How To Scale a Remote Business with Liam Martin @ Time Doctor - Escape Velocity Show #45
Episode Stats
Words per minute
174.46379
Harmful content
Misogyny
11
sentences flagged
Toxicity
15
sentences flagged
Hate speech
3
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, we're joined by the CEO of a mermaid company that's on track to hit $500M in sales this year. We talk about how he got started with the business, why he thinks mermaids are a good fit for his company, and why he doesn't want to go back to his day job.
Transcript
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This turned into a very interesting podcast quite quickly.
00:00:40.140
Yeah, she teaches people how to be mermaids.
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Yeah, there's no bigger influencer than her in mermaiding,
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Well, I would take it's a subset of people that
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What do you think of just the mermaid tail sales per year are?
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I'm going to do some math in my head, and we're going to go 50 million.
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It is one of those little niches that you don't know is that deep
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And it's been really fun for me to do the reverse.
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Because you've been helping her with marketing and stuff.
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it's a mermaid company and seeing whether those same fundamentals exist apply apply i had that
00:02:02.320
same experience with my brother with the home building i'm uh you know brick and mortar versus
00:02:06.460
ones and zeros it's so interesting and it actually it's like a dessert business it's kind of like a
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oh okay let's see if i can do this let's kind of stretch myself a little bit in this direction what
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do you mean by dessert business so running remote thanks for the coffee man this is awesome no
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Running remote is what I consider my dessert business.
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Put in, can I afford to give eight hours a week to this?
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If I can, and I can actually delegate it to the point
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Any more time, if I see it starting to work into the main
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then I really need to do an assessment and figure out, OK,
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is this something that I really want to do in a bigger way?
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that could be bigger than what our software companies are
00:03:06.780
And to be honest with you, going into a conference,
00:03:09.880
it's not a very profitable business model fundamentally.
00:03:12.820
Like if you're doing a good job, you're doing a 20% net.
00:03:17.060
Yeah, that's like in the top 10% of conferences.
00:03:19.500
So if you're breaking even, you're pretty happy with that.
00:03:24.960
So that's something that I need to be mindful of
00:03:31.860
You know it's not always the best thing for you,
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see that as helping her as a dessert business for you
00:03:46.360
So like men and women or partners in business together.
00:03:51.640
I don't know whether or not that mixes very well.
00:03:55.460
So I've been, I would say the majority of our fights
00:04:02.680
have been, and we don't fight, are around business issues.
00:04:08.740
So I've kind of decided I'm going to put this in a little box.
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she had an IP issue with one of her competitors, right?
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And within six hours, she had to very publicly take it down
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because she's just a ready, fire, aim type of person,
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But sometimes you step on a couple people's toes.
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I think this is going to actually bite you in the ass.
1.00
00:05:05.140
But that's just the way that those relationships work.
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That's totally fine, because we've already discussed this.
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So my mindset is, we might as well put it all out there.
00:05:16.540
OK, but you were going to tell a story of how you met her,
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So she shows up at the front desk, and she says,
00:06:03.400
OK, this is interesting, because I know Jason very well.
00:06:06.140
And I think most of you will forget Chandler Bolt.
00:06:13.880
Lots of great people, you know, and it's just sort of like.
00:06:16.820
So she, they told her, oh, well, why don't you go?
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So she then went over to the videographer, Gebs.
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Then she said, well, I was sent by the front desk
00:07:01.320
She said that I was very kind of transactional in the way
00:07:05.160
that I interacted with people, which may have been correct.
00:07:08.700
I remember going into that event just being like, wow,
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That was when we just started Time Doctor and Staff.com
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But then I said, oh man, this girl's really cute.
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And it's like seven years later, I don't know, six years later.
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I think I actually did tell Jason a couple of years ago.
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I just find this so fascinating because clearly I was there.
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Well, I didn't know how to tell it without, you know.
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It's one of those things where you want to be raw,
00:08:06.740
But the fun fact, for those that don't know this,
00:08:10.860
is not only was it the first time I told it because of the big,
00:08:20.780
who was a world-class speaker, so he totally deserved it.
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And I was like, don't let them leave until I talk to them.
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Because she said, I had no clue, but now it makes sense.
