Dan Martell - How To Build Your Remote Team

00:00:00.000 I'm just genuinely curious, like I've been on so many video chat calls, I'm just

00:00:07.720 curious how many of those people weren't wearing pants.

00:00:17.000 How to build a killer remote team for your startup. You know, I think that the

00:00:22.760 biggest challenge in today's businesses is literally hiring. Great talent. If you

00:00:27.720 If you live in a small town like I grew up in,

00:00:29.760 you probably have nobody in your team,

00:00:32.560 in your vicinity, in your region, for that matter,

00:00:36.760 that have specialized expertise around marketing

00:00:40.100 and product and engineering,

00:00:42.440 and all these really unique aspects

00:00:44.600 of building great companies today.

00:00:46.380 So if you're trying to hire and you don't have the budget,

00:00:49.280 or you're trying to find specialized skills,

00:00:51.320 it's super tough.

00:00:52.620 Now imagine if there was a world

00:00:54.680 where the talent was plentiful,

00:00:58.000 that you could reach out and connect

00:01:00.160 and have your problems solved,

00:01:01.380 that you were able to hire people at a third of the cost.

00:01:05.200 This reality exists, it just requires you

00:01:07.980 to build a team in a distributed fashion.

00:01:11.280 In today's video, I wanna share with you guys

00:01:13.200 the five specific strategies that you need

00:01:16.520 to build an incredible world-class distributed team.

00:01:20.040 Now, I've been building companies with remote workers

00:01:23.160 ever since I started my first company, Sphere.

00:01:25.220 We were an enterprise consulting company

00:01:27.100 and we literally had people working

00:01:29.040 in every province in Canada.

00:01:31.160 Yes, I'm Canadian for those that didn't know.

00:01:33.200 Surprise.

00:01:34.480 I do say A in a boot from time to time.

00:01:37.140 But we literally had people all over Canada

00:01:39.840 working with our customers in the US.

00:01:41.880 So that was the beginning of me at 24 years old

00:01:44.620 building that team, scaling it up to 30 employees

00:01:46.980 in a four year period of just understanding

00:01:49.180 how all this comes together.

00:01:50.280 And then when I moved to San Francisco

00:01:52.020 and started my venture-backed company, Flowtown,

00:01:54.820 and really trying to build that initial product

00:01:57.320 and scaling out the team.

00:01:58.720 You know, in a city like San Francisco,

00:02:00.460 the talent is fierce.

00:02:02.160 The competition for world-class people is real.

00:02:05.760 So if you can build a strategy like SlideShare,

00:02:08.360 where they had most of their engineering in India,

00:02:11.280 you can build a competitive process.

00:02:12.780 Companies like GitHub, Automatic, who builds WordPress,

00:02:15.980 all these companies now have huge distributed teams.

00:02:18.780 Some of you guys might know of Basecamp,

00:02:21.120 37 Signals, Distributed Team.

00:02:23.680 You know, even more recently with Clarity,

00:02:25.160 because our marketplace was kind of global in nature,

00:02:28.420 we had people doing calls every day,

00:02:30.200 thousands of calls every day across the world,

00:02:33.300 we had to build our team with a distributed structure.

00:02:36.400 So I'm gonna walk you through exactly how we've done that,

00:02:39.140 how we created a culture that not only was,

00:02:43.040 I think, incredible, I think it was competitive.

00:02:46.040 And the process is really simple.

00:02:47.480 So number one, you gotta hire self-starters.

00:02:50.480 I don't care who you are.

00:02:51.480 There's literally people that can't work from home.

00:02:55.480 They can't do it.

00:02:56.480 Every time they walk by the kitchen,

00:02:58.480 they want to get something to eat.

00:02:59.980 Or they see a sock on the ground,

00:03:01.480 and they go ding dong, I gotta go do my laundry.

00:03:03.980 Or somebody comes to the door,

00:03:05.480 and they stop what they're doing,

00:03:06.480 and they rush to the door and answer it.

