Transcription:
Hello, hello, Peter Moriarty here. Great to be here with you. Today we're talking about my journey of being a remote CEO. And that's basically my journey of traveling and being on the road and living the life of my dreams, which is a life of travel and adventure and exploration. While still running a multimillion dollar business with now over 50 employees across the group have multiple companies. And that's been To be honest, a pretty interesting challenge. You know, over the years, as we grew and scaled our business, I decided that I didn't want to be stuck in one location, I read the four hour workweek, which is an amazing book by Tim Ferriss. And I decided that I didn't really want to just go to work in an office in one place. Until about six or seven years ago, I started making movements in the business to actually switch for me to be able to work remotely. And this is a little bit of part of my story in how I did that. Now, we've only previously shared this with our customers inside our genius Academy. So this is the first time I'm sharing some of these things externally to the public. So if you don't know who we are, we are it genius. And we're a small and medium business consulting firm. And primarily, we work with consulting around technology. And so what our mission is, is to really help small businesses play a bigger game by getting the right technology strategy in place, which means that you can grow and scale, have more flexibility, have more profit, have more money, have more options. And for you, the entrepreneur lived the life of your dreams. And we've worked with literally 1000s of business owners 10s of 1000s of employees across those businesses. And we've received hundreds and hundreds of five star reviews from all of our best customers. And we want to share our messages with the world. We want to help businesses as much as possible. Now, how do we do that? Well, we take businesses through our growth roadmap, and that is, whatever stage of business you're at whether you're just starting, you don't have any employees yet. Or maybe you're you know, you've grown up as a business and you're starting to get some structures in place. We've got different technology strategies that will work for you different pieces of software that we think are critical for different stages of business, and a team that will help to chaperone you through the growth of your business to help make sure that your business is successful as the business grows and scales. So the first section of this video is going to be about the reality of being a remote CEO. What does it actually take to run a business remotely? And how do I actually do that inside my business. So about six months ago, I bought one of my dream vehicles, which is where I'm broadcasting from right now. It's called an
expedition truck. And this is basically a four wheel drive camper truck. And this truck is designed to go off road and pretty much go everywhere. And it's fully self contained, it's going to bathrooms, got a shower, it's got a kitchen, you can see my Sinclair behind me. And basically this truck is my adventure machine. But I also needed to be able to actually work from it as well. And while I'm in the stage of being kind of semi retired in the business, in that we've got enough employees that most of the day to day, things can be pretty much taken care of. Without my direct involvement. I'm still obviously actively involved in the business. I'm the founder, I'm the current CEO of the business. And so that means there's still a level of interaction required for me to be a part of the business. And that means that I have to manage my responsibilities. And so the number one thing for me to really think about as I balance out the difference between Well, when am I having leisure time? And when am I actually having business time is this balance between work and play. And what I see is for many business owners, and particularly kind of Boomer business owners, and this is my parents generation where they would work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work. And then they'd have a holiday. And then they'd go and work Work, work, work, work, work, work, work, and then they'd have a holiday. And Tim Ferriss really kind of broke the mold on that for a lot of people in his book, The Four Hour Workweek, when he said, Well, why don't you have lots of short mini breaks, or design your life, so it feels holiday ish. So you don't have to kind of do that grind or that long slog. And then you know, go and have a holiday, which is a bit like a hangover. I know for many entrepreneurs, they actually get sick on holidays, because it's the only time that they probably stop. Or maybe you don't stop when you're on holidays, because you're still in hustle mode, and you take your laptop and your phone with you. And we're all kind of connected all the time. And so I wanted to do things differently. I wanted my life to kind of be like, always on holiday and never on holiday. And what I mean by that is I have a work life balance where I'm really doing things that I love doing every day not necessarily work, or work as people would call work, which means you know, to me sitting on meetings or replying to emails, but have a life where I have the flexibility to be where I want location wise and do what I want activity wise. And so that was basically My dream is to do engaging work. That's impactful work with a team that I love working with, but still obviously have it in a way that works for me. And I've been able to do that quite successfully. We've grown and scaled our business it genius to quite a large team. Now there's