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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2312 Extended Interview with Liam Martin: The Challenges & Benefits of Running a Remote Team
00:52:37
What does it really take to run a remote team? As businesses grapple with the choice to bring employees back to the office or maintain COVID-era remote work policies, entrepreneurs find themselves at a crossroads.
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- [00:00]
Omar Zenhom
This episode of the $100 MBA show is brought to you by this Is Small Business, an original podcast from Amazon. This podcast is all about what it takes to be a successful small business owner. Today I listened to an episode of this Is Small Business and I love.
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Liam Martin
How practical it is.
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Omar Zenhom
I listened to an episode that is titled Product Improvements without breaking the Bank. How to iterate on your product, how to improve it so that you are getting more customers, serving the customers you already have, and adding value to your business. Season two of this is Small Business is out. So go ahead, listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, welcome to the $100 VA Show Business Lessons Delivered on a silver platter. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is a special extended interview episode where we sit down with a business founder. We extract the lessons that they've learned along the way so that you can be better as a business owner. Today we have Liam Martin, the co founder and CMO of Time Doctor. In my opinion, Time Doctor is the best productivity tool you can install in your business. How do I know? Well, we've been running an experiment with Time Doctor for the last few months. They've been a sponsor of the show. We've rolled out Time Doctor in our own team and and share the results along the way. But today Liam is here to share his story about starting Time Doctor with his co founder Rob Rawson and the benefits and challenges of running a remote team. There's a ton in this chat. If you're thinking about starting a remote team or you have an existing one, or you're trying to transition from on premises types of businesses, or you're trying to transition to a remote working environment, you're going to learn a ton. Because in order for remote work to work, you gotta change the way you work, how you communicate and how you collaborate with your team. Can't wait to dive in. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's extended interview chat is with Liam Martin, the CMO and co founder of Time Doctor. If you're unfamiliar with Time Doctor, it's a tool that you and your team use to measure your productivity, your accountability and how you work. Really the way I like to describe it to other people is that time is your greatest asset in business. And we have other tools to measure other assets like money and talent and like hosting usage and all that kind of stuff. But many of us, as business owners, neglect measuring time, how we use it. Now, I've known Liam for years now. Him and his co founder, Rob Rosson, are friends of mine. But even though I've known Liam for so long, I learned a ton about him in this chat, about the genesis of the idea, how they improved it and pivoted it along the way. They're all about helping people work better remotely. We're going to jump right into the conversation now with Liam Marin, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and fill in any gaps. But for now, let's jump into the chat with Liam Martin.
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Liam Martin
Liam Martin, so awesome to have you on the show. We've known each other for a few years now, more than a few years, I think about, like, five years or so. And, yeah, I've really admired what you and Rob have started with Time Doctor because you guys started a remote team and were champions of remote work before it was a thing, you know, back in 2012, even before us when we started in 2014. So that. That's amazing. But I want to kind of kick back a little bit and talk a little bit about you starting Time Doctor. What was the inspiration, and were you guys scratching your own itch or did you see any need in the market? What was the backstory, and why did you start it?
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Rob Rawson
Well, that's a very long story. I think it essentially starts with me at grad school. So I went to grad school at McGill University, which is about 10 blocks in that direction, and. And really loved it. That was what I was planning to do with my life. I was going to go into academia in sociology, taught my first class, started with 300 students and ended up with less than 150 finishing the course and the worst academic reviews in the history of the department. The department had been running for 189 years, so very bad. And I remember walking into my supervisor's office and. And I said, I don't think I'm very good at this. And he said, no, you are not. And I said, okay, so what do you think I should be doing next? And he said, well, you got to get pretty good at this teaching thing if you want to do anything fun. So either figure out how to do better at that or figure out something else to do. And six weeks later, I threw a master's thesis out under his door. I was out into the real world. And what I ended up starting was an online tutoring business off of that experience. And so we had dozens of tutors throughout North America and Europe that were specifically actually focused on people passing their pre med prerequisites. Me and Rob is a medical doctor. So that's where we kind of connected in a different way as well. And there was this. I was at a conference called south by Southwest. I was speaking about remote work. And that's where I met Rob, my business partner and CEO of the company. And we ended up connecting. And he had this really crappy little alpha of this thing that he was calling Time Doctor because he was a medical doctor. And this perfectly solved the biggest problem that I had inside of my tutoring business, my online tutoring business, which was I couldn't actually adequately measure how long a tutor was working with a student. So I would bill a student for 10 hours, and the tutor would basically say, yeah, I worked with this student for 10 hours. But then the tutor would say, no, I worked with him for five. So who do you trust? Well, you pay the tutor out the full 10 hours and you end up refunding the student 5 hours and I end up losing money in the deal. So Time Doctor was a perfect solution to scratch that particular itch. And I said, listen, software is something that I've wanted to get into for a really long time. So back in 2011, 2012, is when we ended up joining forces, and we have been joined at the hip ever since.
