's lifespan. Anything that has more than a year lifespan, I call it the dream. You don’t know where the market is heading, everything changes so quickly, and so many variables are unseen for you – so there’s no point wasting time on 5-10 years plans. However, if you can define a clear annual plan with fixed milestones to achieve, you are off to go. Establishing your business strategy is highly personal, you have to know your business and your capabilities. In this book, I hope I delivered you some insights on market research, product positioning and branding, and organization structure, but these are all general information not tied to your particular business. 

Once the plan is ready, please make sure it is transparent too. Please share it with every member of your team so they can see you have an idea and they are in the same boat as you. Make sure the milestones are also shared when achieved and celebrate achievements. There are three rules on how to align goals. 

Make the goals transparent so everyone can feel they are in the same boat.

Yes, even financial results and planning. Make sure all of the plans are visible to everyone. You can create a digestible document that is shared across your team and can be commented on by everyone. Who knows, a team member might have some great addition to your long-term plans!

Share updates on progress. The easiest way to share it: is a weekly progress report and a monthly strategy report. These reports can be written in a template, which you should update every time. In the weekly bulletin, share the progress on individual projects, the actual cash flow of the company, and the teamwork schedule, focusing on sprints, time-offs, new hires, and layoffs, and also share new sales prospects and results. In the monthly report do the same but on a grander scale. Don’t focus on the smaller projects and reports but report on how the milestones are and how far you come with the annual plan achievement. These reports are amazingly crucial as they are getting an update for everyone on the progress of the goals. 

Celebrate and get feedback. Every time you achieve a goal or reach a milestone, celebrate it with the team. If you fail to reach the goals, gain input from everyone. 

Having clear goals help you to get everyone on the same page, and it boosts morale and productivity. No one wants to work for a company that doesn’t have plans or is secretive about results. Transparency helps you to reach your goals, and even further, it helps you to improve your strategy via team insights and feedback.

How company culture increases productivity

Productivity is based on motivation and self-management.

We have talked about motivation, where each employee has to know the goals of the company, set personal goals, and have a drive for success to achieve the goals. Self-management, however, is different, it is less based on personal purposes, rather than individual skills. Self-management is the employee’s capability to organize their work efficiently. As a distributed business owner, you probably hired the best talents who have great organization and self-management skills, but as the key leader in the company, you can also enhance their skills by implementing rules for the company.

First, you need to think about the needs of a remote employee. Then how do they achieve better self-management? If you are working remotely, you don’t have an office with all of its parts: fixed location, daily routines, and sort-of-fixed working hours. While most of these parts can be changed for the good, there are some that have to stay attached. A recurring daily routine, for example, enhances productivity, and while traveling is possible while you are working, a fixed location could also be beneficial. Fixed working hours are the things of the past, so no one stresses this while working remotely. The primary challenge can be the issue of not working and finding the perfect work and life balance. As you don’t have an office and a fixed schedule is harder to maintain, you end up doing more work on your terms. 

As a manager of a distributed company, you can enhance productivity and self-management by implementing rules that respect the needs of your distributed team. Some rules you should follow: execute recurring routines, shut down the ‘office’ on weekends and stop tracking time but start tracking progress.  

There are some mandatory recurring events for any distributed business.

• The first should be the weekly kick-off call with your team, where you discuss the week’s main sprint, tasks to achieve, and the to-do list for everyone. Also, that is the time when everyone can ask for feedback or help. Make sure the call is a recurring call every week at the same time. Only change the call’s time when it is necessary.

• Have end-of-the-day reports from everyone, a quick catch-up on what did they work. Have a set recurring time to do the report as well, no later than 7-8 pm for everyone’s timezone – this makes sure, everyone closes the computer at 7 or 8 and only works after that if it is super necessary or they are behind tasks. If it is required, discuss this individually with everyone, some prefer to work late at night instead of working in the mornings.

• Have bi-weekly and monthly team stand-up calls, to discuss the company’s goals on a grander scale. Whatever other calls or reports you have, the key here is the consistent recurring style: don’t change the scheduling and repeat the process. It gives a bit of structure to everyone and helps them to organize their remote lifestyle around fixed-time calls and reports. 

Those who work remotely, actually work more than those who work from an office. Some find it hard to set a manageable work-life balance and tend to overwork themselves. While working is excellent, overworking isn’t – it messes up our biological clock and productivity. As the manager of the team, you can help them to drop the keyboard by implementing a rule for non-working. The most commonly used practice is not working on the weekends, only if it is necessary. Also, make sure no one works on national holidays and birthdays. Having holidays is also a crucial part, make sure everyone spends some weeks on time-offs. 

Connected to time-offs, please stop tracking time. There are two reasons to track time in general: track working hours for those who get paid by the hour and track the amount of time spent on specific projects so you can get an idea of how different projects and tasks need time. Tracking time to get paid doesn’t work. First off, timesheets can be cheated. Second, those time tracking software that makes a print screen on your screen once in a while to monitor your work? Those are horrible. They kill motivation because they destroy the very first element of a relationship: trust. Don’t use them. However, there are time-tracking tools, where the hour spent on they can track projects and tasks. Those are highly useful, and you can use them to track the length of projects. They can help you to assign and delegate responsibilities and plan out your resources. 

Implementing productivity rules help you to work better and more efficiently. However, as a remote company, working collaboratively and efficiently, your best help will be the constant use of asynchronous workflows.

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How to write a great job post

You have to write a fantastic job post, no matter if you are looking for someone for the short-term or the long-term. If you need someone urgently or you can dedicate time to go through a longer hiring process – none of this matters, you still have to write a fantastic job post. 

What is the goal of a job post?

First, of course, you need the job post to attract the best of talent. However, you also want to minimize clutter: you don’t want to waste your time on highly speculative applicants. You need someone who fits your ideal candidate description.

The hiring process can be intensely long, and even if you are looking for a short-term jump-in candidate, you need to make sure you save time from the very beginning: your job post. Your job post is also a marketing platform for your business, and here you can openly share anything relevant to your company, your long-term goals, your values, and basically anything that helps others to understand your business.

What makes a job post impressive? In a nutshell: transparency, details, and vision. In short: being transparent on what needs to be done, whom you are looking for and what you can provide for the ideal candidate.

In your job post, be as transparent as you can. It’s the internet, and candidates don’t have the option to walk into your office and check your way of work – so you have to be upfront and overshare. Provide enough details about your business, the job requirements, your expectations, and the compensation – in this order. 