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was it a pivotal event for me, but for other people,
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And, you know, I think about you a lot in that context of where you came from and where you are now.
00:09:04.560
And not to necessarily be disingenuous, but like life's been pretty easy for me overall.
00:09:10.860
I'm very successful. I'm very happy of where I am right now.
00:09:16.700
But I didn't I wasn't dealt the cards that you were dealt at the beginning of that process.
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And if I were dealt those cards, I don't know where I'd be right now.
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And I think, and you do a lot of work about this as well.
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I don't know where the majority of those people are.
00:09:39.580
You know, that's something that I think about a lot because I try to figure out, like, what are those people in society that have been dealt that bad hand and where can they go?
00:09:51.240
And you're an example of success, but there are plenty of people that haven't, you know, they've been dealt the same cards and they didn't get to where you are right now.
00:09:59.440
Well, so there's Jason, actually, Gaynard, same guy, MMT, invited a bunch of friends to do the Hustle 2.0 event, which is in prison in the U.S.
00:10:12.920
um, what prison was north of LA. And so we go into this prison, we spend a day with, uh, they don't
00:10:21.120
like to call them inmates. They call them, um, incarcerated individuals or, you know, offenders.
00:10:26.460
They just don't like the word inmate. And, uh, we do this program. And one of the exercises that
00:10:32.260
we do is called a step to the line. So step to the line is you have all the volunteers,
00:10:38.060
all the volunteers are entrepreneurs. Okay. So a lot of the people you would have met at, uh,
00:10:46.240
the incarcerated individuals, which are between 22.
00:11:02.260
Things like, step to the line if you've ever drank.
00:11:15.820
Step to the line if you were raised by a single parent.
00:11:20.560
Step to the line if you've ever committed a crime
00:11:28.300
Which, I mean, if you've ever, most of us have, right?
00:11:34.120
to see this where both parties step to the line, right?
00:11:40.340
And everybody that's on the line that is not in there,
00:11:48.340
Steps in line if you've ever had a sibling die,
00:11:57.900
to just demonstrate, I think, what you're saying is
00:12:12.300
And some of us had people show up in their lives like I had.
00:12:14.760
I had an incredible person named Brian that took me aside
00:12:17.640
and shared some words with me that transformed my life.
00:12:25.740
and I appreciate it, because I think about it all the time.
00:12:28.480
Because my work with kids, it's like, what was it?
00:12:33.960
Because if I knew, I would obviously love to share it.
00:12:39.120
Yeah, my mother's a schoolteacher, or she was a schoolteacher.
00:12:43.100
And the amount of kids that she saw going through that she just knew
00:12:49.120
without someone coming in to make that course correction,
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they're moving in this direction in their lives.
00:12:55.340
And the vast majority of the time, she's right.
00:12:59.380
Did she feel like that's what she saw as it was somebody came into that child's life?
00:13:04.700
Well, so she was always telling me the horror stories, right?
00:13:08.560
Like the kid whose father murdered the wife, the mother, and was disposing of the body over a couple weeks while the kid is in the house.
00:13:20.580
And the psychological damage that that type of child experiences in the fifth grade.
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And my mother has no psychologist, no sociologist, no social worker.
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It's just her as the primary, you know, caregiver to be able to make sure that this kid is OK because they're being managed by their grandparents, that kind of thing.
00:13:44.480
How do you and there's plenty of people that are damaged to some degree.
00:13:53.360
And I could say, well, there's definitely things that have happened in my life that have produced damage, but not to the same, not in the same degree to like the vast majority of people.
00:14:05.640
And trauma, my success stems from having a proper upbringing, you know, having an environment that's really great for me to be able to succeed.
00:14:26.360
But there was no point in which I was just in a high speed
00:14:30.200
chase with a key of coke in the back and a gun.
00:14:42.280
And it happens even to people that work for me.
00:14:46.180
And I try to think to myself, well, how can I actually like,
00:14:48.840
we had someone just recently who, about a year and a half ago,
00:14:53.220
that they were addicted to some restricted substances.
00:15:09.820
So how do you get that person to make that course correction?
00:15:18.440
I do a lot better, obviously, with the ones that are ready for that change.
00:15:28.140
I mean, those are the ones that I just, it's, and I like, I feel for this, this person that, that, uh, that's worked with us for years.
