← Mondays with Matt
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- [00:01]
Unnamed Beverage Company Representative
Today, the beverage aisle looks a lot different than it used to. America's beverage companies are working together. We're delivering the options everyone wants. In fact, nearly 60% of beverages Americans buy have zero sugar. You'll find more variety than ever, including more of your favorites now available with zero sugar. You'll also find more sizes and clear calorie information on the front of every can, bottle and pack. We know when it comes to finding balance, the more choices, the better.
- [00:32]
Matt Reynolds
You're listening to the Build you'd Business podcast powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds.
- [00:43]
Chris Reynolds
Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom. You're listening to the Build you'd Business podcast with your co hosts, Matt and Chris Reynolds. I'm Matt, he's Chris. Hey, man.
- [01:05]
Matt Reynolds
Welcome to how's it going?
- [01:07]
Chris Reynolds
Glad you're here. We've got. I got a little bit less than 20 years of business ownership experience. You got a little more than 20 years. And so we kind of balance out about 40 years of business ownership experience. Our goal is to move business owners, founders, entrepreneurs for. From fear to freedom. All that anxiety and stuff that we had to deal with many years ago when there wasn't something like that. We try to walk through with the listener who is primarily a business owner on how to navigate that craziness and the anxiety of that world and so wanted to dive in directly today into. Both of us now own fully remote online businesses. We used to own fully in person businesses and I love online business and I don't think I could ever run an in person business ever again. I don't want to. I don't know if you feel the.
- [02:06]
Matt Reynolds
Same way, but I mean, I show up to people's offices and there's definitely an energy to that kind of thing. But I think remote culture can be done with. Right. I think you have to be very intentional about it. So we're going to talk about what those things are, how to be intentional, and then how to make sure that you ultimately are getting the benefit and sort of guarding against the things that can go wrong.
- [02:30]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, I like it. For me, the biggest benefit of an online or remote business is the freedom it brings everyone that's part of that business. And the everyone, as a side note, is literally meaning everyone in the whole world that could potentially work at that business. Yeah, I live in Springfield, Missouri. You live in Boston. There's a lot more talent in Boston than there is In Springfield, Missouri. Not knocking Springfield, Missouri. We got some talent here. Totally cool. But the reality is that for people who work for my business, I now have access to the entire world of excellent skill set based workers who can work for me. And all of those people can work on their own schedule, on their own timeline. They're not locked into a location or a schedule. I'm not locked into a location or schedule. I travel all the time for business. You travel all the time for business. Because we're not constantly forced to check in to clock in at the office. The number one reason for me why online is better in person is freedom. It's freedom for everybody. Yeah, everybody is more free.
- [03:43]
Matt Reynolds
Yep. Yeah. So that point is definitely correct. We did the same thing in our first company where I, you know, we started with, with an office because the world just hadn't done this thing yet. And we transitioned extremely early to a fully remote company. And what really enabled that for us, we were, I think, one of the earliest adopters of Slack. Everybody uses Slack now, but we use Slack when it was literally brand new. When it was released, we used Slack. And I think what I realized in that process was that it's not that there isn't an office anymore, it's that the office has become digital.
- [04:23]
Chris Reynolds
Correct.
- [04:24]
Matt Reynolds
So I think this is confusing to a lot of people who think like, oh, you know, how, how could you possibly keep a finger on the pulse of what's going on in your company if you don't, you know, you can't walk around the office? And my argument is actually, and has been, has been this for many years, you can keep your finger on the pulse far better than you could when there was an office. There's, there's one of you and finite time to walk into all of the different cubicles or office spaces or whatever you would possibly do in the real office setup, but in a digital office setup, you can recap every single Slack channel or basecamp or whatever it is you're. You're doing whenever the time suits you. And you may not be there in real time, but you can get all, you can get all the information because all communication is happening in this one place.
- [05:11]
Chris Reynolds
Yep.