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Liam Martin
This is such an interesting backstory, because I didn't know that you're in education and they have an education background in academia. As you know, I used to be a teacher, high school university teacher for 13 years. I have masters in education. And somehow we kind of both use that experience in some way in our businesses, our, our ventures. It's so interesting to hear that you started kind of like a test prep company. A lot of our users at Webinar Ninja do that. They, they teach and sell test prep courses and live training and all that kind of stuff. What, what I found very interesting as well is the, the. The use case of Time Doctor for you was not. Is not the current use case today. Like, it's not exactly the same use of it. It's more for teams and, and remote teams to kind of track accountability and time and productivity, all that kind of stuff. When did it start to kind of solidify, like, okay, this is our avatar. This is who we're targeting. You know, this is what the app does like, and how did you guys make that pivot or, or make that.
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Rob Rawson
Decision with a lot of bootstrapped companies? And again, this was back in 2012. Right. So soccer as a service, which is the type of business that we operate, that was a new idea back in 2012. There weren't many of those types of businesses that were out there. And for us it was really just trying a whole bunch of different things. Right. So I wrote hundreds of blog posts. We, you know, we were doing backlinking and that still actually is a huge engine of ours today. But one of the things that we identified from that was who was using it the most. And what I would suggest that people do is scratch your own itch. Never build a product that doesn't scratch your own itch because you're not going to be passionate about that product long.
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Liam Martin
And you're not going to understand the pain point.
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Rob Rawson
Yeah, you're not going to understand the pain point. And more importantly, it's going to get tough, right? There's going to be a day that you want to, there's going to be multiple days that you want to quit. And you have to say to yourself, no, I'm doing this because I actually want to help people that were just like me. And that's something that I've always kept in my mind in terms of the long term vision. And our mission as a company is we want to empower the world's transition towards remote work. So we're all very, very passionate about that particular subject. So when we have those tough days, it's very easy for us to be able to say, well, what are we doing here? We're here to be able to help people work remotely, which got a lot easier, by the way, in 2020, but 10 years previous to that, that was a tough sell for people. And so making that transition, making sure that people are passionate about it is really important. But once we actually really got a couple thousand customers, those what we call ICPs, ideal customer profiles, really just presented themselves. So now we deal with a lot of companies that are doing a lot of offshoring, a lot of outsourcing at large scale. We work with a lot of agencies and we actually work with a lot of really interesting outside use case customers. That's also the beauty of having a product LED type of product as opposed to something that's focused on sales. Like you can try a 14 day trial of time Dr. If you want, you can play around with it. If you want to buy it, you can buy it. You don't even have to talk to a salesperson. So this allows us for a lot of really interesting customers to come out of the woodwork. That we wouldn't have otherwise thought of contacting.
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Omar Zenhom
This episode of the $100 MBA show is brought to you by this Is Small Business, an original podcast from Amazon. I love this podcast because it's all about practical ways to be successful as a small business owner. Today this Is Small Business is hosted by Mexican American Andrea Marquez. She's part of Amazon's Small Business Empowerment team. Andrea brings a unique perspective of a curious millennial trying to figure out what it takes to be successful as a small business owner. Today, the show explores the journey to success for small business owners. It dives deep into pivotal moments they have to face along the way, like funding your business. In episode 15 of season two, you hear from Deitra Williams. She's a co founder of a small business and she talks about her relationship, her personal relationship with money and some really helpful tips on bootstrapping loans and her own personal favorite and current funding method, pitching for grants. Season two of this is Small Business is out now, so go ahead and add this Is Small Business to your podcast rotation.
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Liam Martin
I was thinking about using Time Doctor in our company for years, using some sort of time tracking productivity tool, mostly because I wanted to know if I can verify my gut. You know, I'm a gut kind of entrepreneur, but over the years I've realized I need the data to prove it. Like I need, I need to verify my gut. And I just felt like, you know, am I spending my time in the right areas? Am I spending my time in the right ways? And then I thought, I think if, if I'm questioning my own self, the person that is probably going to work the hardest and care the most has the most on the line and the stakes are high as the, you know, the business owner and the CEO. What about my, my team members, you know, like, are they getting enough accountability and verification of how they're working product in terms of their productivity? But I think what held me back, and I want to hear from you, do you think this is what holds a lot of people back from using something like Time Doctor Is the kind of initial work to implement it on your team, the reaction of the team, how do I message this to the team, all that kind of stuff and I can share what we did in our team, but is that something that you find with your users, that this is kind of the hurdle and once they get out of the hurdle, they fall in love?
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Rob Rawson
Absolutely. So we've really, I remember we hired a really smart marketing consulting team maybe about 10 years back and they nailed exactly what our biggest issue Was. Which was if there was no social cost for deploying Time doctor Every single person on planet Earth would deploy this for their team, right?
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Liam Martin
It is every single person. Yes.
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Rob Rawson
Yeah. Analytics for your workday, Right? We run Google Analytics on every single website known to men. You would, as a business owner, you.
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Liam Martin
Would never start financial analytics. Yeah, Exactly.
