We are running an 8-week webinar series for members delivering our ‘Remote Work Playbook’ for small businesses running remote teams covering everything from hiring and supporting your team to technology tools and leadership during the current economic landscape.
This series is free for active Concierge members and their teams.
This week’s training was Our Remote Story covering Founder & CEO Peter Moriarty’s journey leading itGenius through the change in adopting remote work.
- The remote working scale — businesses transitioning from office-based to fully distributed teams. Take one step to the right and adopt more flexible work arrangements.
- Our remote business journey — we realized that recruiting only in one place is restricting your business to talents only in that area. Building a remote team means opening your business to more talents and not limited to those who are just around your physical office.
- The changing business landscape has helped motivate us in transforming our business model.
We’ll be sharing our expertise from tech tools to keeping the team culture (more of these in the coming weeks).
Here are the resources you might want to check out:
- The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
- Buffer blog
- Basecamp
To get full access to the training, join Concierge today or connect with our team.
Transcription:
Hey guys, Peter Moriarty here and I’m excited to be here with you today. I’m sharing my journey of going remote, how I took to a company that was five years old at the time, multiple millions in revenue and transitioned it from office work to a full remote team. A pretty crazy process and there were certainly some challenges along the way. I’m going to give you a little bit of a snapshot.
Over the next eight weeks, we are actually running an eight-week webinar series, which is from office to remote. It’s called the Remote Work Playbook and it’s all for companies that want to switch from being a office-based business to being a remote business.
Now it doesn’t mean you have to cancel your office lease, but in the current times we are in, it’s very important to embrace remote work and do it well. You need to know how do you manage your culture, how do you manage your team, how do you make sure things actually still get done? How do you make sure that your team members are communicating and collaborating and working with their customers? We’ve been there, done that over the last five years and I want to share everything. But I’m going to give you a quick snapshot this morning and kind of share with you how that process was for me.
So before I get into the meat and potatoes of our journey, I want to share something with you and that is the Remote Working Scale. This is something that was shared from a company called Buffer and Buffer, it’s like a social media management app, but they’re a full remote company. They’re one of the first businesses to kind of start blogging about it and sharing it widely.
The Remote Working Scale is a really easy way to kind of show what are the different stages of a company transitioning to remote work. You can see here all the way on the left, you’ve got a completely office-based business. Everyone comes into the one place to get their work done. You then have office-based, but work from home sometimes and, honestly, most companies don’t get past step two. That’s basically it. Even most corporate businesses in Australia now do not get past step number two. But there’s a whole another world of businesses that are running in step three, step four and step five and that’s what I want to talk a little bit more about.
So step number three is different team members in different times zones, right? This is typically thought about only as being accessible to multinationals or large businesses that have really broken through that small business stage, but it is available for small business owners. Now for anyone who started hiring offshore resources maybe in the Philippines, it’s really popular, then this may be your first step into having international team members. That’s kind of like step three starting.
Then you have number four, remote teams in many time zones. That’s a district that’s an actual real distributed team. They’re the kind of businesses that are opening up for 24-hour support, which we are on the journey of. They’re businesses that maybe from the ground up have decided, “We are not going to restrict ourselves to talent in just one place. We’re going to open ourselves up to hiring from wherever.” That’s pretty cool.
Then step number five here, you can see is a completely distributed team with nomads. What that means is there’s no offices included and people not only are working internationally, but they are also traveling. That’s black-belt level. That’s totally pro.
So our aim has always been in the work that we do with our customers to help you move one step to the right. We’re not trying to get you to level five. We’re just trying to help you move one step to the right.
Now our core business is implementing a product called G Suite, where that’s the most popular product that we sell and that helps businesses move from traditional infrastructure like servers, even people using Dropbox or consumer Gmail accounts for their business file storage, and helping them move into a collaborative platform, which allows them to get work done.
It doesn’t mean that you have to be nomads traveling the world, running the business completely remotely. What G Suite allows you to do is get work done from any device and we say at any time. Hopefully, you’ve got good boundaries around when you do actually work. But from any device at any time means that you have the flexibility to work where and when you want to.
Now for many businesses when they work with us, they’re starting at level one. They’re all the way on the left. They’re in an office, they’re sometimes driving to the office to get work done. They may have like a VPN or remote desktop setup, but it’s usually a pretty crap experience because internet connections are not always great and Microsoft Remote Desktop is pretty terrible.