- [05:11]
Matt Reynolds
So it's not so much that there isn't an office, is that the office became digital. And when the office becomes digital, it gives you tremendous amounts of physical freedom. You can move to all these, all these different places and still keep up with what's going on. Of course, you know, Covid sped some of this up to the extent that, you know, Everybody now is like, even meetings, like meetings before COVID meetings were still rarely on zoom and more, more frequently or whatever, digital in whatever way, but more frequently in person in a conference room.
- [05:45]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, but like now, almost everything is online.
- [05:49]
Matt Reynolds
All the meetings we'll get into the pros and cons of this, there is obviously still, when you do these in person meetings, there is higher value that comes out of those meetings when you can get everybody in the same space if they're the right people for the right period of time and is a very targeted kind of approach.
- [06:06]
Chris Reynolds
Sure.
- [06:07]
Matt Reynolds
So we'll talk about that. But the primary piece of this that I think is maybe the, the main positive for founders is that your talent pool just became infinite.
- [06:18]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [06:18]
Matt Reynolds
You can essentially pick off great talent as either, you know, international contractors or people in any place in the United States, and they will work for you in the same way that they would have worked if they were in a physical office, except, you know, you'll be doing a lot of zoom calls and chatting over slack. So let's talk about like when you, when you think about how you hire for this, it actually shifts a bit as well. So I think the thing that is the easiest to hit on here is just that as a founder you are by your very nature, you are highly driven. You don't need someone to tell you wake up this morning and do this list of things right.
- [06:59]
Chris Reynolds
Initiative. You have initiative and ambition. But you cannot expect that out of everyone that is in your business.
- [07:07]
Matt Reynolds
That's correct. And the extent to which you might have allowed less of that even in office environment, because know you're staring at people and when you come in they're like, oh, I gotta do something, boss coming, you know, that kind of thing. That's, that's gone. So basically your employees that you hire in a remote first company have, you should always imagine that they have Netflix, PS5. They have all the things that are.
- [07:36]
Chris Reynolds
Competing for their attention.
- [07:38]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [07:38]
Chris Reynolds
We live now at this point in the greatest commodity is attention. We are all fighting for the attention of the client, the employee, the everybody. Like it's the attention economy. That's what we live in.
- [07:55]
Matt Reynolds
The most limited thing that you can get, you know that you can get is attention because there are, you know, there's only a finite amount of it and everybody's competing for it. So that's right. What you have to do is you have to hire with this idea in mind. Is this person, the kind of person who can be sitting directly in front of a TV that's off and Go. I'm going to sit down and focus on my work now because that's the most important thing that needs to get done. And I'm not going to turn on Netflix and start watching a show, even though I can kind of do that and in the background do some work, that person will be horribly ineffective at their job. And. And so. And you'll know it, like, really early. This is one of the reasons also we do things like game plans so that we can actually hold people accountable for the work they're doing. But the way that you hold people accountable and the fact that you need to have systems in place and SOPs in place to hold people accountable for their deliverables and less so their time. Right. It's kind of a big shift. Becomes really, really critical.
- [08:51]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, you just stole my next point, so I'll just tack onto that, is that in person, often pay is equated with the number of hours worked. And it's often also this sort of unwritten rule of a visual scan of the CEO or head of HR or whatever. So if everybody's in cubicles and you scan and everybody's working, you're like, yeah, they're all working. Probably not, right? Yeah.
- [09:21]
Matt Reynolds
Wasn't true in the past either.