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Rob Rawson
Yeah, exactly. QuickBooks, right. You've got all of these measurement tools in place, but for some reason, when we're looking at measuring people, we use this weird 20th century model of, well, they're in the office, so I think they're working right. Which is not actually an effective way to be able to measure people. And the counterintuitive perspective, which is really interesting, is some of the people that you may. Not necessarily. You've got a really good gut, but there are a lot of people that will look at the situation and think to themselves, oh, yeah, I really think that John is great because, frankly, I like John and John's a really good talker, and John's able to make me. John's a charismatic guy, but in reality, actually, John may be nowhere near as effective as Susan, who's actually very quiet and just diligently works away. It allows you to be able to identify who are your real rock stars, not just who are telling you they're rock stars. And that's a big thing that is really important, particularly inside of a remote team.
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Liam Martin
Huge. Just a couple things that I noticed when we started using Time doctor In our team is just real allocation of our resources. Like, we realized there. There were a handful of people on our team that were actually overworked, like, they. They didn't have good work life balance. They were putting in too many hours. And we had to have talk with them and say, hey, you know, part of the reason why we're doing this is so that this doesn't happen, so that you can be conscious of the time you're putting into your work. And then the other side of the spectrum, we realize, oh, there's some people that are bored. Like, that's a problem too. Like, they have too much time in their hands in that department or that job or that shift, for that example. It's a slow time for customer support, and maybe they would be better off changing their shift and we'd serve our customers better. And the nail in the coffin for us was for about 13 months, we were trying to get our average response time for customer support down under. Our goal was under five minutes, and it was hovering around 12 minutes, 13 minutes. We would try different things. We Would try different, like change the shifts around. We do all that kind of stuff. And then once we implement a Time Doctor and looked at the activities and the projects and the tasks and the things that people were actually working on and had the data to say, oh, we knew exactly the changes we need to make. And immediately the next week, we got it under five minutes. Like, it was. It was just like, what in the world? It was crazy. And it was like we were trying to do this, like, with other ways and guessing and trial and error. So, like, if that's any kind of testimonial, I don't know what is.
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Rob Rawson
What you don't measure, you don't manage. And that is true Time and time. Again, I don't know what type of ticketing software that you use.
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Liam Martin
Yeah, we use Intercom. Yeah.
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Rob Rawson
Okay. So one of the really magical things that you can do with Time Doctor, which is a new feature that we released recently, is we do integrations with Zendesk and Intercom is actually coming up next where you can correlate and optimize how you work based off the outcome variable. So one of the very nerdy things that we've identified, which is super cool, at least as a sociologist of work, which is what I was pursuing in grad school, is that when you want to optimize a particular goal, so let's say that you want high net promoter score inside of your ticketing software, that workflow looks completely different than ticket completion time, which is what you're targeting.
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Liam Martin
Yeah.
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Rob Rawson
So you actually can choose. So the way that someone would work to get high MPS is completely different from the way that someone would work if they're creating, if they want to be able to get the response time as low as humanly possible. And so it's really cool to be able to now optimize these two separate, separate things to be able to say, do you want to work for high nps? Do you want to work for csac? Do you want to work for ticket completion time? And it's been a game changer for a lot of our customers, particularly the ones that are using Zendesk. But Intercom is coming pretty soon.
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Liam Martin
Yeah. And also, not to get too much in the weeds, but when we looked at the projects and tasks, this is a great feature you guys have where you. When somebody is working on anything, they choose what they're working on so they can know how much time they're spending on it. And also you get to see the patterns. So for us, I'll give you a small example One of the things that helped us understand why it's taking so long to even pick up a new ticket or complete a ticket in support was just the workflow. Like they would work with the customer, then they would log the JIRA ticket if there was an issue that they needed to log and then they'd go back to the customer and this would kind of delay the next customer in queue. And it's just like, well, you can log that ticket later. Like you could, like you don't need to go back and forth. You can deal with the customer, close that ticket, get to the next customer, the queue is done, then you can do the JIRA tickets. You know, you can just kind of have it there. And we wouldn't have that visibility because our team members are global and they're all around the world and we don't sit right next to them in the desk. And even if I did, I can't look at their screen 24 7. Right. So I don't know their workflow. I don't know how they're actually managing the tasks. And it was very clear once we implemented time doctors. See. Okay, we actually need to provide some training and some, some, maybe some suggestions on how they can, you know, manage tickets in a different way. And we just kind of took it for granted because we're just like, okay, you know, we, we love our team, we trust them, they're great. And that's great and all, but doesn't mean that everybody's perfect. We all can improve. And that's something that I think was really eye opening for us and the team and those moments actually sell this product to the team. Like they can't deny that, oh, we're actually getting better results. Now this makes sense. I want to talk about your remote team for a moment. Sorry. Go ahead, Liam.
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Rob Rawson
Sure. Yeah, no, I completely agree. Let's move on to my remote team, which is very, very complicated.