Being transparent about your business is crucial. The more you share, the more likely you will find someone who’s a cultural fit for your business. If you don’t provide enough information, you will raise the number of speculative applicants, and they will suck away your time. Tell them about your current team and where is the gap you are looking to fill now. 

Be prompt and provide details on the required skills and capabilities on your side. Be detailed on what your expectations are, and let these out so candidates who read your job spec will feel like they were called out from the crowd. Be very transparent on the compensation as well, and I’m not just talking about salary and money. Please make it clear that there’s a long-term plan here and they have the option to work with you and make an impact on your business. 

If you can, be transparent about how the hiring process will look like: the number of rounds, possible test work, and pre-screening. Also, please skip the jargon and the bullshit, and be humble and straightforward. There are no growth gurus, marketing ninjas, code junkies, and dev wizards. Some terms might be justified like “happiness engineers” for customer service people, but these are rarely acceptable. 

Your job posts shouldn’t be too long though and make sure you stick the how-to-hire part only at the end with a bonus “what to write in the email subject” that can help too – that makes sure they’ve read the article till the end. You have committed your time to write this post, don’t shy away to ask for a commitment in return from applicants.

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The fully detailed remote hiring process

A comprehensive summary of the remote hiring process. We focus on remote freelance sites, remote job boards, and remote recruitment services. From application to test work.

It is where you need to dedicate time – the longer the term you are planning with the candidate, the more time you need to commit to hiring. If you are looking for someone for the long term, you have to adopt a longer process. If you are looking for someone for the short term, you need to adapt to the procedures already in place with recruitment and freelancing sites. Let’s talk about the short ones first.

How to hire someone from a freelancing site 

We’ve talked about freelancing sites: they are your go-to sites when you need someone relatively urgently, for a short period, and for a simple, specific task. One of the biggest, if not the most prominent site is UpWork, formerly known as oDesk. Most of our upcoming examples are based on and can be applied to this site, but you can learn from them and use them on other sites as well. 

First, you don’t have much choice in the hiring process when you go to these sites. It’s pretty straightforward and all based on the site's features. Most of these sites have three significant features, which help you to pick the best candidate for your job.

They have public freelancer profiles, where they can market themselves and their services. Some of the sites even have tests, which the freelancers can take and publicly share on their public profile, showcasing their skills. They can add a portfolio, references, and any material that can justify their expertise. They can state their minimum hourly rate as well.  

They have public reviews on the freelancers. The reviews were written by previous employees who hired them through this site and completed the project. These reviews are open, usually based on a rating system with comments. 

They have public work and activity logs. The sites measure how much time the freelancer billed out on the website or how many users ordered their services. How quickly they respond to new requests. How much money they have made through this site? There’s also an in-house rating system where the site rates these freelancers, like “rising star” or “top performer.” 

It is all transparent – so it seems, but more on that later. First, let’s discuss what you need to do. We discussed the importance of a job post, which is true here as well. There are countless project details on these sites which have zero or no information on the project. E.g., “I need a WordPress website,” and that’s it. That doesn’t work that way, even if you are short on time and you need someone now, spend some time on that job spec and put it up with details. You will save time in the long run. I know it sounds common sense, but if you register as a freelancer on these sites and browse through the jobs, you will see that around only 10% of the projects are detailed. You can, however, skip the company vision and anything long-term related, you are looking for someone to jump in now, so stick to the proportional details only. Be very detailed about what you need. 

Many of the freelancers are going only for volume on these sites – they apply to 100 jobs per day so they can get 1. They don’t even read the whole spec. So you need to make sure you will get only those who do. Add something unique, a message at the end of the job spec, that ensures they’ve read it through. Something like “to apply, please write a balloon at the start of your application” can work. With this, you can make sure that you will get someone with attention to detail – which is super important. You also won’t have to read through all the bots with a standard application script – so you will have more time to spend on those who are worth it.

On some sites you can set up a location rule, making sure you only hire someone from the US. I strongly advise not to set this rule up.

1. First, you are hiring remotely and trying to build a globally distributed business – why would you exclude others then?

2. Second, only set this rule up if you need to be in constant contact with the freelancer. By continuous contact I mean, you can’t wait a couple of hours for a response. In that case, excluding anyone outside your location makes sense due to the factors of difficult communication that have to do with different time zones. 

On sites like UpWork, everything is public and transparent – you should use that feature. Check their previous works, their past reviews, and the number of projects they’ve completed on the site. Avoid those who are entirely new to the site – let others test them out first. Avoid those who promise too much or, have too many work capabilities and skills. No one is an expert on all aspects of marketing. They don’t. Check if they are available at all: how quickly they respond to inquiries, what is the percentage of their current job completion. You want to make sure they will have their attention on you and can deliver your project on time. 

Avoid the very cheap ones. Everyone has a price in mind, avoid those who have an average hourly rate that is only a third or less than the price that is in your mind for that job. Good work needs to be valued, and if a freelancer is not assessing his work enough to set a valid price for it, there must be something wrong. It might be super great desperation or just not real value. Neither one should work for you. However, also avoid those who want to work with you on 2x-3x of your price in mind. They are usually not worth the value. 

If you follow these rules, you can narrow the applicants down quite a bit. From the pool, only engage with those who have the highest values: the highest amount of hours they worked on the site and the highest numbers of good reviews they have. Once you write back, check how long it takes for them to reply. If that is more than a day, leave them. Ask for references and previous work as most of the public reviews only feature the experience of working with the freelancer but the actual example of the work. Most freelancers have a portfolio page or even feature their work examples on their profile though.

How to hire through a remote recruitment company

Here the process is smooth – I mean, this is why you use a remote recruitment company, to not spend time on the actual hiring process. There are some minor things you should focus on though. 

Make sure the recruitment company you use has a track record, and an excellent talent pool and not just another outsourcing agency. Use the big ones, Toptal for example, even if they are more expensive than others. They will make sure that the talent you get is truly talented.  

Make sure the contract and paperwork are kosher. Look for satisfaction guarantees – if you don’t like the talent that has been delivered to you within a trial period, you don’t need to pay anything. These recruitment companies tend to work with long-term projects, so it is crucial for you to learn whether the talent is worth investing in or not. Consider this as a probation period.

