Navigating the Remote Work Revolution

0:00We had decided that we were going to be a remote company before then. So we had started hiring people outside of Austin, which was the headquarters of Digital Marketer. And what we saw that was a big, big, big problem is the people who were in office got all the opportunity. The people that were in office, you know, we would hold impromptu meetings that the people who weren't, they weren't in the loop on.

0:27Hey, welcome to the podcast. Ryan, welcome to the podcast also. How are you doing? Good. Solid start. Really solid start today. We were just on point. Nice. We were just talking about your relationship with the sun. Oh my gosh. Yeah. For anybody who watches this one on YouTube, my face basically looks like a cherry right now. I spent the weekend, my wife and I went to a country music festival, which if you know anything about me you know like i don't love strangers but you love your music i mean i'm not even that big of a country music fan like it's great it's fine um but my wife is a huge fan of like 90s country music um in this play it was like dina carter it was martina mcbride clint black i mean it was like it was the soundtrack of her youth and so when this came up.

1:27She's like, we're going to this thing. I don't care if you hate it. I'm doing this. I'm going to love it. And that's good enough for me, which I respect. I had a great time. I really did. It rained like crap on a Saturday, just rained the whole time, but she made sure we were like ponchoed out. But somehow there was fun. Well, so that was Saturday. Then, then Sunday, the sun came out. But because I don't know, it's like, I still had rain on the brain. I just was like, Like sunblock is for amateurs, which was a huge mistake. So yes, just to give you the picture, my forehead hasn't seen sun all year.

2:04So it is like beet red. The lower half of my face is kind of okay, but around my eyes, totally pale because I was wearing sunglasses. I look ridiculous, but that's okay. It's kind of like you're a big Tesla fan because you've got like a T kind of going like, you know, across there. That's what I tell people. I'm just all about Tesla, man. All about Tesla. Bought the stock when it was low. Yeah, what can I say? Yeah, like real fans, like pseudo fans will do like a tattoo. I do skin burn. I'm doing skin cancer for Tesla. Well, all of that aside, you had a couple of things you wanted to chat about.

2:38You want to share some of those with us and we'll get on in. So I thought this was really an interesting story. The Dell came out recently and this was an article in, I don't know, we dropped in the show notes, but they basically came out and they announced that starting in May, they're done with work from home. The work from home era at Dell is officially over. And we're seeing this with, you know, a number of, right. Lots of people. Yeah. Lots of them are saying go back, but they're like, that's it. Starting in May, those who are fully remote. And I thought this was interesting. They're not saying you're fired.

3:13They're saying you have to come back. They're saying those who are fully remote will not be eligible for promotion. Okay. And I thought that was an interesting, I thought that was an interesting take. If you're willing to come in and do some kind of a hybrid schedule, you know, that's fine. But if you're unwilling, if you moved away, far, far, far away, you either got to move back and start coming in sometime or hang around. We're just not going to promote you. You're kind of stuck where you are. What do you think about that? I, you know, I, I, initially I don't hate it. It's a, it's interesting.

3:44Like it's, If you want to work as a side hustle or as a remote person, and we totally get that. We support that. We realize that we need that. And it's a function that we'll have. But we really want our management to be here so they can participate more actively in the meetings. I think that's cool. I was talking to... So I think that's interesting. I don't think it's probably good or bad. I guess it would potentially stop a brilliant remote manager from being able to have an opportunity to get promoted. But my guess is there would be exceptions for those kinds of people anyway. Who was it? I was just talking to.

4:24Oh, Robin at Go High Level. I was just talking to. They've got a thousand employees plus, 100 % remote. And he said that they got a, I think they have a building now in Atlanta just because he's like, people wanted to know that the company actually, their paychecks came from a building. But we have it, but nobody's there. So to me, it clearly works either way and it's just a choice. And so they're kind of saying, you know, let's try this for a while and see what happens. And, you know, we want our managers to be more inculcated in the culture of the company. And that does definitely not happen as well, you know, when you're outside.