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Liam Martin
Yeah. So I've heard bits and bobs about how you have team members all over the world, Egypt and Philippines and the US and Australia and all around the place. How do you guys manage, you know, across time zones? This is one of the banes of our existence, like meetings and all that kind of stuff. When you're dealing with like, you know, probably in your case, I think it's like 10 different time zones.
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Rob Rawson
Well, it's 33 countries and I think, I believe it's 16 time zones at this point. Wow.
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Liam Martin
Okay.
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Rob Rawson
It's very, very. So that can be a little bit stressful for people.
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Liam Martin
So you Guys have like some. Yeah, so do you guys have like, rules of thumb? Like all departments have to have a be on. On a four hour lap or like, do you guys have any rules of thumb? Or you guys just figure it out.
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Rob Rawson
So the biggest thing that we really focus on is something called asynchronous management, which is a philosophy that I actually wrote. Me and Rob wrote a book on, which came out about seven or eight months ago, and it's called Running Remote, which is also the name of our conference.
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Liam Martin
It hit one of the lists, right?
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Rob Rawson
It hit Wall Street Journal, which was fantastic. Yeah, we, we really worked very hard to be able to hit that particular target. But it, it's definitely something that is a niche product. And we could probably do a completely separate podcast, book marketing, because I've just been through that process. By the way, don't write a book. Disaster.
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Liam Martin
And it takes a lot of time.
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Rob Rawson
Yeah, it takes a lot of time. But the methodology that we really saw, the vast majority of what we call remote pioneers, which are people that were remote before the pandemic, is this management philosophy that we're calling asynchronous management, which is the ability to be able to manage people without directly interacting with them synchronously. So right now we're on Zoom. We're communicating synchronously. The people that are listening to this podcast, however, are consuming this information asynchronously. And it allows for you to be able to create a communication portal and project management environment where being in the room either in person or digitally, is not actually going to slow down the rate at which you understand information and can take action on various points. I talk a lot about how. I don't know how old you are, but I remember back in the day on Friday nights at 8:30pm friends would come on.
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Liam Martin
Yeah.
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Rob Rawson
And if I was not in front of the TV at 8:30, I missed the episode and I'd have to wait another six months to be able to watch it again. On Monday, I go into school and everyone's talking about Chandler doing something with Phoebe, and I'm completely left out of that conversation. Netflix, however, is an asynchronous way of consuming that information. I have every single episode of Friends that I could possibly think of that exist on Netflix. And it allows for the information to be available for you when it's the most opportunistic for you to consume it. And this is huge in terms of optimizing the real key to what I believe will accelerate remote teams, which is focused work. So if Anyone can actually. You can focus on your work and you can have no distractions, and you can simply be in that zone to execute your greatest work. As long as you can optimize that time, make that as. As much of your workday as humanly possible, you will have a very successful business. And the majority of the time, I don't know if you know this statistic, but the average amount of time that people spend on zoom calls in remote work in 2022, what do you think that was? Not just zoom calls, basically, like any type of video calls.
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Liam Martin
Yeah.
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Rob Rawson
What do you think that was in 2022 for remote teams?
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Liam Martin
Per week.
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Rob Rawson
Per week, yeah. Or just a percentage of their work week?
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Liam Martin
I would probably say maybe 15.
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Rob Rawson
Maximum 56% was spent on video communication and synchronous communication.
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Liam Martin
Oh, my frame of reference is totally off.
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Rob Rawson
Well, and you know what? But you are one of those successful remote companies. Understanding that my definition of an asynchronous organization is an organization that spends less than 20% of their work week. Week. Communicating synchronously. So imagine all that time that they're wasting on preparing to work, but not actually working. You're spending more than half your week just talking about work instead of actually doing it. And asynchronous management basically teaches you how to be able to operate your business in the way that both me and you operate our businesses.
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Liam Martin
If somebody wants to go deep on, you know, creating this philosophy, the asynchronous management in their business, what would you recommend? Is there a resource or a book or. Or a blog post or.
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Rob Rawson
Yeah, so I think the biggest one is if you just go and read the book, running remote, that's probably going to be the easiest way to be able to get a clear understanding of it. The real piece that I would really focus people on is there was a chapter that we left out of the book. So I did a case study with 20 different companies and I tried to get them all to go remote. And these were companies that were, sorry, asynchronous. And these were companies that had become remote because the pandemic, before the pandemic, February of 2020 4.5% of the US workforce was working remotely. And one month later, it was 47% of the US workforce that was working remotely. So we're talking about an absolute exponential shift. Right now it's about 26% of the US workforce that's working remotely. Seen a little bit of that pendulum swing back the other direction. But the funny thing is that that number is going back up, which is pretty crazy. So we're now seeing expansion out in the other direction. I don't know if you've spoken to any of your friends in San Francisco, but the cost of real estate is huge in the toilet because everyone is actually leaving.
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Liam Martin
It's a huge reason why this is happening. Yeah, yeah.