Note that if there is no recruitment fee, that fee is calculated in the payment of the freelancer. Many recruitment companies work like this: no cost to hire someone through them, but everything works through them. You get a contract from the umbrella company, and they deliver talent for you. You pay the umbrella company, and they spend the talent. It’s a minor thing, but you should be aware of that when you hire someone for the long-term: their fee is a bit higher than usual. 

All in all, finding talent through a remote recruitment company only works if you seriously don’t have time, but you need someone to work for you more than just for a couple of weeks.

How to hire from remote job boards

It is the ideal situation, everything else so far was an alibi. You need someone as a full-time team member, and you are willing to invest your own time in finding that special someone. 

The recipe, however, can’t be a general one here as all businesses are different, depending on your team size or your expectations. If you are an already established business with a solid non-distributed team behind you, hiring is different remotely than for a startup, which makes their first-ever hiring.  

The sort-of-general recipe looks something like this: you write an excellent job post. You put it up on remote job boards and your social networks and wait. If you have circled your job post through multiple sources, you end up with applicants. Then you do interviews with the most promising ones, then ask for test work if needed to prove their capabilities, then another meeting to see if they fit culturally, and then hire them. Sounds easy but it’s not that simple. Let’s start with the circulation.

You have committed your time to hire someone and this time, you don’t recruit through a freelancer site or a recruitment company, so candidates are not just ‘there’ for you. You need the best and broadest visibility ever so your job post will get to everyone’s desk – possibly to that exceptional one’s desk too. Consider putting out the post to LinkedIn Groups. Circulate through the traditional remote job boards. Put it up in your newsletter, Twitter, social networks, and site. It should be in the footer of every email you send out to anyone till you won’t find the One. If there’s still no answer, consider throwing some ads on the job post. Seriously, you need the best possible coverage for your job spec. You can worry about filtering non-qualified candidates later.

How to filter applicants

Once you have applicants, filter them out. Start with the ones which I call “dust,” those who didn’t get what the job is all about or who look like professional fakes. Reject these promptly but politely. A nice quick email will do. Then move on to those who see at least a bit promising. Filter out those, who can’t comply with the basic needs: their skills don’t match your criteria. Remember, you are looking for someone for the long-term so having skills to do the job is a must, but even more importantly, you need to work with them for a very long time hopefully, so the cultural fit is even more important than skills. Consider skills and capabilities as the primary line of requirements – it doesn’t get the candidate anywhere yet, just to the front of the door.

Look for the five essential elements and test them out:

1. Previous remote working experience. It is necessary, and you don’t want someone who’s just starting out to work remotely. Working remotely is entirely different from working traditionally. If they have worked remotely for more than a year, even better, this means remote working is great for them, and they did their first lags and mistakes, and now they are productive, proactive, and cooperative in a remote working environment. 

2. Expert communicators. In a traditional office, you have a kitchen where all the conversations are going. Also, it is easy to tap someone and grab a bite outside and talk. In remote working, there are no such things – however, there are some supplements to these habits. You have to look for those who are experts in written communication. Anyone who’s oversharing everything in writing but still manages to stay sharp and on point is excellent. Look for someone who thinks “what’s not written down, doesn’t exist.” Having slight graphomania is better than having zero communication. You don’t want to work with someone remotely who communicates in 3-words sentences only. 

3. Natural born project manager, even if the job is not about project management. Your best candidate has to be able to prioritize tasks and has to do them independently. There’s no office where you can walk onto someone and ask: what’s up? Due to timezones and work-from-home issues, there might be hourly lags between feedback on inquiries – there’s no time for always debriefing and re-briefing. Your candidate has to have basic project management skills, or they can’t survive in a remote working environment.

4. Proactivity. It is essential for every employee but even more important for remote workers. As you can't overlook their time, as they are not in the office where you can see them – however, I would argue if you have the same control over your regular employee – they sometimes finish off tasks before the deadline. So they sit on it. It is where proactivity comes in, and they have to be able to stand up and claim responsibility and ownership. 

5. Trust your first impression. I know it sounds harsh, but this matters. If someone walks into your office for a job interview, you always have a first impression. Sometimes they can talk themselves out of it and assure you, that they are worth your time. In remote hiring, you have the same issues, but this time, your candidate is super transparent. You can look up online, and you can do a background check, you can check the credentials, you can surf and peek into their lives. Most of them are public, and there is nothing wrong with doing a background check. If something looks fishy, don’t even bother to move on with them. Trust your gut and only hire someone whom you trust.

How to interview applicants remotely

Let’s say you narrowed them further to a small selection. No matter what job you are in or what stage your business is in, your next step is to get a first screening interview with the top candidates. These interviews are one-on-one interviews. The goal of these interviews is the same: check how the candidate communicates and how the chemistry works for you. Here, little things matter. Pay extraordinary attention to how the candidates communicate during the process, before, during, and after the interview. 

• Before the call, are they flexible enough? Do they suggest more slots for their time to talk? Are they considering time zones if there’s a lag between you and them? Are they proactive? Do they send calendar invites to you, or do you need to carry that over? Do they offer multiple ways to connect, Skype, phone, or Hangouts? Are they on time? Do they have an excellent setup to talk with you? 

• During the call, do they have an excellent internet connection? I know it sounds harsh, but we are talking about remote work. Are they in a quiet place or is there a lot of background noise? If they can’t commit to a safe and quiet place for the interview, how could they manage future talks with your team with a setup like this? Do they ask questions about the job and the team you have, or just trying to sell themselves? Also, this can’t be rationalized but does chemistry work between the two of you? Did they do their background check on your business? If yes, that is great, they are interested in you. 

• After the interview, do they follow up proactively? If you asked them anything, do they send it over ASAP or entirely forget to send it? Do they mail you with further follow-up questions?   

How to test applicants remotely

After the interview, many candidates will be disqualified. You act like you always do: reject them even more politely, as they’ve spent time talking with you. Let them know they are dismissed quickly, and it is polite. They might hunt for other jobs as well and still wait for your feedback. With those who qualified during the interview, you should do a test job.  

It can be tricky because it highly depends on the position you are about to fill. Also keep in mind that if the test job requires more than a couple of hours, you should pay for their time. Some companies even pay a flat fee for the test job, regardless of the time. It’s polite and respectful. Note that the test job’s goal is simple: it is done only to test their skills. Nothing else. Let’s say you are hiring a marketer. The candidate has excellent skills, and it got confirmed by a background check. The candidate also did great during the interview, sharp, proactive, prompt, and not too pushy and their chemistry worked too. However, you are a developer shop that wants more clients and this candidate only worked for SaaS startups before. The candidate might have a unique approach to your company that is misaligned with your goals. So even if on paper everything is fine, you still need to make sure that the candidate is the right candidate solely for you. 