- [09:22]
Chris Reynolds
I couldn't care less how many hours my employees work. That's not entirely true. Cause if they're working 150 hours a week, that's a problem. And if they're working six hours a week, that's a problem. But in general, if they're in somewhere in the middle of the bell curve, we are paying and giving incentives and commission and all that stuff based on output, not on hours worked. And to come back to your point about Slack, we track this. And if some of my staff, especially my 1099s, hear this, they may not know that we do this. We track your engagement on Slack, on Basecamp, we know who's engaged and who's not, and that's part of the output. Like, are they part of the team? Whereas that's not the same thing as the guy that makes all the funny jokes, the water cooler and whatever in the office, in the cubicle always looks like they're working. It's like the movie Office Space. You know when they call him in and he's like, I think I probably don't do more than 15 minutes of real work in any given week. Okay? So online, the pay has to be based on output, which means there has to be clear responsibilities and expectations of the output for every single employee. Every single like contract or contractor that you're working with, this is the expected output. And when you hit these milestones based on output, you'll get paid this and sometimes you'll get paid bonuses or commission or whatever. But like, we don't care when you work in general, right now there are some companies that want to have certain office hours so that we can have like, obviously there's certain meetings that we have and then we've got people from all different time zones and everyone is expected, whoever is on that specific team to be on that team meeting. Whether it is 6am in the morning or 10pm at night, you know, some guy in India or somebody you know in Alaska, we need to be on the team meeting. But outside of that, it's really about output. Yeah, it's really about finding great talent, which is now the entire world, and making sure they're aware of the output that is expected. And coming back to the final point that you said is you've got to hire. Well, you hire slowly and fire quickly based on the personality of the person. Are they a culture fit? Will they take initiative and ambition? Because when you work from home, you get all, again, you get all the freedom advantage. There's no commute. You don't have to clock in, you don't have to clock out. You just have output work that has to be done. Is this the kind of person who will get that output done? And what I'm really looking for is somebody who actually goes above and beyond and does even a little more than what is actually expected of them or sometimes a lot more, which leads to a promotion. And so these are the major differences between in person and online.
- [12:16]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah, I think one of the things that you, you really keep, you're really keeping an eye out for. I think about this almost like two different types of people in terms of their drive and ambition. And it's, you know, the people that are very low on that spectrum are going to struggle with on the low end of, you know, the number of hours they're working and how engaged they are inside of the digital office and all of that. The other end of that spectrum probably leads us to the next topic, which is that you can't, if you are highly driven and there's a tremendous amount to do and there's always. All businesses have what is essentially infinity to do. It's not like the list stops at some point. You can continue to grow the organization.
- [12:57]
Chris Reynolds
Sure.
- [12:57]
Matt Reynolds
And so when you have that freedom to work whenever you want, you also don't have A lot of built in boundaries. And so there is this whole idea, you know, in the past where you know, you can do kind of whatever you want until 8:00am or 9:00am you check in. It's all the Fred Flintstone stuff, right. Like you go in and you just do normal hours. You, when you clock out, you're done, you walk out and the day's over. That does not exist anymore in this culture. And it can be dangerous in and of itself.
- [13:32]
Chris Reynolds
And this is by the way to Rabbit Trail a little bit. Have you watched Severance at all?
- [13:36]
Matt Reynolds
Oh yeah.
- [13:37]
Chris Reynolds
This is why this show is so intriguing.
- [13:40]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah, for sure.
- [13:41]
Chris Reynolds
Because in the show you get on the elevator and this is not giving away anything. You learn this in the first few minutes of the first episode. You get on the elevator and you are your work self and you work the day and then you clock out at 5 or 5:15 or 5:30 whenever they tell you to and you get on the elevator and as the elevator goes down you become your outside world version of you and those two things are completely severed. Obviously that is, that's not, that's not realism. That's, you know, that's fantasy still for some time until neuralink is able to do that. But there are still a lot of people that like clock in at the factory job and clock out at the factory job and then like go drink the beer and then hang out with the family and the kids and watch Netflix at night and never think about the job again until they clock back in the next day. There is, let me be clear, there's. I'm definitely kind of jealous of those people.
- [14:39]
Matt Reynolds
Oh for sure. That's freaking awesome.
- [14:41]
Chris Reynolds
Sounds amazing.
- [14:42]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah.
- [14:42]
Chris Reynolds
Unfortunately not possible for a business owner.
- [14:45]
Matt Reynolds
No.