5:10But when I was talking with Robin about how they did it, he said, man, we're at work every day, just like a building. We all come into Zoom and we all go into the rooms that would be the rooms that we would be in. And we're there the whole day. We're on Zoom, you know, eight hours a day plus. us. And, um, so we don't find it to be that different. I do think that like the, the ability to connect, even when you and I are talking like this versus when we get to hang out, um, it's, it's definitely different. And I think that you do get more, um, out of being together, but the trade-off and then I'll shut up.

5:48Um, cause I really, I guess I, to me, either one worked, um, because the trade-off of having a really good person that can't relocate because of family or other, you know, issues or challenges or desires and to not have the ability to access that person and also penalize them by not promoting them, if that would be good for the company, seems kind of silly and arbitrary. As a guideline, I think it's cool. As an absolute rule, I think it's silly. What do you think? So I've seen it's obvious that in-office works and it's obvious there are plenty of examples of purely remote companies that work. Right.

6:26So I think kind of both extremes work. What I haven't really seen work effectively is, hey, team members, you decide what work environment is best for you. And I think that's because it's optimizing for the individual and the best businesses optimized for the team. Right. And it's like this is this was something that was not very, very popular to say. But now I think everybody's realizing that one, it's true. right when it's very easy to say oh no we want everybody to like find their you know find your best work truth and like live your best life and do all this stuff when everything's up and to the right and the government's printing free money right then yeah you go you go do that um i find it interesting that this follows a significant reduction in force that they did back in february of 2023 so a lot of these changes in work from home policy i think are basically a way to just get people to quit without having to lay them off?

7:19Because when you say to somebody, you can keep working from home, you can keep working remotely, you don't have to come back in, you'll just never get another promotion here ever again for as long as you live. What's the first thing they're going to do? Promotion versus raise, like that is a significant difference, right? And it was promotion. Yeah, they could presumably still get a raise within the same salary band as dictated by their role. But I would think if you find out that you basically have no more upward mobility at this company, it's a dead end. you're going to start looking for another job.

7:46And I think that's exactly what they want some folks to do. And to your point, I wouldn't be surprised if they've reached out to certain people who really moved the knee and they're like, Hey, we're going to make an exception for you. Yeah. Right. We're going to make sure this doesn't apply to you. But I think the bigger thing is optimize for the team, not the individual. Like that's, that's what a company has to do. And so if you're good at remote, if you've learned that, like what we've had to do, like, I feel like now at this point, we're not great, but I feel like we've gotten a lot better at, you know, at remote so we can make remote work.

8:19And we have had businesses in the past that were, everybody was under one roof and that worked. What doesn't work is, Hey, individuals do your own thing. I just have, I don't see that working anywhere. I don't, I don't know of a lot of examples of where that has, of where that's worked. Cause you just have to figure out how are we as a team going to work. And if some people are in the office, some people aren't, I'm not seeing it. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. What is DM doing? DM is now fully remote and digital marketers fully remote. But in the past, we actually had a similar policy. So we were all under one roof.

8:58Prior to COVID, digital marketer was under one roof. Everybody came into a building and that was where all of the work happened. And we did have some remote people. There were some people that we hired, and then there were some people who left and we wanted to keep them. And so we said, that's fine, you can work remotely. But the conversation that we had with all of them was, this is almost certainly going to limit your ability to ascend within this company. So if you're okay staying within this same role, and we said the same thing, you can still get raises along the way for this role, but you're unlikely to be able to ascend in any kind of managerial or leadership type role.

9:39There were people who stayed and they stayed in that role. And then there were some people who stayed for a bit until they found another job. And the reason they were like, yeah, I wanted to go to a place where I could ascend. And it was fine because it was transparent. Transparent. We had one. No, nobody who left then came back. We've had people who have left for different reasons return, but nobody who left because they went remote. You know, didn't. And also at this point now, we're fully like we've had people who left. And I'm sorry. I mean, when you said that, did anybody say, oh, yeah, no worries.