On the test job, ask for something presentable and deliverable. Even if you pay for it, the test job shouldn’t take more than a day of work. It should relate to the position, so if you are hiring a developer, ask for a code on a non-relevant project of yours. If you are hiring a PR person, ask for a copy of a press release with a couple of journalist names to pitch the article. If you are hiring a customer service agent, bring out some issues and let the candidate answer the questions. It’s up to you and your business, but keep it relevant, brief, and reviewable. Set a deadline and let them know that they are free to ask anything but that doesn’t change the timeline. You need to check the quality of the test work of course, but also keep an eye on how this small project has been managed, and how the candidate communicated.  

How to make sure applicants are a great fit

Those who made it through here are worth hiring. There should be only a handful of them. From now on, only one thing matters – culture. I know this hasn’t been highlighted here before during the process, but this is the most crucial part. Everything that has happened until this point was to test if the candidate can work remotely and can deliver value to your company. However, none of this matter if they can’t fit into your team and company culture. Now testing this out is tricky, and seriously there are no general recipes for this. It all depends on what your company culture is. The last interview should test this out. 

There is no recipe on how to test the cultural fit, but I always recommend one approach that is indeed working for others. The method is the podium talk. Sure you can test personality traits through various tools and assessments, but ultimately, your team has to work with someone new. So your team has to make the call. Anyone who made it this far is worth hiring as they have the skills and capabilities, plus they can work with you. From your point of view, anyone from your now narrowed shortlist would be a great fit. So why you are the one who picks? Let your team choose whom they want to work with. 

Gather around all of your team for a video call and invite the candidate to join. Let the candidate speak on a topic of her/his choice. Let the candidate know beforehand that the interview will be about a speak-up event for your team where he/she needs to pitch something to your team. The speech somehow has to be connected to your business. It shouldn’t be more than a short presentation, followed by a Q&A. It is excellent as this podium talk lets your team engage with the candidate and the candidate has the chance to peek into your business and your team. After the call, let your team vote anonymously for the best talk and hire the winner. Write back to those who didn’t make it but highlight that they were on the very end shortlist and you might be getting back to them with actual work.

How to do a trial period for new employees

Now you have a winner, but make sure you still test the applicant before the employment. I mean, not on paper as most of these employees will work on a contract basis with you but more in your mindset. Be upfront and tell them that their first month is a trial period. Some companies even offer a lower base salary for the first months. In this trial period, keep a close eye on their work. There are a couple of ways you should do that.

Some companies who have a SaaS or any service that needs customer service support, throw the trialing applicant into customer service first. A significant amount of their time should be spent on customer service to learn more about the product, the customers, and the main issues. It is done for everyone, even if you hire a marketing director who did customer service ticketing years ago or haven’t had the chance to do it before. Companies who do this, don’t evaluate the work based on the sharp customer service the applicant provides but on the way the applicant works.

Some other companies, like Buffer, have new employees bootcamp. They do serious and sometimes offline onboarding for newcomers to further test out if the new candidates are a good fit for the company. During this time the applicant gets a base salary but not doing actual billable work but only tests. 

Others attach the newcomer to non-relevant projects first to test out if they can be a good fit. Even others assign them to the most critical project, the deep dive, to see how they react to pressure. 

It all depends on your business, but ultimately you should test before you buy. A trial period salary is excellent as it shows the candidate that during this time, they are undergoing a testing period. Once it’s done, their compensation rises to normal levels. If it turns out that your candidate is not the best fit, you can still turn back to other shortlisted ones. Now that you have a new remote employee on board, your job is to keep them happy, motivated, focused, and productive.

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How to start your distributed business

Know your business

You have to be familiar with what you do, where you do it, whom you are doing it for and why are you different from others. In this article, we briefly talk about the importance of market research, user testing, product branding, and business positioning. This series is not intended to be a launch-your-business book, but I wanted to touch base on those areas where a distributed model can shine, compared to traditional businesses. First, let’s talk about market research.

Doing market research is a must to minimize risk. Like any other product or service, yours can be tested before its launch.

There are many use cases for you to do some initial research on. You are launching a new product or service or expanding your office to a new location while keeping the business operations distributed. This book is not a UX or market research guidebook though so I only cover those aspects of market research that can be different when you are a distributed business. We will discuss initial desktop research, online user testing, and product positioning strategies.

How to do desktop market research

As a distributed business, your market is where you want to be active. Before entering the market, I would strongly suggest doing some initial market research to minimize the risk of entry. There are three critical goals for every market research. 

• First, is the market you want to enter ready for you? Even if there is no apparent need for your service or product, would they be interested in buying it? 

• Second, is your product or service vital to that market? If you are at this point, you might know if your product or services solve an essential problem – hence it is crucial for the market. However, does this problem exist in the market where you want to enter?

• Also, third, do you have competitors on the market and what are they doing as of now?

All in all, you want to test the needs, the customer insights, and the market insights. 

There are many options to do this right, but keep in mind: not just businesses but markets have limitations as well. The more limited a market, the more likely you need to use local support for market research. Markets are limited by the stage of their development, language, and geography. Doing desktop market research for the UK market from the US – is much more comfortable than doing the same for let’s say the Polish market. You can also skip the whole national market approach and focus on a global product, which can be bought from anywhere by anyone – but if you want to test different markets, you need to keep it in mind when you need local support.   

I want to highlight that as a distributed business, and you can do pretty much anything online regarding market research. Do you want to test if there is a need on the market for your product? Why not try to check how many people are searching online for a product like yours? How many people are following topics related to your service and what are they talking about? Online conversations and consumer habits are pretty much transparent now, and you need the time and effort to gather relevant insights from them. You can use social media monitoring tools for a quick test run to do all the research you need and check the results and insights on one dashboard. Finding competitors is also can be easy and straightforward online. Also, in the end, if you still need help, hire local support: a virtual assistant with knowledge of the local market and language or a local market research business. They can be super valuable to gain in-depth insights into a specific market or industry. 

How to test your business

User testing is vital for those who are building a new product or launching a new service, and they want actual feedback from possible customers. There are many options on how to do user testing, but before you jump into it, you have to determine three things first.