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Rob Rawson
So we looked at these 20 companies. I tried to get them asynchronous, which is less than 20% of their work week spent working synchronously. And we were using time doctor to be able to measure all of these things, because that's another really important factor is how much time are you spending wasting away on tasks that are not important and not moving the business forward. And so out of those 20 companies, three of them ended up succeeding and they spent less than 20% of their work week working remotely. Seven of them reduced their amount of synchronous time and 10 remained the same or went up.
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Liam Martin
Wow.
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Rob Rawson
And so the reason why we left it out, or, well, the reason why my publisher asked me to leave it out is because it was a complete failure for me to be able to teach these people. And so there were three major factors that worked into that failure. Number one, you need buy in, not just from the founder of the company, but you actually need buy in throughout your entire executive team. Yeah, they need to be able to say, I'm going to work remotely and I'm going to, instead of call someone as my first reaction, I'm going to maybe write an email or write a document to be able to make sure that I'm not just solving the problem today, but I'm creating a long term solution that will solve the problem in the future for that particular issue. The second thing is remote companies that are asynchronous have process documentation as an absolute cornerstone of what they do inside of their organization. So all of those processes need to be written down, digitized and accessible from everywhere in the world. So that's what we do inside of our organization. And the third thing, which was actually a surprise for me was once you actually got the buy in and you had people build the processes and I was helping everyone do this, the third part is actually querying that documentation. So inside of remote async teams, the platform is the manager, not the actual individual. So if you have a question like, what is your HR policy? Well, that will be inside of the process documentation. And you need to be able to go in and check. Yeah, you need to check out those SOPs. And so inside of these organizations, a lot of the times These documents would be built, but no one would actually go and use them and, and get access to them. There's actually a huge business opportunity in there if you weren't busy doing a bunch of other things. Yeah, I would have absolutely built that, Sol because it's critical towards an organization's success. There actually is a product called slight.com and then another really good one is Almanac IO which both do that and they use chat GPT to overlay across all of your process documentation. So you can just type in what's the company's HR policy? And it will say, well, Omar, here's your particular HR policy. But it would be built from those nine or 10 documents that are kind of coming together.
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Liam Martin
That. I love that. And I'm glad that I have a copy of the book Running Remote. I'll be digging into it this weekend. There you go. I want to talk a little bit about the culture though. I love the, the idea, the productivity. And I met some of your team members, you know, through the onboarding process of. Of time. Dr. I met Joy. I met Michelle over in South Africa. Who shout out to Michelle. She did a great job onboarding us. She's quite a professional. How do you guys have a great company culture? Make sure everybody's singing from the same song sheet. Make sure that people don't feel isolated or lonely. I know when I made hires of people that have never had a remote job before, that's the first thing we have to kind of make sure that they don't feel like they're alone. How do you got to cultivate your culture given the fact you got people in 16 different time zones?
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Rob Rawson
Yeah, well, I mean, 16 different time zones in 33 different countries. It is a big challenge. And to be able to suggest that it isn't is just not being pragmatic with regards to remote work. It is one of the barriers towards basically scaling. Any organization is trying to build that culture. So the way that we do it is we really go to a first principles perspective. Focus on the mission.
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Liam Martin
Right?
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Rob Rawson
If you focus on the mission, fundamentally everything is going to fall into place. So we did a. We did one of our company retreats. So everyone flew to Dubai and we all met. And this was the first time that we were meeting since COVID Most remote first companies meet once a year anyways to be able to kind of come together. And I had a pop quiz for everyone which is, gave everyone a piece of paper and I said, turn over your pieces of paper. You don't need to include your Name. This is an anonymous survey. But what's the mission of the company? What are the values of the company? What do we sell? What's our guarantee? And we went through that entire process. So for us, the mission of our company is we're trying to empower the world's transition towards remote work. And about 79% of our people got that answer correct, which was relatively good. If you look at something like entrepreneur operating system, which really is a great way to be able to reinforce this type of thinking, the average success rate is 33. 33 or 36% for the. For the mission of the company. So being really focused on mission is very, very important. We have a saying in the organization which is, you've got to drink the Kool Aid of remote work. If you're not passionate about remote work, don' work here. Go find somewhere else that you. You know, we'll find you a job somewhere else, probably for more money that you really enjoy. So before we even get into the culture, everyone is bought in to the higher goal of the organization. That makes everything else a lot easier. Yeah, then you really need to be able to. From a cultural perspective, we have company retreats every single year. We have team retreats where people meet and connect in person. Kind of like a conference about the company.
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Liam Martin
Right.