- [14:45]
Chris Reynolds
Because Your work is 24 hours a day, seven days a week and the only break you get is when you intentionally set boundaries to say I'm not going to work at this point. And that may be sleep, that may be a date. We took Kaelin's boyfriend, turned 20 yesterday. So took him out to a nice steakhouse and kept the phone on. Do not disturb and face down. And it was there and I checked it once or twice just to make sure nothing blew up. Had a nice steak dinner. But you have to be able to create those boundaries because in an in person environment the boundaries are created for you. When I was a teacher, when I was a public school teacher, there's again will be interesting to see how much public school changes over the next 10 years because I think it's going to go a lot more Remote. If you have, if you have a select group of excellent teachers, like, this guy is the best calculus teacher in the world. That guy should not be in a specific town in America and only available to 200 kids a day throughout eight periods. So when I was a teacher, the boundaries were when the bells rang. Bell rings, class starts. Bell rings, class is off.5 minute break. Bell rings, class is on. Those boundaries are created when you're online or remote. You have to create those boundaries. You have to decide. And as a worker, there is still often a finite amount of work to do. But as an owner or founder, there's an infinite amount of work to do, which means you have to make the call every day. When I'm going to stop working.
- [16:22]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah.
- [16:22]
Chris Reynolds
When I'm going to become dad, husband, family, man, whatever, and turn off the work and turn on the rest of my life.
- [16:30]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah. And I think the other thing to keep in mind here is that, you know, we're talking about how important hiring becomes at this, at this phase. I think you also want to be super honest. Like, just be honest about what it is that you expect in this environment. Like, I learned years ago that in my first company, I would say things that weren't the thing I thought for real. Like, I would say things that sounded correct and then I would tell you maybe that I believed, but I didn't really believe. Like, when I really uncovered it. Like, here's an example. My expectation of remote, of remote employees is that they have slack on their phone and that they're available to answer it almost all the time. Right. Like, admittedly, like, obviously I don't expect that when they're, you know, sleeping or whatever. But, like, the difference between employees that I would rate really highly and ones that I would rate very low are the ones that stay hyper engaged and are sort of constantly keeping an eye on things. Yes, I recognize that that is, that can lead down a, a rabbit hole of, of bad stuff. But I think that is sort of the job. The job is to figure out how to manage that in your own life. Now you can set boundaries. If my employees said, look, I work infinitely better early in the morning and I work very badly at night, so I'm not going to answer things at night, but I'll answer super early in the morning. Just FYI, that's the situation. Great, let's have an open communication about it. It's fine. But I think the. I used to say things like, you know, you need to have good work, life balance, and it's really important that you get off the clock and all these things or whatever. And while I do believe those things sort of at a surface level, I don't. It's hard to reconcile it with the reality of what I expect out of. Out of employees. And so.
- [18:13]
Chris Reynolds
Well, you're not asking people to be on the clock all the time, but you are asking them to be on call.
- [18:19]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah.
- [18:19]
Chris Reynolds
So in the same way that like, for. It's the best example I have of like an OB GYN who delivers babies, they're like, hey, I'm off the clock. I'm going to go home and go to bed. And then the phone goes off. Or I don't. It was always pagers when we were kids. I don't know if they still use pagers or whatever. It was like so and so is having a baby, then you're on call and so you must respond and go deliver a baby. This is important. Right. And for companies that potentially get into crisis mode or we've got to fix a problem right now, again, you'd never want to overuse that as a founder or as an owner, but you are looking for that thing. Now, here's what the hardest part of that is actually in the hiring of the people, because pretty quick you'll learn when they're work. I know every single person that works for me. I know when they work because I know when they respond to my messages and they know when I work because they're going to get messages at 4am on Basecamp and some of them respond to the messages at 5am on Basecamp and some respond at 9:30 or 10am and I don't care as long as the output is what it's supposed to be. I have a great executive assistant. He's fantastic. He's super, super on it all the time. He's similar to me late at night. He's a family man. Like, he's not on it as much. He's also a hardcore Catholic and he doesn't work on Sundays.