• Who is your target audience? You have to know and profile your ideal customer. It helps a lot on the user testing research because either you use a 3rd party service provider or go out and test publicly on a forum or community, you have to know whom you are expecting to answer and provide feedback. It also helps you to ignore anyone who’s not in your target audience.

• How unique is your product or service? Do you need to explain it before you can gather actual feedback? How can you pitch it in a few sentences so everyone can understand it right away? In the following chapter, we will talk a bit about positioning, which might help to clear things up on this as well.

• What is the goal of your user research? Do you want new ideas? Do you want feedback? Do you want customer opinions and insights? What is the ideal situation that you want to walk away with after successfully testing? 

If you already have a user base and your product or service is an addition to many existing ones of yours, asking for feedback and insights for a little discount incentive from your customers is a must. If you did it right, you already have a social media following community and a newsletter community under your brand. Ask them what they think about your new product or service. 

If your product or service is entirely new or you are launching your company from scratch, turn to remote user research services. These companies offer you the chance to speak with actual would-be customers remotely.

How to build a public image/positioning

Positioning your company is crucial to your future success because ultimately, your position as a company will define your place in the market. If you don’t have a clear vision about yourself, what your company does and for whom you work, you will lose sight of your progress. However, positioning as a distributed company means much more than that. It will define your workflows and also the very foundations of your company structure.  

First, positioning matters because, with that, you can distinguish yourself from your competition. Also, as a distributed company, your positioning or brand image will be the first selling point for customers. As you don’t have a shopfront or you might not do any robust personal networking, your online presence is the only thing that keeps you in the loop. You should always maintain, change and rely on it.

There are three strategies to position yourself as a company. Of course, these are general concepts, so you always have to apply or combine them to fit your particular business needs.

1. The industry leader. This approach is excellent for those who can claim the such quality of service or expertise that can be fitted with this strategy. No matter your competition, you can argue that your business is the leader or expert in the field. However, there are two problems with this strategy: without relevant background, the leadership claim can’t be fitted, and second, this is the most common approach. It is hard to become an industry leader if you become one, and you might not need to claim the title at all. 

2. Industry pioneer. It is more fitted for those companies that have a creative, out-of-the-box, and innovative approach to their services. The innovative initiative is the very essence of your position, and you can share how differently you do the work. Hint here, by stating that you are a fully distributed company, and you are already a special one amongst others.  

3. The expert. It is excellent for those who are not dealing with an all-rounder approach and only focusing on one thing. If you are a digital production agency, you might be familiar with 360-approach, where you do pretty much anything that is digital. With the expert approach, you can do just one or maybe two types of work, i.e., you are a digital agency that’s focusing only on email marketing. The narrow focus gives you a competitive advantage, and as you are focusing only on one thing, you can claim expert status.

You can also combine the industry leader and pioneer categories or the expert and pioneer categories to get a more solid position.

However, positioning doesn’t stop here for a distributed company. A market position also affects you as a company. If you are transitioning from a traditional setup to a distributed company, you can streamline your operations with a new positioning approach. If you are an all-rounder digital production agency, you can narrow down not just your focus but your team as well, and only work with a small group of experts focusing on one thing. 

We have talked about transparency and its importance before, and I want to highlight that transparency also helps with positioning. With a transparently shared approach, you can design and publish thought leadership materials that can help you to claim the desired position on the market. Any inbound marketing materials you push out, whitepapers, webinars, surveys, blog posts, etc., all of them are tools in your hands in positioning. 

Having a solid vision of where you are and how you approach your industry will help you to attract more clients and raise more awareness about your business. With a stable position, it is also easier to market yourself online. Positioning your company should come after you have a clear vision of the market and your business model’s viability.  

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How to pivot the distributed business model

If you are an already established business with an office and a team in place, you have many options to test how to work remotely. Since the distributed model has one key element that differentiates it from classic business setups, you have to pivot the model with your and your team’s location.

Home office for everyone

Issue out home office for everyone. The longer you provide this opportunity, the more you will learn. Monitor the whole process and gather as much feedback from your colleagues on their experiences as possible. Do the work as you would do it in the office, do not change or deprioritize anything. Use the essential business tools that you would use to manage a fully distributed team – more on these tools later in this book. Everyone has to start working during office hours, but this time, everyone stays at home or in a co-working office. Provide co-working office expenses for those who need it – especially for those who have little kids at home. The key here: everyone has to ditch the office for a while but keep productivity levels regular.

• Before you do the pivot, set up the essential business tools the same way just like you had a fully distributed business. More on these tools later in detail.

• Do a full month. If you want, you can do one day first, then a week, and later a month.

• It is essential not to skip on the first days unless the productivity levels drop dramatically and there are severe issues with running the business.

• Most teams who worked in an office together before will lose productivity levels in the first days, even weeks. Don’t be afraid that is normal. Everyone has to learn the way to work online, and it doesn’t come naturally. Also, you are upsetting an established order here, so a small amount of chaos is mandatory.

• Openly share all the feedback with the team and try to learn from the mistakes: what went wrong, what the flaws were.

• Do not track time. Track projects and outputs. Some managers love to see their employees working in the office, and when they set up remote working, they insist on time tracking so that they can virtually monitor employees’ progress on current projects. Guess what: they do make progress. They often interrupt work with random duties, but at the end of the day, your project gets delivered. Remote workers work even more than office workers – they just spread the hours more widely in the day. So after all, the number of hours worked doesn’t matter. The outcome does matter though.

• Create a pivot report with all the feedback and survey your team members on how they felt about the one-month remote working. Analyze the findings and if you feel comfortable with the results and there’s a stabilization in the production levels in the second half of the remote working period and increased employee satisfaction within your team – then remote working is right for your company, and you can go full-on.

Hire someone remotely

Hire someone remotely and integrate them into your current team. If you have a new open position, consider hiring someone remotely. Make sure that you hire the right candidate – more on how to hire remotely later. Then once the new candidate is ready, have an onboarding session with the new employee. Treat him as you would treat a new employee, show them around in the office – at least virtually – and let them join meetings through video calls. Manage the projects with the new employee online. Meanwhile, gather feedback from your team on their experiences with working with someone remotely.

• Establish the same business tools to manage projects just like you had a fully remote team. Let your “normal” team adapt and accommodate the newly hired remote employee and not backward.