over 50 employees, and I've got basically as much freedom as I like now I'm able to take time away from work last week, I actually did have a full 10 days off because I was at a festival and a training there was completely like phone off and in the wilderness and no reception and I wanted to take that time off. But for the most part, I have all the freedom that I desire. But I also still retain all of the responsibility of the business and I think this is really the Balancing Act for business owner is not to abdicate any parts of the business, you still have to actually keep the responsibility of managing the business, but also having the discipline and the diligence to have time to yourself. So let's talk about what things work well, when I'm on the road. And what are some of the things where I have some challenges? Well, first off, what things worked well, for me actually sitting down and doing work, sitting in a combat truck, and I'm sitting at my kind of kitchen table here at the moment, works pretty darn well. For me, I spend most of my time on meetings during the day. And when I spend most of my time on meetings, what that means is that I'm just sitting here chatting away to my team. And it's pretty straightforward to do that. Now I've got a little iPad Mini setup here. Actually, it might even be an iPad Air, I think it's the latest one on one of the smaller ones. And I've got my laptop here, which I use to do my work. And effectively, this setup means that I don't have to invest in having something like multiple monitors. And for me, I can just have my meetings dedicated on one device, and then actually do any work that I want to do on another device. What I often find is when I'm in a meeting talking to my team, I'm also going to be making notes in one of the apps that I use a sauna for maybe meeting minutes or maybe I'm you know, dishing out some action items in there. Or maybe I'm reading an article or I've got a presentation and I want to actually present that into the meeting. It's nice to have a second device there. So I'm not flicking between different tabs. So that's kind of like the the first thing and to be honest, because most of my time is spent on meetings and on calls, I'm pretty comfortable to sit here for most of the day. Now at home, there's one thing that I do miss and that's it, I had a great stand up desk at home and an anti fatigue mat that I can stand on all day long. And that kind of keeps my body a little bit more active. And so I'm in the process of setting up a monitor and a stand up desk set up. So in my truck, I'll have a stand up organization of some sort, and I will keep you posted on how that goes. But for now, this is this is how things work. So what hasn't worked? Well, what's been the most frustrating part about working on the road? Well, that's the obvious one is the connectivity issues, actually making sure I can somehow stay connected to my team, when there's potentially not great service. And this is this is honestly the balancing act of being on the road. Obviously, I'm reliant on 4g for me to do my work. I'm not going to internet cafes or you know Wi Fi hotspots or anything like that I'm working from mobile internet. And so internet connectivity is a big one. And really important. And I'm going to take you through some of the specific tech that I use to do that. Now, the easiest way for me to manage sometimes being offline. And sometimes being online is basically for me to choose my workdays basically Tuesdays that I know that I'm going to be available to my team. And when I set that expectation, they know that for me on Mondays, and Fridays, I'm probably not really going to be available, because they're my non work days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, my work days, the other times where I'm going to be active and available, I'm usually starting my meetings from around 10 or 11am. And I'm wrapping them up by three or 4pm. And they're basically the days that my team can expect me to be active and expect me to be responsive. And what that means is if they drop a task to me on a Friday are probably not going to get to it till the Tuesday. And so things that have a regular cadence, like maybe approving payroll or approving supplier payments, or, you know, jumping into meetings with suppliers, or, you know, jumping into a strategic type meetings, they're going to need to be scheduled on the days that I'm actually available for working. And so my calendar literally looks like it's only got those three days free. And then either side, on the other days, I can actually set my Google calendar to be out of office, and it's automatically just going to decline any of those meetings. The other cool thing that Google does is when you set your calendar to be out of office, it actually puts a little message in chat. So if someone wants to send me a message inside of Google Chat, it'll say Peter is out of the office. And he'll be back on the next Tuesday makes it super duper obvious for anyone who's maybe trying to get in touch with me so many people ask me, well, Pete, what's your tech setup? When you're on the road? What tools do you actually use to get things moving inside the truck, and it's actually pretty damn simple setup. And so you already seen I've got a little iPad Air there, which just sits on a little tripod. And I use that either for notes when I'm doing live streams, or I use it for my meetings, which I'm doing right now. Next up, I have my laptop, which happens to be a Google Pixel book. Now this is one of the pixel books, which was not available on the Australian market. I actually purchased this from the states had it