00:03:07.980 Or they have their kids around,

00:03:09.480 or their spouse, or whatever it is,

00:03:11.480 or they decide that they just don't feel like working,

00:03:13.480 so they're gonna jump in their car and go get some food.

00:03:15.480 literally some people cannot work from home.

00:03:18.380 Those people are not a good fit for distributed teams.

00:03:20.520 So I just really just boil it down to self-starters.

00:03:23.720 Does this person take initiative, look for ideas,

00:03:26.860 can get hyper-focused, can grind,

00:03:29.260 can put their heads down and produce work?

00:03:32.360 Now I'm gonna give you the structure to manage those people

00:03:34.340 because asking for that without actually providing them

00:03:37.500 clear direction is not gonna work either.

00:03:39.580 So number two is being able to hire specialists.

00:03:43.640 So the other thing that I think about distributed teams,

00:03:46.100 remote teams, is that you can hire people

00:03:48.520 that have a specialty, you don't need them full time.

00:03:51.260 Whereas I feel like when you hire somebody locally,

00:03:53.420 you know, if they're not employed,

00:03:54.320 like they need employment, they need full time work.

00:03:56.800 What I love about remote, especially consultants,

00:03:59.400 is that you can just bring them in for a special project

00:04:01.900 or you can bring them in for like 10 hours a week

00:04:03.820 and they can keep working with you for that long.

00:04:06.120 So second thing that's really powerful is hiring specialists.

00:04:10.040 Now third, you gotta make sure

00:04:11.200 that you have clear objectives for them, okay?

00:04:14.000 If you hire somebody and you're just like,

00:04:15.880 oh, go work on the website and let me know

00:04:17.640 how things are going, you're gonna get frustrated.

00:04:20.200 You're gonna be six weeks in, two months in,

00:04:22.120 and go, what have you been working on?

00:04:23.720 I've been paying you every two weeks,

00:04:25.380 but I'm not really seeing any output or product

00:04:28.280 because it's different when you work in a company.

00:04:30.760 When you're in the office and people are working

00:04:33.680 and you see them whiteboarding and they're in meetings

00:04:35.460 and you talk to them at the water cooler

00:04:36.620 and you see them at lunch and you're kinda keeping pace.

00:04:39.060 If you don't build a structure where you can get

00:04:40.960 that feedback loop of where they're at,

00:04:42.660 where they're going and what they're stuck on.

00:04:44.560 So you need a clear objective when you work

00:04:46.960 with Distribute Team.

00:04:47.800 I'm gonna talk about the tools and the communication strategy,

00:04:49.740 but just understanding where they're at

00:04:52.040 and what they should be working on, that is key.

00:04:54.080 Number four is use video.

00:04:56.340 I do this in many different ways.

00:04:57.920 Sometimes I'll use GoToMeeting if it's a bigger team meeting.

00:05:00.980 More recently I've been using Zoom

00:05:02.620 because Zoom is an incredible product,

00:05:04.660 especially for Distribute, you can do up to 100 people.

00:05:07.520 Imagine team meetings, you can up to 100 people

00:05:10.520 on one Zoom session and have somebody present,

00:05:13.060 somebody else jump on and their videos keep switching

00:05:15.500 and swapping, it's recorded and it's distributed

00:05:17.660 and it's fast and it's easy, it's mobile.

00:05:19.800 So you can have a 100 person video distributed meeting,

00:05:24.660 but to me video's important because you can see somebody

00:05:27.700 eye to eye, right?

00:05:28.700 You can see their face, you can have that conversation.

00:05:30.700 Now it does not replace in person.

00:05:32.900 I'm gonna share a tip at the end of this video,

00:05:35.080 but I highly recommend that you try to use video

00:05:37.240 as much as you can.

00:05:39.220 Now, the fifth area is you have to have

00:05:41.520 project management software.

00:05:43.000 See, even if you have 80% of your team distributed

00:05:46.160 or remote or virtual, whatever word you want to use,

00:05:49.840 if you're working in an office,

00:05:51.540 you still want to act like you're not together.

00:05:54.360 Meaning that if the person just stops by your desk

00:05:56.400 and says, hey, do you got a minute?