• The key with this pivot is not to find out if you can work with a remote employee. The key here is to find out whether your current team can work with a remote employee – therefore, whether they could work remotely.

• Usually, you will have glitches on your office team. If you hired someone remotely and you did it right – the candidate is already familiar with remote working. Your team, however, does not. Glitches are fixable. Make sure you will gather enough feedback and information on how they worked and what were the issues – so you can learn and solve them.

• After a month, sit down with your team – including the remote employee – and discuss the past month. If you think the pivot worked and you have successfully integrated the new remote employee into your team, and also your current team remained satisfied, you can go full remote now.

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How do you know if distributed business is right for you

At my company, Anywhere Consulting, we have a simple walkthrough process during which we help you to evaluate your business and assess whether implementing distributed business models can bring value. It is indeed not for everyone. There are three outcomes of the evaluation.

1. It’s not right for you. Simple as that. You don’t have any processes that are remote, and you won’t benefit from the new approach, even more, it would create chaos within your current setup which will cost you a massive setback. Only 10-20% of businesses fall into this category, mostly because their model is entirely offline – this is what makes them successful. Therefore, there’s no need to change. Another explanation is that the manager’s mindset is incompatible with the new model.

2. You can implement some techniques, but you can’t go fully distributed. The majority of businesses fall into this category. Your company still needs local or regional presence, but you can split your team into offline and remote groups, based on production cycles. The core team can be local or the account management or sales, areas where the very personal touch and networking are still helpful to get new business. However, anything else that is supportive, or production can be treated as a distributed leg of the company. It is much more like outsourcing as we’ve said ten years ago, although outsourcing does not involve good integration to the core team, therefore can’t be as productive as needed. The key in this scenario is to identify those points where distributed techniques can be introduced into the business and help business managers to implement these techniques.

3. You can go full remote. Only a handful of companies can do that. In this category, even the managers of the business are fully distributed around the globe, along with their teams. Tech startup companies are an excellent example of this, but I’ve seen traditional advertising agencies and digital development companies ditch the office and create a fully distributed team. At this level, everything depends on the managers of the business. If you make a full commitment to your decision, this will work. If you hesitate and don’t feel confident about the distributed model, this setup will be doomed.

Setting your goals and expectations

As every business is different, there are general screening options where it can be determined if the distributed business model can play a vital role in the business transformation. Details matter but the very first question I would ask any business owner who’s interested in this topic would be about their goals. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you are a digital advertising agency, based in Wichita, Kansas. You have a couple of clients, you enjoy your work and your business is stable, but you want to grow. If you're going to expand around the region or open up a shop in the nearest bigger city, a distributed business can help you by first hiring people there online but managing them from your hometown. You can open a new office as soon as your team is profitable enough. This way, you can reduce risk and keep cash flow intact when moving to another city or region. If you have bigger plans and you are serious that your services are cutting edge and you can stand out from the global market competition, you can go entirely distributed. You can build up a global team online and market your services around the globe, but still, keep a core team in Wichita. In the first option, you are slightly distributed, on the second option, you are entirely distributed. Each option needs different approaches and an altogether different focus from the managers. It is why goals matter.

Evaluating your current setup

Apart from goals, the second most important thing is your current setup. How do you find new business currently? What’s your method? If getting new business involves a lot of personal connections, you can’t ditch the personal touch. You still need to network offline. If your services can be visualized, reproduced, and sold online, you might not need anyone to stay in an office.

Most businesses keep a core account management and strategic team together in a smaller office while managing a team of distributed employees around the globe.

After new business, production comes. How do you serve your current clients? If your work involves a lot of repetitive, low-added-value processes that can be a) automated or b) outsourced to a cheaper workforce, you should consider distributed business to save money and allocate to more important parts of your business. If your current team has some weak links but you are struggling to find new talents, and the work is online, you should look into the options as well. In my experience, digital production, digital marketing, coding, software development, sometimes graphic design and UX, and certain parts of sales is entirely outsourced to a distributed team. However, of course, that depends on your current setup and level of comfort to outsource.

A company I used to work with, RebelMouse, is based in New York. They offer a social media CMS solution for media companies and brands. Initially, they had a big team in NYC and an even bigger one around the globe. The office team was made up of strategists, sales and account management, and all the senior people. The distributed team included a squad of developers and production. Eventually, they ditched the office entirely and went full remote. RebelMouse was a startup company with massive investments – but they turned profitable only when they went full remote. The business is still operational, and they serve clients in the US with this fully distributed setup. The new structure allowed them to become more flexible, and agile and they managed to accomplish their development sprints more efficiently.

How distributed structure can help you is entirely up to your current goals, setup, and level of comfort to go full-on with it. If you are not comfortable or confident in making this journey, there are some tests that you can do before committing.

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Challenges with distributed business

Building a business is not a piece of cake, and a great entrepreneur grows after each failure. Every business, every company setup, and every industry has its challenges. Some of these challenges are shared and literally, everyone has to face them. Some of them are unique to the type of business. If we take sales and marketing out of the picture and we strictly focus on business management, most companies have five key areas where they face challenges: communication, motivation, integration, retention, and transformation. Let’s inspect each of these challenges separately.

Challenges with communication

Almost every challenge a remote entrepreneur faces relates to communication. The manager lost the tracking of several projects because employees are not reporting back. A plan has stopped because of an underlying problem that hasn’t been flagged and communicated to the team. Conversations get lost – important information is on the company chat but not in the mailbox or cloud drive. Video meetings are inefficient because people don’t know how to do them properly. There are many other issues and flaws where communication is the root of the problem.

Communication also affects mostly all the other challenges. If the connection doesn’t work, motivation will be the first to fall, then the integrity of the team. An alive and happy distributed collaborative team can quickly turn into an offshore outsourcing center, where the only communication that happens internally is sending out briefs on projects and then getting reviews and revisions.

A company that has lousy communication policies has lower retention of their employees. It is also harder to transform or adapt to new challenges.

You need to be more structured with your communication. The reason is simple, and this is part of the unique concept of remote working: there is a little amount of room for ad-hoc watercooler office conversations where some essential things, brainstorming and corporate engagements happen ‘on-the-go’ and without any structure.

You have to work proactively to implement, maintain and strengthen communication policies within your distributed business.