10:14I'm going to come in. No, no, we had pretty much everybody because it was understood. And I think that's what's clear. What's your default? Are you default in office or are you default remote? Right. I think if you know your default and you say this is how we work as a team, I think you can make exceptions as a mature organization. You don't have to be dogmatic about this stuff. You just have to acknowledge that as an exception, it's going to be harder for you to, you're going to have to be so much better than everybody else. Right? Because you are not operating within the default setting of how this team works.

10:47So no, we didn't have anybody, because in general, because our default was, you know, we're not a remote company. And we said that when people were moving, they were like, hey, I'm really bummed. I guess I'm going to have to resign because I'm moving. And there were some people who were like, yeah, we're going to miss you. No, we won't. And there were other people who were like, oh, dang, we will definitely miss you. Would you consider working remotely? They'd say, I didn't know that was an option. We'd explain that it is an option. It's just somewhat limiting. So now having done the fully non-remote and the fully remote and I guess a hybrid as well, what have you found that works best?

11:23Because for a relatively small company, I'd say, correct me if I'm wrong, but DM has run between, say, 15 and 60 or so employees over the period of all of that. Is that about right? So in that range and having experienced all three, you're really in a great position to say as a CEO of that company, have you found one or the other to be better? Or is it kind of like, you know what, as long as you lean in and do these things, it kind of works. The only one that didn't that absolutely did not work was hybrid. And there was a season post COVID where it was safe to come back into the office. We still had an 18 ,000 square foot office.

12:05We had 18 months on our left on our lease when we sent everybody home on March 13th of 2020 and said, hopefully we'll be back in a couple of weeks. Right. There were still 18 months left. And so when it was finally, you know, people felt comfortable to come back. We said, yeah, sure. If you want to come back, you can do that. But we had decided that we were going to be a remote company before then. So we had started hiring people outside of Austin, which was the headquarters of Digital Marketer. And what we saw that was a big, big, big problem is the people who were in office got all the opportunity.

12:38The people that were in office, you know, we would hold impromptu meetings that the people who weren't, they weren't in the loop on. And so it created this really difficult kind of multi-tiered culture where some people knew certain things and other people didn't. And it was unfair to the remote people because when we hired them, we said we're a default remote company, but we weren't behaving that way. So we literally had to tell everybody, you're no longer allowed to come back into the office unless you're coming in here for a team meeting planning purpose. And that worked. But between having a remote company or in office, I think when a company is young and in the startup phase and you're trying to get stuff figured out, there's really no substitute.

13:23I think the advantage goes to in office all day, every day. Just the speed with which you can work and iterate. I know it can be done remotely if everybody's committed to doing it. but just there's no, we, I think one thing that COVID taught us is there's no substitute for in person. So getting everybody in the office together, especially in the early days or when you're in a major project all day at scale, man, everybody functions. Like you get some of these offices. I mean, heck, even when, even when we were 18 ,000 square feet, which is in, you know, 70 some people under roof, that's still relatively small, but most of the communication was happening in Slack and email because people just didn't want to walk all the way across the office to talk to somebody else.

14:07So even though it's under one roof, it was still fundamentally remote. So I think at scale, you can begin to do it. As a CEO, if I'm the one who's leading a team, my preference though today, now that I know how to do it would probably be remote because the benefit of getting talent anywhere. Yeah. I think that supersedes. I think if you're building a startup in Silicon Valley, you probably want to be there, you know, AI type thing. But in general, if you're not in one of those hubs, I think you're going to benefit from remote. You, but like right now, because you said it's remote, but really the core team, like the core management isn't remote, right?

14:52Because it's you and Richard and Matt, anybody else that are going into the DM office on the reg? No. Yeah. So we now have a smaller space that is what, 20 % of what it used to be? Yeah. I mean, 80 % of that? Yeah. 3 ,500 square feet. And a lot of that studio space, like where I am right now, there's a big planning area where we will fly in team members if we're doing quarterly sprint planning and those kinds of things. But you've got three people that primarily come to the office office, right? And I do think that having a core leadership team under one roof is big, is really, really, really big.