We are moving them into that collaborative workspace of G Suite and Google Cloud and that allows them to actually seamlessly get work done. I’m talking video calls on Hangouts, chat using Hangouts chat, which is a little bit like Slack. Google Drive is way better than Dropbox. It’s got heaps more business features. Then, of course, Gmail has all the power of Google’s amazing AI search algorithms and everything else in an inbox that will never slow down, never crash the search and never get full. You got unlimited storage if you’re on the Business Plan on G Suite. So what that does is that enables businesses to go along this journey.
Now once we’ve kind of implemented G Suite, then there’s other products like cloud-based phone system, cloud-based CRM system, cloud-based task management, cloud-based workflow automation. All of those things kind of get peppered in there, but the base foundational level is that you get set up on G Suite and we help you manage that migration process.
Now, how do you manage your team actually going along this remote work scale and how do you take them along that journey? That is a people journey. It’s a change management journey. I’ve got another framework on change management, which I will share in another video on leading and managing effective change with your team. But you need to learn and you need to learn yourself first and then take your team on that journey of change in transitioning from a local, everyone’s in the same place type setup, to being able to work remotely or working differently.
Now for some people they’ve said up until recently, “Hey, you know what, that’s fine. I’m really comfortable going to the office. I like having separation between home and the office and that works for me. And I really want my staff to be in the office so either customers can meet with us or I can see what they’re doing or we feel more collaborative when we’re in the office.” However current times have changed and many are being forced now to work at home, which is great for us because we’re in a great position to actually educate. But it’s quite a challenge and we’ve really heard that challenge from our customers that right now it’s a bit of a shock to the system. So we’re trying to make it as easy as possible.
So my point for sharing the Remote Working Scale for you is just try and move one step to the right. That’s all you need to do. Don’t try and get to step five. You don’t need to. Just try and move one step to the right or you might have to go two steps because everyone’s going to be working at home. Okay, cool.
So I want to move on and I want to talk about our remote business journey and how we kind of went from being in an office to completely switching over to being remote. So we had an office in North Sydney. We had five staff in that office. Before that, we had an office in Crows Nest and I think we had six or seven people there and the business had kind of gone up and up and down. Being a service business, for anyone who’s in a service business you would know there’s this constant challenge of making sure you’ve got enough work coming in for the consulting dollars to pay for all of your labor because the biggest cost is the labor and then second biggest cost is the office.
There’s a general rule, I think it comes from accountants, that you want to have each full-time staff member generating about three times their salary in revenue so they can pay for themselves. So a third of that revenue goes to their salary, a third of the revenue goes to outgoings and a third of the revenue goes to profit, right? But that’s hard to see in a growing and scaling business to see that profit. I shared a post recently on my Facebook page and LinkedIn of how I was in $350,000 of debt by the time I was 24 and how I kind of navigated that journey.
Now we were in this up and down, this constant challenge of making sure we had enough dollars coming in to pay for the labor for our service business. Around that time, four, five, six years ago, I read the book, The Four-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, and he talked about getting a VA in the Philippines, someone who can help you get some of your stuff done, but most importantly have a cheaper cost of labor for the business. I was like, “Hm, that’s interesting. Let me see if I can get that done.”
Initially, I was really scared because I thought, well, what if my customers find out? At the time, Telstra call centers had a really bad reputation of outsourcing to the Philippines and I think there was a lot of real angst from Australian customers and Australian business owners and just Australians in general with offshore call centers and what that meant. So that was challenging for me to get through on a mindset level of, well, if I start hiring in the Philippines, what does that mean for my brand? What does that mean for my business? What does that mean for my customer experience and how will that change us as a company?
So we started, the first step of the journey was just hiring back office positions, so non-customer-facing, so data processing, data entry, managing other things that I deemed, well, this is safe. What I found, over time, was our international team members were coming from quite prestigious roles and I was like, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” Some of our staff were ex-Microsoft, some of our staff were ex-Google, some of our staff were ex-Apple. And I was like, “Wow, that’s really interesting.”
What I learnt was the staff that had worked through the BPOs into these larger companies had actually had amazing training, were extremely well-qualified and were excellent, excellent workers. I was like, “Wow, bloody hell. That’s really awesome,” and it really broke down my perception that someone overseas, someone who’s not Australian can actually be a great worker. I guess at the time I had subscribed to the collective thought that someone who was of a different culture or born in a different country was different in their ability to work.
Now there are longstanding differences in culture, that’s a reality, and language and accent and those kind of things. However, it’s no different to working with someone from the United States or another country that speaks a closer level of English to us with maybe like a different accent twang. I think what was interesting at the time is what I discovered was how I saw our country versus developing countries and what my perception was there of working with different people.