00:15:42.980
could I have come in three months earlier and possibly drop the hammer down and maybe things
00:15:50.100
would have been different you know you think about that and you think because you know we have about
00:15:54.100
100 people right now in 32 different countries all over the world it's very difficult to be able
00:15:58.900
to manage their day in day out of their lives yeah so there's a lot of other variables that
00:16:03.620
we measure from an HR perspective to make sure that they're okay and and even I have you know
00:16:09.100
I have friends of mine that have gone that direction as well,
00:16:18.600
Could I have made that change two weeks earlier,
00:16:36.360
I think that's at least the way that I want to interpret it.
00:16:41.160
And a good friend of mine, entrepreneur, killed himself.
00:16:55.340
And where he went wrong, I remember talking to him two weeks before he did it.
00:17:01.560
And I remember there were definite signs that something was going wrong.
00:17:05.060
and i was in hong kong because i was i had this fantastic i have this fantastic lifestyle i'm so
00:17:12.960
happy like i'm just incredibly happy as a person and uh i remember him saying oh yeah everything's
00:17:20.760
great you know i said well why don't you he ran an entrepreneur group i said you could use our
00:17:25.760
office space if you wanted to kind of i was trying to get him re-motivated and he said no no everything's
00:17:30.000
fine. Everything's fine. And, you know, nothing was fine. So where do you go with that? Was that
00:17:35.960
too late? Should I have spoken to him six months ago, a year ago? Was there something else that I
00:17:40.780
could have done? Um, and when I talked to my therapist, the answer is no. The answer is there
00:17:46.940
are people who, there are people who kill themselves and there are people who talk about
00:17:51.840
killing themselves. And unfortunately those are two very separate groups. Separate people. Yeah.
00:17:56.840
So the people that are going to kill themselves do it.
00:18:00.900
And they usually don't give you very good signs beforehand
00:18:05.520
And suicide is a massive epidemic in our society.
00:18:09.660
And it's also massively over-represented in entrepreneurs.
00:18:21.780
that is probably a pretty important component of your job.
00:18:25.440
And you're dealing with these high-level performers
00:18:36.300
Maybe they put that down in their box deep down,
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Two things can go wrong, maybe you're in a bad mood.
00:18:52.940
Especially if you have your identity tied up in the business.
00:18:56.780
I just had a client call me, just reach out to me a couple weeks ago.
00:19:00.440
And usually I can tell when the email is like, we need to talk.
00:19:05.000
And we get on the call and he shared with me, you know, like I've been drinking way too much.
00:19:13.120
And I'm like spiraling and I don't know how to stop it.
00:19:17.340
And you mentioned, you know, quickly that you talked to your therapist.
00:19:19.760
Like, you know, I think it's one of those things where I'm
00:19:28.980
I think I have a responsibility to set the example.
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You know, and I think that there's some leading habits
00:19:34.100
that are positive, like working out and feeding your mind
00:19:37.660
and surrounding yourself with the right people.
00:19:39.280
And those are kind of like outside of the tactical things
00:19:45.580
I put in there because talking about getting a therapist
00:19:53.520
But in that case, I say, I talk about my therapist a lot
00:19:59.560
And that's like what I said, because I was like, dude,
00:20:02.880
there's things that I'm not qualified to support you on.
00:20:09.220
Like when we started digging into why he unfortunately
00:20:12.060
had a family member take his life as well a couple of years
00:20:21.340
was that he didn't feel deserving of his success.
00:20:27.420
and started sabotaging himself, his relationship,
00:20:46.440
why are you not doing that? And actually I figured out a good technique, at least for myself to be
00:20:52.160
able to get past that, which is if it's, if it's the thing that you don't want to do,
00:20:56.600
usually the moment you do it, you immediately feel better. Like going to the gym. Yeah. Like
00:21:03.260
ripping off a bandaid, right? It's just sort of like, you know, it's the right thing. It's hard.