15:33That helps a lot. And we've been talking about how, you know, if we add another, you know, critical team member to, you know, to the team, we might require that they locate in Austin. And the three people that you've got right now, does that seem to be enough or do you feel like you need a couple of more people? I feel like right now today it's enough because, you know, we're building companies that are, you know, we're effectively a holding company, right? And so, you know, digital marketer long term, the day to day is not going to be run by anybody in this office. Same, hopefully, with Scalable and, you know, with some of our other brands where the people in this have portfolio oversight.

16:11So I think what we're building here in this office looks a whole lot more like a Berkshire Hathaway type thing where you've got a small office with people in there who are kind of handling a lot of the strategic analysis like back office support consulting, but really the companies are being run elsewhere. And I do see a day where maybe some of these underlying portfolio companies, there's a leader in there who says, we need to get everybody under one roof. And that leader feels like there's a strategic advantage to do that. and we would be happy, you know, not, I mean, whether or not happy is not, we would, we would allow them to make that call.

16:48But yeah, so I think that's where it's a little bit different, but for sure, given that a lot of the work right now is standing up newer teams and newer organizations, man, it's, we've experienced it. Like I said, we need to get back on the same roof. You know, you're out in Southern California, I'm in Austin, you know, getting us in the same room, we get more work done in a couple of days than, you know, than we would in a month, just by being in the same room. And that is what I think more leadership teams need to do is schedule in office time, just because you're a remote first organization doesn't mean you shouldn't be getting everybody together.

17:20I believe that leadership teams should get together in person quarterly, and entire companies should get together at least once a year. That, that I think is kind of the minimum to maintain culture, build those relationships and to get good work done together. Okay. So just before we sign off, what would you say three biggest challenges or mistakes or takeaways and learnings that you got from going from in-house to remote? Basically, what did you take from that that anybody that's thinking about doing that could benefit from? The biggest mistake we made was hybrid. You can't be half pregnant, right?

18:04So you either decide your default setting. You don't have to be dogmatic, but decide your default. So that was kind of mistake number one. And we fixed it by just saying, we're default remote. So you can't just come into the office to work. You can only come in if you're doing collaborative work with your team. The second big mistake that we made was we didn't do a good job of, we kind of got out of our meeting rhythm. So we were used to, okay, everybody, we didn't realize, but we had a certain meeting rhythm in place, even though it wasn't scheduled, that sort of developed organically and worked.

18:36And we didn't carry that over into the remote setting. We just expected that some of the project planning meetings, for example, some of the kickoff meetings that we'd have before we would do certain things, that they would just happen, but they didn't. You know, because it wasn't institutionalized. That would be that, right? Yeah. So you have to institutionalize your meeting rhythm and feedback. And it doesn't mean having more meetings. We actually wound up having less meetings. They just had to be more intentional, scheduled. We had to give them specific names, for example. So before we do this, we're going to have a project kickoff meeting.

19:08You know, every week we're going to have a scorecard review meeting. That was big. The third big mistake that we made was trying to mimic the in-office experience remotely. And we tried to do this with things like, oh, like every Wednesday in the past, we would buy lunch for the entire team. It was something that we did as kind of a company perk, as a culture building piece. We would also do a Wednesday all-hands meeting where, you know, it was like everybody go grab a glass of wine or a beer or something like that. You know, like as kind of a culture thing, we're like, ah, you know, do we try to mimic this?

19:45And I remember there were some people saying like, hey, so are you still going to buy us lunch on Wednesdays? It's like, no, we're not going to buy you lunch on Wednesdays because the whole point of that was it was getting everybody together, not merely feeding you for free. Like this was just a free snack. Probably 20x the cost because we're going to be not buying like barbecue or something like that. Exactly. Yeah, DoorDash for everybody.

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