- [19:42]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah.
- [19:42]
Chris Reynolds
And so I know those are his boundaries. Like, it has to be a ma. I have to call him on the phone and there has to be a massive emergency. And that better not occur more than once a year on a Sunday. Right. Because Sundays for him are special. And so he's not working. Okay, so fine. I know the boundaries, right. I've got other employees or staff members or contractors, whatever. They're in time zones that are 13, 14 hours difference than me. So essentially that slows down. And this is a downside of, of an. The Online workspace is a communication cycle. I send a message, they send a message back 14 hours later. I send a message back while they're sleeping and I'm awake and then they send a message back 14 hours later or whatever. Right. And so because you're on the opposite ends of the earth and so the communication, then what ends up having to happen with people like that is you have to give them more information in a single message or in a single like thread of messages so that you know that they're going to spend 10 hours working on that thing or eight hours working on that thing while you're late at night and sleeping and expect things to actually be done by the next day. If their response to what you sent them is another couple questions. You just delayed the work by another day.
- [21:03]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah, that's right. I will also say that you can use this to your advantage over time. So when you first start, it's not going to be that way. You're not going to, it's not going to be a positive, it's mostly going to be a negative. Exactly what you just said, Matt. But I think you can get to the point as your company grows where you can actually use that time difference to your advantage for a 24 hour thing schedule. And the way you do that is it's difficult to get right. But time zones begin to really matter. So you do things like there's a time zone that's actually pretty hard to cover for most companies in the United States. And that is the time zone that is roughly covering 4:00pm Eastern time until about 1:00am Eastern time.
- [21:42]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [21:43]
Matt Reynolds
That time zone is a hard one to find, but it exists in Australia.
- [21:46]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [21:47]
Matt Reynolds
And so if you get a good set of Australian employees that are working for you, again as international contractors, but you can basically say, look, the time zone we need coverage for is this time zone. And this for a guy like me that's an early morning person. And by 4pm I'd really like to be 4pm Eastern time. I'd like to be clocking out because I started at 3am, it's a long ass day. And so what I'm looking for is how do I utilize that person in Australia to get things done. And the answer to that is I cannot be the one communicating the messages to that person. Need a layer of management that's above that general area that has crossover in time and can see, you know, sort of like an everyday event where you do this handoff and you say, you know, 30 minutes of brain dump to somebody who's going to be like, got it. All right. We're going to take the baton and go do this next thing and keep things going through the night. It's hard to run. So just FYI, it's difficult to. Things get lost in translation. There's some communication needs to be freaking on point if you're going to do this. But it is, it can become an advantage over time. Doesn't have to be a disadvantage, but at the beginning it probably is a disadvantage.
- [23:01]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah. And to be clear, why is it an advantage? Well, it's an advantage because there is nothing that feels better in business than when you go to bed and then you wake up the next morning and shit got done.
- [23:13]
Matt Reynolds
That's right.
- [23:14]
Chris Reynolds
And the business advanced without you. And whether that's while you sleep or whether that's while you're on vacation or whatever. The thing is, that's the advantage of the time zone having, having potential contractors or employees spread out across multiple time zones. It's like the factories that work three shifts. We just don't specifically identify when those shifts are because we still want everyone that works for us to have the freedom to work when they want. Yet they know and we know when their work set is that all hours are essentially covered. So customer service at any point, someone can get a hold of customer service for barbalogic any hour of any day. Andrew Jackson, our coo, his executive assistant, lives in Scotland. That's six hours ahead of me, but it's eight hours ahead of Andrew. They do a standup, which is first thing in the morning for Andrew, but it's sort of at the end of the day for Mac and they've worked and they're awesome. The perfect handoff. So Mac's like, I got all this done today and I'm ready to shut down and like go eat dinner with my family and you're good to go. And then by the time Andrew wakes up the next morning, he has a complete schedule for the next morning. And here's all the stuff that got done by Mac and it works awesome. And so. And again for me, for Dan, Dan is one hour. He's east coast time. I'm central time, so he's one hour ahead of me. Dan is an early morning guy just like me. I don't think he's a 3am guy like me. He's more like a 4 or 5am but that's perfect because that's. They line up and so I want to work with. I don't actually want the eight hour separation. I want the same hours that I'm working to be the same hours that my EA is working as well, so that we can quickly communicate back and forth. So that depends on personality as well. But yes, you can absolutely use the time zones in the beginning. They will feel like a pain in the butt, but it's done. Well, there is a time I can remember these time periods in this business as well as even my previous business, where when you don't do the work, but the work still gets done and then it just comes. Is emailed to you, or if it's in person, it comes across your desk, you're like, oh my God, work got done and I wasn't here. Okay, that's an incredible feeling.