00:21:07.400
But once you do it, letting somebody go, I make videos of myself when I haven't been to the gym
00:21:13.140
in a while and uh the gym that i have is open till midnight so a couple years ago i made a
00:21:19.160
commitment to go into the gym every single day so just walk in i can walk right back out yeah
00:21:24.660
just get in the door yeah so that's been actually a challenge recently um that has been a big issue
00:21:30.400
for me and is going to the gym is going to the gym yeah uh i lost my workout partner so that's
00:21:36.820
just a major part of just that reliability that routine to be able to get back into it and i've
00:21:44.900
Actually, I was able to work out in Cairo a week ago
00:21:53.400
that I'm able to experience, which are just mind-blowing
00:22:06.680
after I get out of the gym talking about how great I feel
00:22:14.560
No, I'm just like, Liam, you feel fantastic right now.
00:22:18.020
Like, you got endorphins running through your system.
00:22:39.680
And I'm trying to figure out all these triggers
00:22:42.460
to be able to keep myself performing at a high level.
00:22:46.320
And that's actually, I mean, to go from the people
00:22:49.020
that are dealt that bad hand and maybe they falter
00:22:56.000
versus keeping yourself at that high performance level.
00:23:18.740
I get to work with my team or, you know, clients.
00:23:22.200
And because I never want to take it for granted,
00:23:28.500
And I know them because I visit them, you know,
00:23:34.820
And they would love the opportunity to go run 5K.
00:23:39.020
And I just think that it's a really important mindset to kind of get to.
00:23:44.260
My uncle, who's a quadriplegic, I remember when we were going up some stairs
00:23:48.720
and I was walking up the stairs and I always used to run upstairs
00:24:00.100
He said, never walk upstairs, always run up them.
00:24:07.860
So every flight of stairs, I run up the stairs.
00:24:11.160
And the moment I can't do that, man, something's wrong.
00:24:17.780
This turned into a very interesting podcast quite quickly.
00:24:27.340
It's the conversation that we would have over dinner
00:24:56.720
Yeah, the first South by, I was running a consultancy
00:25:03.220
that was helping YouTube channels basically monetize.
00:25:10.760
where you could basically have a URL inside of your advertisement.
00:25:32.840
Very, very good, like millions and millions of dollars a month, as an example.
00:25:40.560
So that, I remember going to South by, spoke on this panel, met Rob, met you, and closed
00:25:51.740
a deal that was going to set me up for the next couple of years, like easily.
00:25:57.540
And from that, I actually, so at that point, YouTube was relatively new.
00:26:01.160
You know, it evolved, but it was at a certain point in which it really wasn't the big thing
00:26:10.020
Was that like the first event that you got out to?
00:26:14.280
Actually, a friend of mine, Esprit, had put me on a panel for remote work.
00:26:19.660
So she knew that I was an expert on remote work, even because I was doing it for 15 years.
00:26:31.160
We're running, running remote. Yeah. And so for us, uh, or for me, that was one of the first
00:26:38.920
conferences that I ever went to. That was like big, big, big. And, uh, yeah, I walked away with
00:26:44.540
a multimillion dollar deal in my pocket, um, and a business partner. And I came to the conclusion,
00:26:50.580
do I want to continue on with this YouTube thing or do I want to learn software? Because Rob,
00:27:27.300
and Rob's dynamic, because it's a really interesting.
00:27:36.420
I love in the first few conversations we had together,
00:27:42.900
Yeah, he's on his iPhone and like late at night
00:27:53.280
But he is the polar opposite personality type from me.
00:28:03.560
He likes to get his information from books, as an example.
00:28:09.840
Well, let's talk to five experts that do Facebook ads.
00:28:15.780
I'm going to go into this hole for the next 25 hours,
00:28:18.080
read all this information, come out the other end,
00:28:27.180
I actually think it's a really good founding team
00:28:30.180
because what he's good at, I'm not good at, and the reverse.
00:28:36.300
But it's interesting because it can provide unique challenges
00:28:42.260
And I think another important aspect to the way that we've succeeded
00:28:52.580
If Rob decides to do something, if he's made the decision,
00:29:03.100
I'm going to try to make this decision as successful
00:29:24.120
So I'm one of those executives that sit on that team.
00:29:30.540
I've had a lot of private conversations with Rob,
00:29:32.560
which are just like, this is, we had an issue about nine
00:29:39.540
you probably know, we went down for two and a half days.
00:29:51.060
And about a month later, Rob comes to me and says, well, you know, I think you're right.