So as that perception slowly, over time, broke down and our team excels more and more and more, I allowed myself to say, “Okay. Well, let’s put some of my team in customer-facing positions and see how this goes.” What I found, not so much from a customer perspective because customers, I guess, didn’t really know the difference. That was pretty cool. We did most of our work delivered to customers remotely at the time. We’re doing remote support and all those kinds of things.
But what I found was really interesting. On a performance perspective, our international team members were performing better than local staff and I went, “Wow, holy crap. That’s a big one.” Someone who has a dramatically, dramatically different economic cost to the business is actually outperforming staff that I have locally. That was, like, boom. That was the moment that made me go, “Wow. Okay, I’ve changed my perspective here and things need to be done differently.”
Now that created a problem and that problem was that I can’t deliver to my customers onsite or in-person and we were an IT support business. A number of our customers were in Sydney, but over time we’d been bringing on more and more customers across kind of the East Coast of Australia, so in Brisbane and in Melbourne and we were starting to modify our pricing and our services for the removal of the cost of going onsite to customers. So we were really starting to tweak the business model, but we still kind of had, in a way, a ball and chain of our Sydney-based customers who expected us to come on-site when something went wrong. Sometimes that was me, sometimes that was other staff, sometimes we even hired contractors out to do that.
But there was a bit of a problem with the business model because I had ambitions to grow a successful business and we weren’t going to be able to be successful if we had kept limiting ourselves to doing that onsite work because what I found was that we would have to open offices in every city that we wanted to operate in. We had even one or two customers who’d come to us from the United States because they knew our expertise with G Suite and people were finding us on Google, hearing about our reputation. What I found was that we had to shift the business model to be more of a remote company. That was a big shift because we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue from doing that onsite kind of managed service support.
So what I found was that I had to make a really tough decision and that decision was, if I want to grow this company in the way that I want to grow it, I’m going to have to, I’m going to have to change what I’m delivering to my customers. I’m going to have to bite the bullet. And I did that. I decided to make that choice and I cut hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring revenue.
I called every one of our customers and I said, “Hi, how are you going? I need to let you know about some changes in the service that we’re offering to you. We’re no longer going to charge you $1,000 a month for our IT support. We’re only going to charge you $300 a month and now we’re going to stop coming onsite. So we’re going to still be able to deliver about 90% of what we could deliver before, but your cost is going to be a third of what it was previously.”
You can guess all of our customers said, “Fuck, yeah. That sounds great, Pete.” Everyone went for it and we managed to retain all of those customers, which is really great. So what we then found was I could accelerate the growth of the business and particularly accelerate the remote team aspect of the business because now we didn’t have that restriction of having to hire in one place.
Now here’s the big problem in having to hire in one place. You limit your talent to a half-an-hour or a one-hour commute radius of your office. That’s ridiculous. If you think about how large your country is, how large the world is, how many people are in other countries outside of just, if we’re talking about Australia, a tiny little country with 20-odd million people, think of what you’re restricting yourself to if you’re just putting a circle around your physical office and only hiring talent around there. That’s just absolutely nuts.
So when you open yourself to working with remote team members, and I’m talking about full-time completely remote team members, not even coming to your office, your talent pool, boom, opens way up. That was one of the biggest things for us, is we were able to access really, really great talent, as I said, ex-Microsoft staff, ex-Google staff, ex-corporate staff in Emerson Electric, like high-profile executives from different businesses and bring them into our business.
Now, obviously, there’s some arbitrage included here. We started hiring in the Philippines. That works really well for us because of the cost base and it allowed us to really rapidly grow and scale our team. We went from five people in that office in Sydney right up to now we have more than 35 staff and we have a blossoming team. It’s all going really well.
This video is not about team hire in the Philippines. That’s not the message of this video. The message of this video is to open yourself up to remote working and if you look at this scale, it’s moving from being office-based to, over time, a more distributed team and a more distributed setup.
So we’ve made that change and we then had to learn how to operate as a remote company. That’s the things that I’m going to be covering in our eight-week series Remote Work Playbook. It’s all about how do you operate as a remote company. For many of you, you may have had some flexible work and you’ve been at step two on the scale of having a bit of work-from-home-type stuff. That’s not how you run a company if you’ve got everyone working from home 95% of the time. So we’re going to show you how to do all of that in our Remote Work Playbook. If you’re interested in that, just drop me a message and a PM straight to this page and I can get you hooked up with some details there.