- [31:46]
Rob Rawson
That's really powerful to be able to create those forms of connection. We also do online stuff. We have Oculus Rift headsets. We play poker Stars VR every week. And it's really fun to be able to kind of just look left and right, and you see physical people that are in the metaverse with you. There are other companies like doist, which is a really great remote first company. They have a really neat way of building culture. They have a version of Dungeons and Dragons on their version of Slack. And so basically, they have their entire team. And all of a sudden you might get a push notification saying, hey, Omar, you know, was slain on the battlefield by a dragon. You're the healing wizard. And you need to go into the chat and. And heal Omar. That type of stuff is just a really interesting way of solving those problems. So we generally, anything that really creates connection is important. The biggest one is there are two types of remote companies today. There are remote first and remote forced. You need to make sure that you're not forcing culture on your people. So that's the biggest piece. I. In researching the book, I was talking to some employees and some companies that would say, well, every Friday we do. We all jump on Zoom and we play cards against humanity. But not the hr, not the fun one, the HR approved version that no one really likes. And I went and spoke to these employees and I said, do you guys like this? And they said, no, we hate it. We didn't choose that. Right, so work with them and figure out what they really like. And that's where you're going to be able to build that environment where people will be able to have, you know, cultural exchange and build trust inside of the organization.
- [33:38]
Liam Martin
I think a lot of people forget, especially entrepreneurs, the founders that work is a big part of most people's social life and how they make friends and how they interact and how they get value and enjoyment out of their day. So I think that these are great tips and a good way to look at it. If somebody's starting a company and they haven't hired anybody yet, do you think it's easier for them to start as a remote first company and start working asynchronously and implement asynchronous management? Or is it makes no difference if somebody has an established company with employees in an office and then they go remote?
- [34:21]
Rob Rawson
So the hard answer is it's definitely more difficult to transition than to start remote first. I've got some interesting statistics on that. 68% of Y Combinator companies, which is really kind of like the Harvard, Yale and Oxford of tech combined. 68% of those companies right now are being started remotely, whereas it was 19 pre pandemic. So the shift is completely flipped in the opposite direction. And when I speak to what we like to call on premise companies in office companies, we tell them, hey, you know what, if you have everyone go back to the office and you're really kind of forgetting all of these things that you're learning about remote work now, you're probably going to be fine this year, you might be fine next year, but in five years, when all of those tech startups and those upstarts have effectively built a better machine to be able to extract labor from their organization, you're going to be in deep trouble. So really making sure that you've built that system from the ground up is important. And if you're an on premise company right now, I mean, the biggest tips that I can give people is make the platform the manager. So everyone in our organization has longitudinal, quantifiable goals. So mine is maybe I have to do well, actually, it's not a maybe. I have to do so many podcasts per month as an example. And we actually look at all of the metrics that are connected to that. I identify how long it's actually taken me to be able to research the questions, do the podcast with you as an example, figure out anything else that we need to be able to make work for the launch of that podcast. And then we measure the outputs, right? How much traffic are we generating from it? How many trials do we generate from it? So everything is quantifiable. And inside of that we have a very simple system. Green, yellow, red, which is green is you're doing great, you're on target. Yellow is you may hit the target, and red means you're probably not going to hit the target for the quarter. Don't pay attention to the greens, help the yellows and assess the reds. That's very, very simple. You need to be really good at the written word to be able to not only work remotely, but also, more importantly, work asynchronous. So we communicate through looms, project management systems like Asana and other forms of communication that allow us to really consume the data when it's most advantageous for us to actually consume it. I tell a lot of people that are switching over to remote. The reality is, as a manager, your job is to be able to reduce the amount of distractions from your direct reports. And counterintuitively, the manager is the number one source of those distractions. So a lot of the times, if you just get out of those people's way and allow them to be autonomous. We have this other saying that we put together in the book, which is everyone in the company should have the same informational advantage as the CEO. Once you do this, and this is very scary, by the way, for the vast majority of people. Right. But if you give every team member the same informational advantage as the CEO, which is very easy to do in a remote team because everything is digitized.
- [37:55]
Liam Martin
Yeah.
- [37:56]
Rob Rawson
Then you'll see a magical process where all of your team members will automatically become much more autonomous. We have one of our internal values is self guided missile, meaning you just click the button, there's the target, go after it. And we don't care how you get there as long as you actually get there. But the biggest thing that they need is information. So if you give them that information, they'll be much more autonomous in their decision making. And when you have difficult decisions to make, like you have to let people go, the vast majority of the team actually understands because they have the same information that you do.
- [38:34]
Liam Martin
It's huge. And a lot of people don't realize how much this increases the value of your company. By having the platform as the manager having all these, you know, SOPs documented, all this stuff makes it so easy for a company to just come and acquire you and just pick up where you left off. A lot of people don't have these things in place. And with remote work, asynchronous work, it kind of forces you to get your, you know, your stuff together, so to speak, so that you can, so you can actually have a well oiled machine and everybody's on the same, you know, playing field. I love the idea of like giving everybody the information because one of the biggest frustrations as a founder or even as a manager is when somebody on your team doesn't understand how critical this thing is and they, they're kind of taking it lightly or they don't understand the gravity of the situation or why you're so worked up about it. If they have all the information, they'll get it. They'll be like, oh, I got to really focus on this. I stakes here. So I really like that point a lot. I want, I want to move into the Running Remote Conference. I was really honored and privileged to be part of the Running Remote Conference, the first one in 2018 in Bali. It was a great event, I gotta say, because I feel like you had like the godfathers of all the rogue companies I admire there. And I got to meet them as fellow speakers. And whether it was John O'Nolan or Amir from Todoist, it was just great to see everybody kind of doing this in their own way, but at the same time sharing best practices. And it was very, it was still kind of new, this idea of remote work, even in 2018. I remember I was blown away when I met Dmitry from GitLab and I was just like, oh my God, this guy's built an incredible business. A billion dollar company, all remote. Everybody's working, you know, efficiently. I was just like, I, I was just picking his brain at every meal.