00:05:57.740 You got to start asking yourself,

00:05:59.040 well, if we have this conversation,

00:06:00.940 what about the other people that aren't here

00:06:02.940 that probably need to be aware of this?

00:06:04.680 So maybe we don't have the one-on-one conversation.

00:06:06.780 Instead, we push it to the project management software.

00:06:08.820 Maybe we would push it to a Slack channel

00:06:10.580 or a HipChat channel or some kind of chat software

00:06:12.700 that you have.

00:06:13.540 Again, it sounds funny because you could be literally

00:06:16.360 sitting in front of the person at a desk,

00:06:18.480 but you gotta think it's not about that conversation.

00:06:21.340 It's about capturing those concepts of discussions

00:06:25.200 and the results or the outcomes or the decisions

00:06:28.020 and putting them in a place where other people can see them.

00:06:30.320 So having a project management software,

00:06:33.060 and you can use an Asana or Trello or Basecamp

00:06:36.180 or whatever you wanna use,

00:06:37.280 but having something online that the whole team has access to

00:06:40.780 where they can see everybody, what they're working on,

00:06:42.780 and having a simple communication process

00:06:45.680 where you just let people know.

00:06:47.020 If you start working on something, you log it in the chat.

00:06:49.680 Wherever the project sits, you log it.

00:06:51.220 So you say, I'm starting on this.

00:06:52.540 Here's where I'm at.

00:06:53.320 I'm done for the day.

00:06:54.240 And it just creates a very simple activity log

00:06:56.520 of what everybody's working on.

00:06:58.320 As a manager, number one tip, okay?

00:07:00.780 I wanna leave you guys with this.

00:07:02.320 You need to ask your team what are they waiting on,

00:07:05.840 from who or what information, and are they blocked?

00:07:09.020 So a lot of people do daily stand-ups

00:07:10.580 asking the question, are you blocked?

00:07:12.440 The leader's role, especially in a distributed team,

00:07:15.120 remote structure, you need to ask people

00:07:17.080 where they're blocked so you can help them get unblocked,

00:07:19.420 move things forward, and really continue

00:07:21.880 to scale the business.

00:07:23.600 So real quick recap, you want to make sure

00:07:26.500 that you hire self-starters, okay?

00:07:28.460 Don't hire people that need to be monitored

00:07:31.240 and controlled and you don't trust.

00:07:33.600 You need people that are self-starters.

00:07:34.760 You need to look at specialists, not always full time

00:07:38.100 because full times cost a lot of money.

00:07:39.540 A specialist might come in for five to 10 hours a week

00:07:42.460 and still get you moving forward in your business.

00:07:44.740 You've got to use video to connect to really ensure

00:07:47.840 that the person on the other end

00:07:49.840 understands the communication.

00:07:51.440 A lot of things get lost in tech, so use video.

00:07:54.380 Four is have clear objections, okay?

00:07:57.580 The objectives, objections.

00:07:59.020 You need to have an objection.

00:08:00.320 It's like, no, objectives for your business.

00:08:03.380 So they start here, this is where they're going

00:08:05.560 and you monitor their progress and chime in.

00:08:08.560 And finally, you've gotta use project management software

00:08:12.940 to connect, to collaborate, to communicate with your team

00:08:16.200 and sure everybody's on the same page.

00:08:17.820 And as I said before, leaders unblock their team players.

00:08:22.620 It doesn't matter if they're local or distributed,

00:08:24.580 that is your job as a leader.

00:08:26.500 As per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life

00:08:28.860 and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.

00:08:31.140 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe

00:08:33.080 to my channel to get other tips and strategies

00:08:35.220 on how to start and grow your business.

00:08:36.580 I'd also encourage you to join my newsletter

00:08:38.720 where I share exclusive invites,

00:08:40.680 free entrepreneurial training and other community contests.

00:08:43.760 And if you want to keep going,

00:08:45.020 I got two videos queued up, ready for you right now.

00:08:48.000 See you next Monday.

Dan Martell - May 22, 2017

How To Build Your Remote Team

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