00:29:56.420
We should have really re-engineered our tech stack way earlier.
00:30:00.460
We should have been paying down this technological debt.
00:30:02.620
And this was me two years ago saying, we need to do this.
00:30:08.420
And we need, and I was getting it from other people saying, you haven't refactored your tech in six years.
00:30:26.180
and Rob is the person that's leading the tech team,
00:30:42.800
But we do have that good relationship where he can come back and say, you know what?
00:30:50.820
Let's try to fix this problem and move forward.
00:30:54.220
But at the end of the day, if you're constantly fighting about those issues, I see a lot of young founding teams.
00:31:02.220
And they tear themselves apart because there's just lines that they say, like, this line and no further.
00:31:18.980
You are in, like, there is a general of the company,
00:31:23.720
But once that decision is made, you've got to move forward.
00:31:32.220
What have you learned about, like, building remote teams?
00:31:47.360
But how do you build teams, even if they're distributed?
00:32:00.200
I thought you just, like, went and said, like, we,
00:32:02.180
and then, like, OK, I'm going to make it about somebody else.
00:32:07.160
The reason is last year at Running Remote, my friend Andreas, who was the CTO at Product Hunt and now is the guy in charge of remote development at AngelList, he spoke at last year's Running Remote.
00:32:27.020
And he said, you know, I'd love to always have, I've always wanted a fund just to be able to fund remote companies.
00:32:35.700
Because one of the biggest variables that we've had,
00:32:38.000
and you're asking this question, how do you build remote teams?
00:32:46.160
Time Doctor's been up and running for eight years.
00:32:51.120
Like the last five years, it's really starting to pop up.
00:32:53.560
I think we work enabled a lot of like distributed teams.
00:32:57.820
And now we're going to be in trouble for the next couple years.
00:33:00.820
But, like, so now you have, and even tools like Slack, you know, these.
00:33:08.600
These infrastructure tools to be able to really work remotely.
00:33:11.500
Even, like, Office Vibes or, like, a fellow.app or, you know, like, to get you, you know, some sentiment of what's going on amongst your team.
00:33:23.100
Now that we've just got the infrastructure in place, now we need to get the money.
00:33:27.560
So it was mind-blowing because Andreas raised, like, a couple hundred thousand in 20 minutes just saying, well, I've always wanted to build this fund connected to remote work.
00:33:39.700
The thesis of the fund is because venture does not understand how remote work adds into their formula, because all venture capitalists have this formula, right?
00:33:52.140
It's like, come to the Valley, get really smart people, pay them $250,000 a year, and then you're going to produce this output.
00:34:05.100
So they don't know where to put that inside of their formula.
00:34:08.820
So our thesis is there are really great companies that are being built.
00:34:12.500
What are some ones that you could, like, I mean, I know of, like, Automatic, GitHub, but what are other ones?
00:34:39.300
top three fastest growing companies in the last year
00:34:47.880
was just on a podcast with HubSpot just recently.
00:35:06.760
But if our philosophy is we've got to hire the best people,
00:35:12.900
within a 50-kilometer or 50-mile radius of our head office
00:35:16.220
in whatever city we're in, I mean, statistically.
00:35:18.800
And so you got a really math equation about it.
00:35:56.980
Automatic, Zapier, Wade's coming to Running Remote.
00:36:03.840
Did they announce $50 million AR or something like that?
00:36:10.840
So like they've got one of the best revenue to, yeah, exactly.
00:36:18.340
These companies are starting to come up, but the data is still small.
00:36:22.880
So the fund's thesis is, well, because venture doesn't know what to do with these companies,
00:36:29.300
let's invest in these companies, and there won't be as much competition, right?
00:36:36.020
Because they're, yeah, it's the thesis of the fund.
00:36:54.400
And Bootstrap Company, they tried to get venture capital.
00:37:08.180
That playbook has never, for a majority of VCs,
00:37:11.280
They've just never invested in a company where they've seen that.
00:37:13.740
So they just say pattern recognition, not comply, pass.
00:37:19.240
What are you seeing companies do right that are succeeding?
00:37:26.700
So I've had the opportunity to do running remote for a couple years now
00:37:30.500
and interact with some of the best remote first founders on planet Earth.