- [25:32]
Matt Reynolds
I'll give you a real quick story on that one and that'll be a decent probably recap for us to. We can recap at the end of that and then maybe tie it up. So we just delivered a project for a customer that was in the. I'll say they're in the oil and gas space. And what they do is they, they manage refineries across the United States. We did a very large project for this customer over the course of what was essentially about nine months of work, but to build their vision for this application into a reality. And I did a lot of early work to help coach these guys on how to think about this business because it's, it's a startup, right? And, and the. These guys are, you know, from the manufacturing kind of space sort of the way of, of thinking about it. Right. It's like industrial stuff and so it's not really their world. So I helped navigate some of that with them. Did a bunch of the design work and stuff. But whenever the project kicked off for actually doing the work, I did zero of the work. I wrote zero lines of code for this thing.
- [26:41]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [26:41]
Matt Reynolds
I just checked in every so often to make sure everything was on point. They delivered their product to their first potential customer this past week. And I didn't touch a line of code ever. I had a couple of people that were in the European time zone, I had a couple that were in South America that were doing some of most of this work. And uh, and that was enough to keep things kind of cranking throughout, you know, most of the, the evenings and the mornings and it got done. That's the world you can create in a remote environment where. And again, like, I think this is really critical. The people that I picked, these are not subpar. Like these are top.01% engineers that I can hand Something to and know it's going to get done. Right. That's a different world than when you're hiring in your small hometown.
- [27:32]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [27:32]
Matt Reynolds
And the total available talent that's available to you is there's two or three people that you might be like, oh, I'd love to have this person, but maybe they're doing something else. Your bar has to change. You have to have a bar that is super high for people that make sure that they actually are capable of delivering on the thing that you need them to deliver on during that time frame. But that's the world you can create. You can create a world with the best talent from. You don't care where. Right. It gets done. And you set up an environment where there is really good, crystal clear communication which requires a digital office. Our digital office is slack. I think your digital office is basecamp.
- [28:09]
Chris Reynolds
Yep.
- [28:09]
Matt Reynolds
There's lots of digital offices that you can pick from. But that's the way I want you to think about it. It's not just a chat app. It's the digital office.
- [28:15]
Chris Reynolds
That's right. Yep. That's perfect. So there you go. We love online businesses. We both run online businesses. That allows us the freedom to travel, often for business, sometimes for pleasure, and continue to do work as needed. You can, it extends, expands your talent pool to the entire world. We didn't even talk about this. It's far more efficient because there is no commute. There's no right. All that crap that gets like, I don't want to commute 45 minutes to the office. No, I don't want to be stuck to a schedule and a location. I don't want to, you know, all of those things get lifted. So everyone has freedom. The clients also tend to benefit from that freedom. So you know, when I, like, there are times when I'm trying to, I don't know, book a plane ticket on the American Express card. And I have because I've got the good American Express card. 24 hour customer service. And there are other times when I need to book a hotel room or a plane ticket or something. And it's like, yeah, it's 9:00am to 4:00pm it's banker's hours.
- [29:15]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah, I don't know.