But we’re releasing that for our concierge members and you don’t even have to be on G Suite to join concierge in this special time. We’ll let you join even if you’re not on G Suite. But that’s going to be how you learn how to actually run a remote team from a technology process standpoint, from a people standpoint, from managing culture, from setting up all the right tools, from how do you manage the change management of actually bringing your team across and everything in between to make that work.
Now if you’re interested in some resources for yourself to get started on this remote work journey, there’s two resources that I want to share with you. Number one is actually this one here, which is the Buffer Blog. So the Buffer Blog is really, really awesome. They’ve got heaps of stuff on remote work because these guys have been doing remote work for a long time. So if you head along, you can even just search for this post Remote Work Scale and you’ll find this post. But I’ve dropped the link actually just down below in the comments already. Then you can see here they’ve got a whole category on remote work and they’ve got heaps of blogs there so go ahead and check those out.
The next one is a book recommendation and that book is called Remote: Office Not Required. That book, let me go ahead and I’ll bring up a link for you here guys, Remote: Office Not Required. This is by the guys at Basecamp. Oops. Remote… Let’s actually bring up the correct link here. All right, cool. So this book is written by the guys who created Basecamp, which is a remote work collaboration app similar to Asana. We actually recommend Asana over Basecamp, but this book is absolutely fantastic. This talks about how to actually manage a team remotely, exactly what you need to do, exactly how to make it work, the real basics.
We use this as an inspiration. I read this book about five years ago and then, yeah, we took all those strategies from the book and we battle-tested them. Some of them worked, some of them we’ve tweaked and kind of made our own. So that’s what we’re going to be sharing in the Remote Work Playbook, which is our lessons from five years of running a multimillion-dollar company completely remotely. If you have any questions, please go ahead and drop them below.
The question that’s on most people’s mind when I share our story of how we changed and how we grew, most people actually ask, “Well, what happened to your Australian staff?” Because now we only have myself and one other staff person in Australia. What we found was that, over time, there was natural attrition in our office in Sydney. Bit by bit, those staff members happened to move on and for a long time we’ve had a strategy of hiring exclusively in the Philippines. What that’s allowed us to do is grow and scale our business and serve more customers in a better way by actually growing out that team more efficiently. We haven’t so far had a need for more team members here.
So you may find as you embark along this journey, I’m not saying it’s going to happen to you, but you may find some really big shifts in how you think about hiring, how you think about the help that you bring on-board into the business. I welcome you sharing what that journey is like and we’re here, of course, to support you.
So that’s it for the content. I wanted to let you know a little bit about itGenius and what we do. So if you haven’t worked with us yet or you’re curious about what we do, we help enable businesses to work remotely and help enable teams to get their work done productively no matter where they are. Whether they’re at home, whether they’re on the go, whether you’re on the couch with your phone or wherever you are, we want to help you do productive work and help you, if you’re a business owner, build a productive scaled team.
Now we’ve technically, we technically focus on technology. We do a little bit about the HR and the other bits and pieces, but most of our focus is on technology. We take care of automation, we take care of your collaboration platform, like what do you do for email, file storage, connecting with each other, video calls, and then we help all your apps talk to each other. So we’ll help with automations, we’ll help with building dashboards. If you want to visualize your business data from zero or have KPI, leaderboards and those kinds of things, we can help you visualize that kind of stuff.
Think about us as a new age technology IT consultancy, specifically for businesses who are interested in working remotely and having more flexibility in how they work. We’re very, very big on the Google platform. We’ve got a cloud-based phone system, cloud-based CRM system that we recommend and all of these integrate. They all talk to each other. That’s a big part of making sure that your operations run smoothly is that you don’t have double-handling of information.
So if you’re interested in chatting, head along to itgenius.com or you can drop me a PM a and I’ll be happy to point you in the right direction. I’ve got some links below.
If you want to join a group with other business owners who are on their remote journey, head along to Remote Revolution. There’s a link in here. Join our group. It’s a free open group and we talk specifically about building and scaling remote teams.
If you’re already on G Suite and you want more product-focused discussion around G Suite, there’s a link to our G Suite community group there as well. Over a thousand business owners in there and we share tips and tricks and help each other out with everything in the Google world. So even if you’re just curious about G Suite, go ahead and jump into that group. We’ve got nothing to hide and hear from thousands of business owners that are already on the Google platform.
All right, that’s it. I’m going to wrap up here, guys. Thanks so much for joining and I will catch you in the next one. Cheers.