00:37:36.180
and so i asked them questions like well what does everyone think about doing
00:37:41.600
video calls on zoom and i get different answers
00:37:45.780
and i actually am getting different answers on everything so i can talk to envision and they can
00:37:53.360
do things one way and then i can talk to automatic and they do things very very differently or hubspot
00:37:58.020
does things very very differently um marcy murray who is the director of support for shopify
00:38:04.260
She went from 0 to 2,000 remote support reps within three years.
00:38:12.260
Yeah, because they said they, I thought Toby said 1,000 employees.
00:38:21.260
So their support, you know, and it's like, yes, it's a support department,
00:38:25.260
but you've got to run it like a business, especially at that scale, right?
00:38:28.260
If you have 2,000 support reps, you've got to run that like an entire self-sustaining business.
00:38:33.260
self-sustaining business. Um, so there's also these companies that are, that are running remote
00:38:37.440
and I'm, uh, I'm blown away that they, that no one knows what they're doing. Like there's no
00:38:45.860
playbook, no one agrees. And so my thesis out of that, or my presumption is because remote work
00:38:55.200
is the single thing that you can do to improve the productivity of your employees inside of an
00:39:03.960
Everyone's doing it wrong, but it doesn't matter
00:39:16.740
it's just because of disruptions, the travel time.
00:39:33.180
When you add them all up, it's about a 40% productivity gain,
00:39:37.560
But more importantly, IBM just ran a pilot project
00:39:46.140
and they saved $30 million just in office costs for the year.
00:39:53.100
people will be asking to go back inside of an office
00:39:56.220
because once the next economic correction happens, which
00:39:59.440
coming um that most large corporate will see this remote thing that just recently the pipes have
00:40:08.520
been laid as you mentioned yeah slack zoom the infrastructure is deployed yeah and they'll say
0.91
00:40:13.880
to themselves oh well let's try this remote thing and then they'll say holy shit this is amazing
0.61
00:40:19.020
you know like we're we're doing huge numbers and our pnl just dropped by 20 we can keep everyone
00:40:25.660
hired, but we just reduced our cost by 20% across the board.
00:40:35.840
because I want that type of personal interaction.
00:40:37.960
We get used to a certain thing, then we want the opposite,
00:40:52.720
talk about the nuts and bolts, the dollars and cents,
00:40:55.640
connected to going remote and also the quality of the candidates you're able to recruit yeah so
00:41:00.780
you can find like envision is a perfect example of just finding absolute amazing people so quickly
00:41:07.040
and i think this is going to last for the next 18 to 24 months where you'll be able to find that
00:41:13.740
absolute top tier talent and then you think there's going to be a competitive market hub
00:41:17.320
spots already in yeah right like so they're going to pay so you're going to go in and you're going
00:41:30.140
I have someone that we just hired recently, fantastic hire.
00:41:34.300
She worked for seven years at Indeed, customer success,
00:41:42.440
She moved to Eastern Europe to be closer to her family.
00:41:51.860
We're paying her less because she's in Eastern Europe.
1.00
00:42:01.160
Yeah, until HubSpot and all those guys come in.
00:42:08.200
I would call it maybe 18 to 36 month opportunity.
00:42:17.940
sounds like you've been doing entrepreneurial stuff even even at the beginning of time doctor
00:42:21.120
when you when you first met rob you know a decade ago to the person you are today
00:42:26.840
who have you had to become to be the person sitting in front of me today
00:42:32.980
boy um i think so i talk about this a lot uh the challenge of moving from an entrepreneur to an
00:42:45.120
executive and that's a major challenge for me so the ability to be able to
00:42:52.620
entrepreneurs want to do everything themselves and they want to just come in
00:42:56.000
and they just want to like do it and I actually think that for you to be a
00:43:01.980
successful business owner long term you need to almost do the polar opposite you
00:43:07.280
need to learn the art of delegation later on in life so going from like zero
00:43:12.960
to one right someone please buy this thing it's a completely new piece of
00:43:17.460
technology brute force it I mean I remember when we were first starting up
00:43:22.320
I was just calling friends of mine like hey you know what you said you always
00:43:25.720
had this problem you should check it out right like I can set you up for a month
00:43:30.060
or two if you want you know that type of thing right and that's the stuff that I
00:43:33.480
actually really like and then when you're a hundred people and you have 15,000
00:43:39.940
leads a month coming into the business, it changes to, OK,
00:43:43.540
well, now there are six people that report to me.