Challenges with motivation

For employees, motivation is one of the biggest challenges. I can quote hundreds of studies on how large percentages of employees don’t feel motivated at work and how many hours per day get wasted on unmotivated meaningless imitation of work. However, remote employees are always a bit more motivated to do their job because they enjoy the benefits of being remote employees, which we have already discussed previously. However, entrepreneurs still have to find a way to keep the motivation flowing. From an entrepreneur’s perspective, motivation is different, and to know why we have to clarify what we mean by motivation.

Motivation is being able to work on a job on your terms, set goals to achieve and gain success by completing them. Now, small words here matter own terms, goals, and progress. How can a business owner screw this up?

For one, and this is way beyond the most significant issue: they don’t give space to their employees. We all know the C-level manager who does junior-level tasks because he just “can’t let it go.” A micromanager boss is even more dangerous than an unpredictable boss. It instantly kills the motivation in everyone. This micromanagement is even more of an issue in remote working because while the entrepreneur had the physical office where all the employees worked, with remote work, there is no office. By not seeing how others are working, some entrepreneurs react with intense micromanagement. It is one of the most significant flaws – you have to provide autonomy for your people.

In goal-setting, the purpose is super essential for everyone. Communicating a clear mission for your employees is vital for the company.

The more transparent your business, the easier will be for every employee to relate.

They see the company’s goals, and they can integrate those goals into their plans. Everyone needs a purpose to stay motivated, so share the business goals publicly and help your employees to identify their personal goals.

Finally, success. That is the easiest but sometimes forgotten part. Even the most introverted employee needs a hug when accomplishing a goal. That virtual hug can be anything, an email, a ‘nice one’ on the team call, or even more. The higher the goal they achieved, the bigger the compensation should be. Share the joy of success with everyone. Entrepreneurs often forget to celebrate their employees.

Challenges with integration

First day in the office? Depending on the size of the company, that first day or even days spent in the same way for everyone. Getting familiar with new faces, new tools, new setups, new goals, and a unique atmosphere. It is the same with remote work and distributed businesses, except that the things that occur in an office naturally don’t happen online much. So again, being proactive and setting up apparent processes for onboarding a new employee or even a new client, is crucial for a distributed business.

What if you fail to do this? You have been working in a remote environment for weeks or even months, and you still don’t recognize some of the names cc-d on emails – that’s not a good sign. Most employees will feel that they are not part of the team, are not valued, not integrated. It leads to decreased motivation and lowers employee retention.

By having a transparent and repeatable onboarding process in place, you can not only save time but also help your newcomers to integrate into the fabric of your company, to feel valued, and to become part of the team.

Challenges with retention

We have talked about communication, motivation, and integration. These are all leading to one single challenge: retaining your employees.

Companies that have lower retention rates are less successful. How could you be successful if the team around you changes constantly and you have to spend a valuable amount of time hiring new people all day long?

People are leaving a company for several reasons, but the main one would be valuation. More precisely, the lack of thereof. Being valued is not an individual perception or a matter of taste – everyone wants the same: a satisfying work environment, achieved and respected goals and gracious compensation for all the hard work and effort.

All of the above, communication, motivation, and integration add to the company culture. If your company culture is a welcoming, transparent, collaborative, and self-respecting culture, you have higher retention of your employees. If you are a micromanager who looks to their remote employees as offshore outsourcing bots that you can use to achieve your own goals for less money – you won’t be building a successful company.

Challenges with transformation

A distributed business is super flexible, as we have discussed before. Also,… it is not to everyone’s taste. Especially those who spent the majority of their career in the 90s and spent it in traditional offices – flexibility means something else.

A distributed business can be scaled up pretty fast but also, scaled down instantly.

As an entrepreneur, you have to make decisions either way. You have to be comfortable with your decisions, and the decisions shouldn’t be affected by the urge, rage, panic, or any hardcore emotion. You have to rely on your knowledge and logic. For those who tend to adapt more slowly to new environments, flexibility is one of the most fearful challenges.

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Benefits of a distributed business

There are multiple benefits if you are running a distributed business. You are no longer limited by your location, which opens up a vast number of new opportunities. You can also be much more flexible, which helps you to overcome competitors and grow beyond limits.

However, you will most likely be working with a distributed team. There is a subtle difference between working remotely and running a business. It is the border between being a freelancer and being an entrepreneur. To create a successful distributed business you not only have to know the benefits of both sides but also have to align and correlate them to produce an “everybody wins” scenario for all participants.

Reclaim your freedom

Let’s start with the obvious as we are talking about remote work: location. If you are an employee, the first main benefit you receive is the lack of commute. If you live in a big city, a 1-hour commute to the office from your home is average. That is 2 hours of travel – every day. Apart from the apparent money reasons, spending money on gas or public transport, time is the main pain point. If someone works 5 days a week, 10 hours are spent on the train or in a car. That’s one work day. Also, the 1-hour-commute is considered a good average, and if you live in a vital location, somewhere in London, New York, or San Fransisco, this can easily extend to 2-hours or even more.

So working remotely is reclaiming your time.

You can spend this time in various ways, no matter if you are the owner of the company or an employee, you can recover your time.

Reclaim your autonomy

Autonomy is the second obvious benefit. You can work not just wherever you want, but whenever you want. Of course, there are some limitations. People think that this suddenly found freedom will lead to no work-at-all, but the opposite is true. If there’s motivation to work, remote workers work more than workers tied to fix work hours and an office.

By letting employees work on their terms, you will most likely end up with employees who work harder and in more diverse working hours.

Reclaim your focus

Speaking of work, the focus is also a significant benefit. However, this is a misunderstood concept. People usually think that a remote worker doesn’t have interruptions like chitchats and water cooler conversations or popping out for lunch. However, this is not true, even if you work from home, you have the same small interruptions, plus, you have access to the internet anyway, which is the most significant source of disruption.

The main benefit here is the lack of lengthy disruption – so-called pointless and meaningless office meetings.

I remember when I was working for a big global advertising agency in London, one day I had 3 hours of actual work – the rest spent on meetings. All of them were utterly pointless, and the whole agenda could have been discussed over email or a series of short stand-up meetings. As a remote worker, you don’t have that, which gives you the ability to focus on broad, meaningful work. Think things through, dive deep into a problem to find a solution, or just like this book for me – write for hours with continuous focus. This reclamation of your attention is key to your success.