shipped out to Australia, but we have the new pixel book go available in stock. So if you're interested in that, head along to it genius.com and ask our team for a quotation. But that's my preferred laptop. And I absolutely love Chromebooks, heaps of other videos on our channel on why Chromebooks are a great choice for you. And you can see here that that's my basic setup. And whether I'm presenting at a conference, or if I'm just working day to day, that's pretty much all I need. And if I need to drive from place to place when I shut the lid on my laptop, the little rubber feet actually keep it stuck to the table so I don't even have to pack it away anywhere. I just literally leave it here. Thankfully, the trucks pretty slow so it doesn't slide off the table when I go around corners too fast. Now, internet connectivity is the next big one that is super important to get right and for that I use a Netgear Nighthawk now I've got the old one which is called an M one there is a newer called the M2, which I would recommend, it's got a few new features and added that you can buy the older ones anymore. But this little modem is a couple of $100. And you just put a 4g SIM card in there. Now what I would recommend is if you're an Australian customer, and you are on the Telstra network, that's the best network to get the most broadest coverage across Australia, you can actually set up a business account, and you can set up shared SIM card data pooling. What that means is, if you've got multiple phones in your family, or if you've got multiple phones in your business, you can actually have all of the data pulled together. And so you're not you know, going over the Nighthawk when you've still got data available on your phone plan, the so that kind of puts everything together. Now from time to time, depending on how many live streams I'm doing on the course of a month. Or if I'm shooting some video and I want to upload it to my team for them to actually edit that video, well, what can actually happen is sometimes I'll get close to reaching my data cap. And right now I think I've got about four or 500 gigabytes a month. Now most people don't need that much. Most people could probably get away with 50 or 100 gigabytes if you were working full time. But I spent a lot of time on video meetings pretty much all my time is on video meetings. Number two, I do a lot of media and a lot of live streams. And so I'm often uploading content, sometimes it's 4k video content. Sometimes it's live streams that can go for an hour or more. And so what that means is that I've got a heavier data consumption than most people would now those who are interested to know how I actually do these live streams, I've got a digital camera. And that basically plugs into this little device here, which is called an item Mini Pro. And this is by Blackmagic Design. This is a great little device, because this basically takes the feed out of my camera. And from that I just plug in a network cable into the little Nighthawk. And then that basically broadcasts the signal. And from there, I would just make sure that I'm in a good spot for my reception. And then I can go to town there, which is nice and easy. I can do my live streams from anywhere I am. Apart from that, that's pretty much all I need. I use my phone from time to time, but I try not to use my phone too much for work. I like to use a computer or an iPad for work and put the phone away. Because as you know, they can be very distracting devices. Now a couple of essential apps that I want to share with you that are in my toolkit for my CEO on the road. My essential travel apps are I've got three recommendations for you. Number one is called wiki camps Australia. And this is basically what I use to pick out campsites I can find free camping sites with this, I can find paid camping sites as ratings, there's dump points when I need to empty the toilet because there's a cassette toilet, you got to pull out and actually dump out from here. So I can find all of those on the wiki camps app. And that one also works offline as well. So you can save these, these offline. If you're in a place that doesn't have much reception. My next recommendation is a great little app called AWS phone towers. And what this one does is it actually shows me exactly where the phone towers are. So I know that if I have an important meeting or an important call, and I do not want to have any issues with internet connectivity, then I can literally drive up to a phone tower and park underneath it. And for each phone tower, it's gonna let you know which operators are on there. Whether it's Optus, or whether it's Telstra, at least here in Australia. And from there, it's actually going to let me know how far away they are, how much bandwidth there are on them. And so I will know before I even get to a town, what kind of services are going to be available there. And it's going to help me not have to guess where I'm getting good signal, I can literally go and drive to a place with good signal. And then I'm good to go. Now finally, and this one is a little bit more for those who want to adventure off the beaten track. This is called maps.me, which is my choice for off roading and forward driving maps. And so this service allows me to download offline maps. It's a bit like Google Maps for the off road. And it gives me things like the topography of different terrain so I can see how steep different climbs might be. I can also see things like directions even when I'm off road or if I don't have signal for any of the Google directions. So they're my recommendations for the top apps on running things remotely as a business owner.