00:43:47.820
And then those people have people that report to them.
00:43:50.700
And they probably have people that report to them, too.
00:43:53.920
And I'm not directly operating, which is also probably
00:44:11.020
You've got to become that executive level person
00:44:17.240
Toby, as an example, is one that's just like his ability
00:44:29.360
I think is just like that's such a powerful lesson
00:44:32.460
and so difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs to learn.
00:44:35.140
Well, when I interviewed him, he mentioned that, you know, his job is to essentially like grow and backfill as fast as possible.
00:44:48.480
Anything that you wanted to chat about that we haven't?
00:44:52.820
Man, I mean, you know, maybe we should get into the dynamic of me and Rob.
00:44:59.960
I think that that's something because like I have no problem discussing that.
00:45:33.200
And at least for a personality type like me that really
00:45:35.440
likes to learn through learning from other people.
00:45:40.960
Like for Rob that wants to consume the online content
00:45:46.720
I think I'm the 98th percentile of inquisitiveness
00:45:54.380
So I love just asking questions and figuring out
00:46:04.700
So that's probably the biggest thing that I would try to,
00:46:13.500
We just hired one of the most expensive employees
00:46:32.740
So this is actually one of the interesting things
00:46:36.940
that came up with me and Rob, is initially Rob had said,
00:46:51.040
It's crazy that that person is working in the company.
00:47:04.500
And it's just sort of like, okay, that's super cool that you're working with us.
00:47:09.900
Are you worried that you're going to mess it up?
00:47:11.560
I'm worried that I'm going to mess it up, yeah.
00:47:13.760
And I'm also worried that between the two of us, Rob is super sort of micromanager,
00:47:24.640
Whenever you talk to employees in the company that talk about the differences,
00:47:27.900
between us it's like well you can never get a hold of liam liam just says well here are your numbers
00:47:32.700
uh hit them or don't um that's your job and then rob is the polar opposite like okay let's work
00:47:40.300
this down how can i show me every single day show me what you're doing show me how i can make those
00:47:44.780
corrections that kind of thing and those are two very different people and and i'm i'm concerned
00:47:51.420
if we've purchased basically a lamborghini we got to let that thing go right like we got to just
00:47:56.620
Just let that woman execute and go in that direction.
1.00
00:48:01.460
And this is actually one of the things that I told Rob.
0.96
00:48:08.640
I remember that conversation we had at the restaurant.
00:48:11.100
Like, are you going to let this person do their job?
00:48:18.600
I'm still not convinced that he has the capability to do.
00:48:31.660
is going to be that if there's an expectation that I want
00:48:55.140
It's to earn the trust and through earning that trust,
00:49:10.800
Delegating responsibility and really letting that happen.
00:49:17.220
important that there's at least a time commitment,
00:49:25.860
and say, like, because you're spending real money,
00:49:29.800
I've seen too many people make the mistake of, you know,
00:49:35.180
They didn't, there was no, the person wasn't even
00:49:47.440
I got on the phone, I said, you got to let him go.
0.99
00:49:51.500
Like, I asked him basic questions, and he was the COO,
00:49:55.740
That's different than, hey, you obviously interviewed them.
00:50:00.940
Let's make sure we give them the ability to win.
00:50:05.360
I think that this woman has this capability for me.
00:50:09.480
And this is another interesting way in the way that the difference is in the way we work.
00:50:27.880
I only want to talk to people who've been there.
00:50:29.260
And then Rob's bringing up a bunch of other people
00:50:31.240
that are like, oh, well, this guy could be awesome
00:50:35.120
I really create these weird mental rules in my mind,
00:50:43.000
by finding those people, getting advice from people
00:50:45.520
that have been there, and it just seems to be better advice.
00:50:51.800
because I don't see the day-to-day between you and Rob,
00:50:53.860
and I've only met Mick and a few other people on your team.