Reclaim your money

Besides reclaiming more time, focus, and freedom, you can also retrieve a lot of money. No matter if you are a freelancer or an entrepreneur, you have two ways to reclaim the money. Salaries and office costs. As an entrepreneur, you don’t need to pay for a big office with all of its supplies. When I had my own office with my company, I paid for workstations, office rent, and tons of other supplies. With a distributed business, I pay for online tools, and that’s it. I save an enormous amount of money. Also, you pay less for remote workers. However, I always want to highlight this: you pay for the same knowledge and skills you would pay for a typical office worker so the difference between standard and remote salaries shouldn’t be a big gap. It is shrinking now, and the two salaries are close to each other, an excellent skilled developer could earn almost as much in cash as a developer in the Bay Area. As a freelancer, you don’t need to spend money on commute and supplies that come with it. You are probably eating out on a daily basis in cafes and delis and business lunch menus. Half of the internet’s money management sites are about this topic: how to save money on your work and cut back costs like eating out. If you are working from home, all of this will change. So if you are someone from a location with a lower average cost of living, you can earn above the average salaries in your region with remote work.

So ultimately, either you are a business owner or a solo freelancer, you will have more money in your pocket with remote working.

Reclaim your control

Overall, I think the most significant benefit of running a remote business contradicts the biggest fear of every entrepreneur. That fear is the lack of control. No actual office, just a laptop, and people who are working with you online – you don’t have control over your business. The opposite is, and that is the most significant benefit of the remote business. You gain so much more power.

You reclaim time, focus, freedom, and money which you can use to grow your business. You have unlimited control and flexibility with your company.

Of course, some people are afraid of this amount of freedom. There are no excuses if you don’t succeed. You can’t just “disappear” into the office and pretend to work. To me, a distributed business is the ultimate frontier, full freedom, I can do anything I want to grow my business, and nothing interrupts, limits, or pulls me back from success. It is right for failures as well – if my company fails, it is my fault. I had all the resources, time, and opportunities to succeed.

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The problems with traditional business setup

Entrepreneurs have to face many issues every day. As an SME, you’ve indeed realized that competition is higher than ever, innovation costs skyrocket, plus hiring and building your team requires enormous efforts. Solving issues and staying on top of the game have severe financial implications for the company. 

For you as a startup, entering the market needs more planning and even more cost-efficient solutions. It’s not like storming through the door anymore. Even if you’re lucky to have full funding for your idea, building a new business is insanely hard today. 

Businesses may encounter various types of problems. There’s the product & service problem when your product or service has some issues. This book won’t help to solve it as this problem exists in traditional and distributed businesses as well. There’s a marketing problem when you have a great product or service, but your sales are struggling. However, doing sales and marketing online can be more effective than traditional ways – this book only touches the surface. 

Moreover, there’s the limitation problem. Location limits businesses. In business, location means access. You have limited access to tools, opportunities, and talents which limits your potential to grow. This book covers the techniques to overcome this limitation. 

Limited by location

Do business where you are – but what if you are anywhere? I genuinely think the location is the most crucial factor that determines the success of a company, apart from its product. Even more, if you have a great product but you are in the wrong location, no one will work for you or buy your product. 

Your location can determine three primary factors of your business: your cashflow, your team, and your growth. Solving the first issue usually involves the solution of the other two questions as well. 

Your location means access. Access to a market, a group of prospects, and a pool of talent. No matter where your office is, you will lose cash in some way. 

Let me show you an example. Let’s say you are a tech company based in a tech hub. We don’t even need to think about the Bay Area here, though that would be the perfect example. Let’s say you are in one of the critical tech hubs somewhere in the U.S. You spend insane amounts on office space. The living expenses are super high, so you have to pay yourself and your local team members a very competitive salary. Most of these tech hubs also have high taxes and every other service charge final prices. Overall, even though you have a talented and kickass team with a great office, you are losing tons of money in cash flow which limits your growth potential. Of course, having a fully backed company by investors can help, or you might be the next pink unicorn – but chances are, you aren’t. Of course, with this high price, you will gain access to a broader pool of talent and opportunities. 

Now let’s look at the situation from another perspective. Let's say you have a tech company based in a small town in the U.S. Your costs are low as there’s weaker competition, plus the services are also cheaper there. However, you have limited access to new clients or better talent. No matter where you are, you will have some competition, and in time, you will see that the clients you have access to are circling you and your competitors. You might be able to step out of the town of your and cover the region with your services, but in time, this growth is still slow and low. Also, hiring new talents is insanely hard as most of the ability has already left the area for the high-paying tech hubs – even if you can find great talent, you have to pay much more to keep and retain them. Otherwise, you will stick to mediocre team members, which also affects your growth potential. Overall, even if you are not losing as much money from your cash flow as you would be in a vital tech hub, you will lose in the long run by limiting your growth potential with your location. 

There are five areas where a business can lose money: infrastructure – office space and tools that are needed to get things done – they all cost money. Production – anything that is required to manufacture your product or maintain your service; if you are in the service industry, this amount will be significantly less than if you have a product or shop. Payroll costs a lot: team salaries and other team-related services. There is the management cost – things that are needed to run the business, including taxes. Also, finally, sales – anything related to marketing your business.

Your location means access.

If you are a traditional business, in general, you have around 20% allocation in each of these areas. Your expenses align according to that, 20% on infrastructure, 20% on production, 20% on the team, and 20-20% on management and sales.  

If you are not limited by location, you have full access to everything plus you also don’t need some of these areas at a 20% allocation. It doesn’t mean that going along this way, you will spend less on your business, everything will become cheaper, and you will win by saving a ton of money. It is the greatest misconception with distributed business and remote working. 

If you are not limited by location, you have more freedom to balance this 20% allocation. You ditch the office and most of your infrastructure costs, but you still need tools to get things done. Let’s say you reduce that cost to 10%. You need to keep the production costs at 20% because it will affect your service. You incorporate in a more business-friendly location and reduce management costs and taxes by 10%. You then end up with an extra 20% to allocate to team and sales. On your side, you will pay the same amount of salaries but for better talent. You might pay less for repetitive administrative work than you’d do now but still, you spend the same amount overall. On sales, you have more cash in hand, which will drive your growth forward. 

Ultimately, having a distributed business won’t save you money, but it does give you more freedom to become more flexible and the opportunity to focus your business assets where they can provide more value to you. 

Flexibility is the luxury of those who have full access to everything. By ditching your office and widening your location coverage, you will have more access to tools, talent, and prospects, which can help you grow your business in the long run.

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