MBA2312 Extended Interview with Liam Martin: The Challenges & Benefits of Running a Remote Team

0:00This 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 how practical it is. 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 now. So go ahead and listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

0:44Hey, welcome to the$100 MBA show, business lessons delivered on a silver platter. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. 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.

1:19How 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 shared 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.

1:55Because in order for remote work to work, you've got to 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.

2:35But 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 Rawson, 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 Martin, 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. Liam Martin, so awesome to have you on the show.

3:09We'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. back in 2012, even before us when we started in 2014. So 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 a need in the market? What was the backstory and why did you start it?

3:46Well, 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 really loved it. That was what I was planning to do with my life. I was going to go into academia and 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 I said, I don't think I'm very good at this.

4:27And 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.

5:02Me 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.

5:46So 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 for five 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.

6:25This 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 a master's in education. And somehow we kind of both use that experience in some way in our businesses, 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 teach and sell test prep courses and live training and all that kind of stuff. What I found very interesting as well is the use case of Time Doctor for you is not the current use case today.

7:15It's not exactly the same use of it. It's more for teams and remote teams to kind of track accountability and time and productivity and all that kind of stuff. when did it start to kind of uh 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 decision with a lot of bootstrap companies and again this was back in 2012 right so software is a service which is the type of business that we operate uh that was a new idea back in 2012 There weren't many of those types of businesses that were out there.

7:52And for us, it was really just trying a whole bunch of different things, right? So I wrote hundreds of blog posts. 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. And you're not going to understand the pain point. Yeah, you're not going to understand the pain point. And more importantly, it's going to get tough, right?

8:31There'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.

9:08But 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.

9:53Like you can try a 14 day trial of Time Doctor 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. And 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. 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.

10:25She'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 our own personal favorite and current funding method, pitching for grants.

11:01Season two of This Is Small Business is out now, so go ahead and add This Is Small Business to your podcast rotation. 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. I'm a gut kind of entrepreneur, but over the years I've realized I need the data to prove it. I need to verify my gut. And I just felt like, am I spending my time in the right areas? Am I spending my time in the right ways? And then I thought to think 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 business owner and the CEO, What about my team members?

11:50Are they getting enough accountability and verification of how they're working 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 like fall in love? Absolutely.

12:30So 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? It is no brainer. Every single person. Yes. Yeah. Analytics for your workday, right? We run Google analytics on every single website known to men. You would, as a business owner, you would never start a website. Financial analytics. Yeah, exactly. 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?

13:19Which 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 a 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.

14:01And that's a big thing that is really important, particularly inside of a remote team. Huge. Just a couple of things that I noticed when we started using Time Doctor and our team is just a real allocation of our resources. Like we realized there were a handful of people on our team that were actually overworked. Like they didn't have good work-life balance. They were putting in too many hours and we had to have a 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 realized, oh, there's some people that are bored.

14:41That's a problem too. They have too much time in their hands in that department or that job or that shift, for example. Maybe it's a slow time for customer support and maybe they'd be better off changing their shift and we'd serve our customers better. and the the 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 and trial and error um so like if that's any kind of uh testimonial i don't know what is what you don't measure, you don't manage.

15:47And that is true time and time again. I don't know what type of ticketing software that you use. Yeah, we use Intercom. 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.

16:27So 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. Yeah. 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 things to be able to say, do you want to work for high MPS? Do you want to work for CSAC? Do you want to work for ticket completion time?

17:05And 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. 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 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 and support was just the workflow.

17:41Like 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, you can log that ticket later. 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.

18:13And even if I did, I can't look at their screen 24 seven, 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 to see, okay, we actually need to provide some training and maybe some suggestions on how they can manage tickets in a different way. And we just kind of took it for granted because it was like, okay, we love our team. We trust them. They're great. And that's great and all, but it doesn't mean that everybody's perfect. We all can improve. and that's something that I think was really eye-opening for us in 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 like you know right this makes sense I want to talk about your remote team for a moment sorry go ahead Liam sure yeah yeah no I completely agree let's let's move on to my remote team which is very very complicated yeah so I've heard bits and bobs about like how you have team members all over the world, Egypt and, and you know, Philippines and in the U S and in Australia and all around the place.

19:20How 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. Well, it's 33 countries. And I think, I believe it's 16 time zones at this point. Wow. Okay.

19:45That can be a little bit stressful for people. So do you guys have like some, yeah. So do you guys have like rules of thumb? Like all departments have to have a be on a four hour lap or like, do you guys have any rules of thumb or you guys just figure it out? 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. It hit one of the lists, right? It hit Wall Street Journal, which was fantastic.

20:22Yeah, we really worked very hard to be able to hit that particular target. But it's definitely something that is a niche product. And we could probably do a completely separate podcast about book marketing because I've just been through that process. By the way, don't write a book. It's a disaster and a half. It takes a lot of time, 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.

21:05So 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 8.30 p.m., friends would come on. Yeah. And if I was not in front of the TV at 8.30, I would miss the episode.

21:53And 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. So 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.

22:32So if anyone can actually, if 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 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 yeah uh what do you think that was in 2022 for remote teams uh per week per week yeah or just a percentage of their work week uh i would probably say maybe 15 maximum 56 percent wow week was spent on video communication and synchronous communication oh my frame of reference is totally off 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 communicating synchronously.

23:44So 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. If somebody wants to go deep on creating this philosophy, the asynchronous management in their business, what would you recommend? Is there a resource or a book or a blog post? 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.

24:26the 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 of the pandemic. Before the pandemic, February of 2020, 4.5 % of the U.S. workforce was working remotely. And one month later, it was 47 % of the U.S. workforce that was working remotely. So we're talking about an absolute exponential shift. Right now, it's about 26 % of the U.S. workforce that's working remotely.

25:08So we've 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. It's a huge reason why this is happening. Yeah. Yeah. 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.

25:43Because 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. And so the reason why we 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.

26:25Number one, you need buy-in, not just from the founder of the company, but you actually need buy-in throughout your entire executive team. 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.

27:02so 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.