00:51:03.960
is they always hire people that make them worried
00:51:07.660
that they're going to figure out that they're not as smart
00:51:14.800
So the first thing, I mean, with the short list
00:51:17.380
that I had spoken to, I told all three of them,
00:51:29.780
like you point me in the right direction of what
00:51:32.060
you need me to do, and then let's execute on that.
00:51:41.440
But sometimes a really smart guy can't actually pause and say to himself, well, you know, maybe this person is smarter than me.
00:51:50.480
So that's one of the challenges that I think we have.
00:51:52.760
I would love to be able to know, too, for you, like out of looking at all these entrepreneurs, if you had to boil it down to like top three things or one thing, what would you say it is in terms of founding teams and their success?
00:52:23.940
Yeah, so everybody's got to go listen to that episode
00:52:29.140
But you see this amongst all, like the ones that
00:52:40.600
And so neurodiversity, I think, about different perspectives
00:52:49.240
A lot of it comes down to just product market fit.
00:52:51.440
I mean, you can't escape the fact that if you got lightning
00:52:58.700
I feel bad when people are like, how did David from David
00:53:03.120
Letko from Deal Machine, 110K in MRR, 800K in 11 months.
00:53:10.160
And I'm like, well, he had a great product market fit.
00:53:12.840
But I will say the technical debt part is the other thing
00:53:16.040
I think that the companies that grew the fastest
00:53:37.220
and build features faster, they ate the market.
00:53:43.580
one-week integrations now versus three-month integrations.
00:53:51.740
of having somebody on Upwork build your first MVP.
00:53:59.900
And that's one of the big things that I'm bringing down.
00:54:11.340
and packages soon enough to, do these resonate with you?
00:54:15.420
Well, no, I mean, we haven't touched on pricing in eight
00:54:30.160
I said, well, if this new hire wants to change pricing,
00:54:37.680
of kind of pulling the conversation away from that.
00:54:41.260
And then I just like, because I know him so well,
00:54:51.940
then they need to be able to move in these directions.
00:54:56.020
And one of those would be changing the pricing.
00:55:01.780
When we did our entire refactoring, we had our new code base on staff.com, which is our other URL, and our old code base on Time Doctor.
00:55:11.660
So then we actually moved it over to the Time Doctor URL.
00:55:15.000
But one of the things that we didn't do is on Time Doctor, the first seat is free, which we call the administration seat.
00:55:24.420
So basically the business owner's seat is always free, and then the first person you manage is a paid seat.
00:55:31.780
we didn't remember to add in that feature in the new build.
00:55:39.280
So the owner's seat was paid, and it converted at the same rate.
00:55:45.480
We were looking at the numbers, and we're like,
00:55:47.140
OK, so we're getting the same amount of conversion points,
00:55:48.940
but for some reason we're generating 20% more revenue
00:55:53.140
And we're just slicing the numbers 20 different ways.
00:55:57.300
And then we figured it out, which was, oh, well,
00:56:00.600
the owner's seat is paid so right out of the bat they're paying an extra 10 bucks per month
00:56:07.100
and and then i i the fight with me was well we should not be changing this back right and say
00:56:16.440
well we have we have almost 10 000 customers on time doctor uh you know they'd be super angry if
00:56:22.720
we ended up making that change i was like no this sounds like a great change because it's like we're
00:56:27.380
seeing that with the new cohort let's apply that um to everyone else yeah so those are changes that
00:56:34.000
i hope we'll make you know in the next couple months but it's it's an interesting challenge
00:56:38.400
um dealing with at the end of the day it just boils down to like
00:56:43.760
you're right product product is something i can't change at this point like we're set this is the
00:56:49.080
product that we have and this is the direction that we're going problem you're solving yeah
00:56:52.080
uh problem that we're solving but then after that it's just like human dynamics leadership
00:57:21.080
think YouTube is the most honest form of social
00:57:25.160
comments. Most people don't know that. They're like, I need you as a mentor. I'm like, just
00:57:28.500
post a comment on my video. Right. So youtube.com slash running remote. And if you can't afford to
00:57:34.500
go to running remote, all the talks are up there for free. Check them out. Yep. We appreciate you,
00:57:39.240
man. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Thanks for watching this episode of Escape
00:57:43.740
Velocity. Be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment with your biggest insight from
00:57:48.680
our conversation. Be sure to check out the next episode.