- [40:36]
Rob Rawson
But, right.
- [40:38]
Liam Martin
I, I know how hard events are. I run a small founders event here called OSCON in Australia. Rob, your business partners was there last year. It's coming this year and it's really hard to run one, a good event, one that actually all the attendees love and then two, make it worth your time and effort, right? Because the margins are low, it's really hard to coordinate. There's a lot of things that can go wrong. First question I have about this conference is like, why did you go through the pain of starting a conference and doing it year after year, even when we're in the pandemic? You did it remotely and all that kind of stuff. And what was the payoff for you guys?
- [41:20]
Rob Rawson
Yeah, I mean, pain is probably. If I just choose a single word to run a conference, it would be pain. It is a very, very painful process. And it's funny, me and Rob, we've been working together for almost 15 years together. And he has the best way to kind of trigger me. Like, he knows my touch points, I know his. And back in 2018, when we were running this conference and I pitched it to him and I said, listen, okay, we'll just, just, we'll get 100 grand together, we'll put together a venue and we'll see if it can work. And he said, you won't get 20 people to go to that conference. And that was exactly the.
- [42:03]
Liam Martin
You needed to hear the hate.
- [42:05]
Rob Rawson
The hate fire that I needed to be able to make that work. And we had 250 people go to the first one, and then the next one, we had 600 people. We actually just finished one in Lisbon a few weeks ago, end of April, and we had almost a thousand people. Incredible.
- [42:24]
Liam Martin
Incredible. I gotta say, I, you know, I know Rob pretty well. I saw him at Running Remote2018, that first conference where he said, there's only 20 people will show up. And he was genuinely surprised. Like, he was genuinely like, wow, this is amazing.
- [42:40]
Omar Zenhom
I. I was wrong.
- [42:41]
Liam Martin
Like, he really was genuinely surprised.
- [42:43]
Rob Rawson
Yeah, no, it was. So I take a. Whenever I start a new project, I have a ready Fire a same philosophy, which is, we just got the venue. So I said, we're going to set up a date, we're going to set up a venue, and we're going to get as many of my remote work friends that I possibly can coming to this event. And if it's a complete failure, at least we'll learn a lot about remote work. Because for US Back in 2018, remote work was weird. I mean, it still is kind of weird, but it was really weird back then. And I, you know, there were lots of. There were lots of blog posts on how to hire a virtual assistant.
- [43:24]
Omar Zenhom
Yeah.
- [43:24]
Rob Rawson
But there wasn't. There wasn't a lot on, like, it.
- [43:26]
Liam Martin
Was very like Digital Nomad Y. Like, it was very like solopreneur Digital Nomad. Kind of like somebody hacking block together. Yeah. Drop shipping, things like that.
- [43:36]
Rob Rawson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So for us, we said, like, GitLab exists. Right? I mean, Dmitry was the most chill billionaire I've ever met. And he. And these are the types of people that we wanted to be able to have at our event to show that you can build multi billion dollar remote first companies, you can build big businesses when you do it remotely. So that was the real kind of nucleus of it. And it just, it just exploded from there for us. I mean, and again, it goes back to that passion and scratching your own itch. I was scratching my own itch. I wanted to be able to figure out, how do we get to 500 people, how do we get to a thousand people, how do we scale a business to a billion, three billion, five billion dollars working remotely? Well, this conference is specifically built to teach me how to be able to get to that particular goal. And if you want to come, it's only going to cost you a thousand bucks to be able to go and check that information out as well. So going back to that passion was really important. And for me, it just continues on to be a passion project. It's something that, that, you know, when 2020 happened, we all kind of looked at each other in the remote work community and said, now is our time to be able to try to communicate this information that everyone on planet Earth needed to get access to, but no one had access to it. So we very quickly started to put all this information together. And it was, the mission really changed. Focusing on not just educating this small nerdy group on the best practices towards building large remote companies, but also communicating out to the large corporates. This year we had companies like Deloitte and Volkswagen and Salesforce and a bunch of other massive, you know, Fortune 100 companies that attended the conference and they were all trying to learn how to do remote and hybrid. Right? And so for me, that's why I keep doing it, is I just want to continue to try to empower people to have that information. And again, it aligns with our mission, which is empowering the world. World's transition towards remote work.
- [45:52]
Liam Martin
I love it. Before we wrap up, I just, I'm so curious to hear about what's around the corner for you guys. Whether it's in time. Dr. Whether it's with the conference running remote, what gets you guys excited? Can you share something like that's exclusive for our audience so they can get excited? I'd love to hear.