- [29:16]
Chris Reynolds
Like that's sucks for the client. I want to be able to call at 4 in the morning and be like, hey, I just want to make sure that the plane tickets are right or whatever. And so everybody benefits from that freedom that allows everyone else to also one you don't have to tend to live in unless you Want to in the super expensive downtown major cities, right, where a 350 square foot apartment is $5,000 a month, right?
- [29:43]
Matt Reynolds
That's right.
- [29:44]
Chris Reynolds
We watched during COVID how many of our coaches and staff moved out of the cities and into the suburbs or even into rural areas because of how much cheaper it was to live. And they could just continue to do their work. Especially now that we have things like Starlink, you have fast Internet anywhere in the world, all of that can be done. So there's a tremendous amount of freedom, tremendous amount of efficiency. You can make way more money, you can often work with way more people. And I'm not talking about your staff. Yes, your staff. But I mean, you can probably take on way more clients. So whether you are an engineer or developer that you know, you would have to commute into the company that's hiring you, sit at the conference room, see what they need. You can actually like exponentially increase the amount of work that you do. If you're a strength coach, and this is what we've tried to do at turnkey coach, you don't have to work with 12 or 13 or 15 clients. You can work with a hundred clients on one fifth the time. And those are the advantages. Now the disadvantages are you gotta be really organized. You gotta have great stops in place. You gotta hire people that are like high initiative, high ambition. Right. Because you're not there to visually check that they're working, which is not a great way to do it anyway. You pay based on output. Your responsibilities and expectations are based on output. And those are the things that cause and then just know, like communication is a little harder because you can't just walk down the hallway and go talk to your coo. Your COO is probably not in the same time zone as you.
- [31:15]
Matt Reynolds
That's right.
- [31:15]
Chris Reynolds
And so those are the things you have to overcome. But if you can overcome them and if you think through them well. And you and I have spent a ton of time writing SOPs and systems for our company to be able to do that. What we found is like tremendous freedom and also just a team of A players.
- [31:34]
Matt Reynolds
That's right.
- [31:34]
Chris Reynolds
Which for me in Springfield, like Boston, is full of A players, but they're also very expensive.
- [31:40]
Matt Reynolds
That's right.
- [31:41]
Chris Reynolds
In Springfield, Missouri. And again, I'm not knocking Springfield, Missouri, but like there's not a lot of A players and the ones that are, that are a players already running major companies that are, you know, the, the five, the O'Reilly's and the SRCS and the bass pros. And like the big major headquarters, like that's where your A players are. And so it's very competitive to try to get an A player in a, you know, in the Ozarks when you're trying to hire specifically someone in the Ozarks.
- [32:08]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah.
- [32:09]
Chris Reynolds
And that's going to apply to most of the people who are listening to this podcast. So that's why we love online or remote work over in person. I do think that distractions can be a massive problem in both places. I think I had an article in Fortune magazine come out that quoted me and it was actually quoting Jamie Dimon who was talking about, you might have seen the quote about people, you know, texting or like getting notifications on their phone and, and how disrespectful it was. And you definitely have to control the, the distractions.
- [32:39]
Matt Reynolds
You do.
- [32:40]
Chris Reynolds
You have to hire people that can control the distractions. You don't get to like, you're not there in the office with them to control the distractions. Like so you have to hire people that can do that on their own. But outside of that, like if you can write good systems and you can get a good flywheel going, I think is far more profitable. There's no rent, there's no mortgage. How expensive is an office building?
- [33:00]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah, that's exactly right.
- [33:01]
Chris Reynolds
The overhead, all of those things.
- [33:03]
Matt Reynolds
The fact that overhead drops, passes along to your, to your customers and that, you know, you end up being able to out price other people that can't. So there's huge advantages there.
- [33:13]
Chris Reynolds
That's it. That's another episode of the build your business podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for giving us some time on your Friday. We would love a five star review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast. And this is on YouTube and always comes out and I think the video is better. So if you haven't subscribed and liked, shared, commented, we love to see those things. We would love to have that from you and we'll see you guys next Friday.