- [46:11]
Rob Rawson
I think when you think about time. Dr. Ironically, I actually think time will be the least important part of time. Dr. So I think in the future you're going to have an AI assistant that's going to help you with everything. It's going to be someone that works with you throughout your workday. Doesn't matter if you're in an office doesn't matter if you're working remotely. It doesn't matter if you're anywhere and that person is or that that AI is going to be able to show you what you're doing well and what you're not doing too well. A lot of the times, just changing 10 minutes of your workday could double your output as a worker or reduce your stress. You know, I think when you think about work, it's not just how hard you're working, but also making sure that you have that work life balance in proper balance. And that's a really important piece, as we've recognized with the Pandemic. But as we move forward with remote work, which is really what we're. I mean, the purpose of the company is to just make people understand that remote work is a valid way to be able to operate your business. The pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction right now. We're seeing a lot of people that are going back to the office. And I think that it's because we had emergency remote work back in 2020 and no one really had the information in front of themselves. So that's another big direction for us is identifying more of those use cases of companies that are actually making remote work work at scale and shining a light on them with the running remote conference.
- [47:53]
Liam Martin
Liam Co founder of Time Doctor awesome to be with you here today. I've learned a ton. You got me excited about my own remote team. And I think a lot of our listeners are going to love the fact that, you know, this, this talk is really about empowering people to understand, like, this is the future. This also gives a lot of people opportunities that maybe can't start a company because they think traditionally you got to get an office and they got to get local employees and things like that. It's quite a competitive space now on in business. So this kind of gives you an advantage, gives you a chance to kind of run as an efficient company, if not more. And at the same time, they have a lot more options when it comes to hiring, has a lot more options when it comes to management, have a lot more options when it comes to picking the right cultural fit, all that kind of stuff. So thanks so much for your time, really appreciate it. And I gotta say, I'm so glad. You know, we had that talk with Rob about, you know, collaborating with the show, trying Time Doctor with our own team. We didn't know what's gonna happen. We were like, like, Rob, if this fails, I'm gonna have to tell the audience if this Fails, you know, I gotta tell them that this doesn't work. And because I had no idea what to expect. I'm so glad that we, we took on that experiment and we implemented Time Doctrine, shared the journey along the way for the last, you know, three months and, and it's been such a positive experience. And of course there's going to be challenges when you implement these things and you implement something like Time doctor Anything, anything that you do is new is going to be hard. And, and I think, think as a founder, one of the things I enjoyed about the process was getting out of.
- [49:30]
Omar Zenhom
My comfort zone a little bit, trying.
- [49:31]
Liam Martin
Something new and making something happen. And it gave me so much great data on how to improve the business and be able to also make a.
- [49:40]
Omar Zenhom
Better workplace for my employees.
- [49:42]
Liam Martin
So that was amazing. So thanks for creating a great tool and spending the time today.
- [49:48]
Rob Rawson
Thanks for having me.
- [49:50]
Omar Zenhom
I thoroughly enjoyed that chat with Liam Martin, the co founder and CMO of Time doctor. Don't forget you have amazing resources that you can consume to get better at remote work. I would start with their book Running Remote. I have it on my bookshelf. It's a great book and I should call it a playbook for running a remote team.
- [50:10]
Liam Martin
You can pick it up on Amazon.
- [50:12]
Omar Zenhom
Or wherever you get books. Step two, go ahead and try using Time Dr. Like I mentioned, we rolled it out to our business for the last three months and we have no regrets. We're so happy that we have implemented Time Doctor because it's been incredibly helpful. I do want to say though, when I speak to other people about this initiative, us using Time Dr. They're hesitant. They're kind of like, oh, I think I'm alright. I think I trust my team. And what I try to tell them is what I wish somebody told me before. It's actually not about trust, it's about analyzing the data, about having data on what works and what doesn't for your team. And I tell them straight up, I too was a little bit scared about what I would find out if I started using. But once I got over that, I realized knowledge is power and I'm so glad that we're using Time Doctor every day. Third step, check out the Running Remote conference. They ran it last year in Lisbon, Portugal. Beautiful Lisbon, Portugal. It's a massive, amazing conference that I personally went to the first one. I absolutely loved it and met so many like minded, great, inspiring, humble people. They're running it again in Lisbon in 2024. So make sure you go to their website, sign up for their newsletter so you can know as soon as tickets are available. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show and joining me and Liam Martin on today's episode. Of course, we love hearing from you, so make sure you leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Change is hard. When you started your business, it was incredibly exciting, but it was difficult. And when you change your business, when you change your methodologies, when you change how you do your work, whether you're going from the office to remote work or a hybrid approach, or holding your team accountable and making productivity a priority in your business, it's going to be a little painful at the start, just like going to the gym for the first time. But once you get into it, it makes you better. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Wednesday's episode. I'll see you then.
- [52:13]
Liam Martin
Take care.