Why I Chose to Create a Remote-First Company
How to make a remote team deliver excellent results.
Once upon a time I found myself in a nightmare professional scenario. I had been a high-level, business development closer, inside sales expert, and lead generator early in my career, and I found myself recruited to work into the manufacturing sector, working for a video surveillance manufacturer. At first, I was excited about the prospect of exploring the new sector, but after joining, I quickly realized that the job was my version of a professional nightmare. Simply put, there was nothing in the job that entailed what I had specialized at. Instead of closing and business developing I spent hours per day inputting data about potential leads into the CRM. This made me feel like a valueless cog in a soulless machine, plugging away at data that most likely would never be used.
What exacerbated my angst was that this job was also in office. At the time, my schedule looked something like this: I would get up in the morning (6am), make breakfast, say goodbye to my wife and kids, and at 7am I was on the highway, driving from Dayville, CT to Waltham, MA to get to the office on time. The drive was an hour-and-a-half in one direction, so three hours of my day, daily, went into driving back and forth. Once at the job, I would spend an additional hour at lunch, and a good hour saying hi to everyone in the office and asking how their life was, before going to my cubicle with dread, to input some more soulless data. Thus, having wasted a good five hours per day, I would return home completely demoralized, not seeing my family for the whole day, and feeling like my life and career was a total waste, with no life to work balance in sight.
Things improved within a few months as the company I was working for started to lay people off, and I was one of such people. Yes, the financial hit on my family was not pleasant, but inside I felt emancipated. In my mind, I wasn’t fired, so nothing to feel guilty about, and I now didn’t have to input data anymore. My next job was again in manufacturing, but this time working as a lead generator and inside sales business developer in a mid-market, cable manufacturing business. The job was closer to my temperament and nature and very close to where I lived at the time, so I felt a bit better. However, within months of working there, questions started to creep in.
My entire job revolved around me knifing through LinkedIn, cold calling unsuspecting (and often annoyed) secretaries, and all in all, prowling through the internet to generate leads and clients. I was enjoying this, but started to have questions as to the efficiency of what I was asked to do. For starters, I was asked to report and work in the office, with no hybrid or remote days offered. While at first I accepted this, I soon realized that there was absolutely nothing for me to do at the office. Generating leads, cold calling, and inputting into a CRM could be done from anywhere. Coordinating with engineers to create the offer a client wanted could be done via Google Meet, and so it became clear that I was, once again, spending at least half of every day sitting in a cubicle for a job I could easily do from anywhere. On the plus side, I was creating the company blog and marketing on LinkedIn as well, and these activities later led me into my current passion, marketing.
Within a year of me getting the cable job, the company was sold to a bigger multi-national in the manufacturing sector, and layoffs started to happen as well. I was again one of the people laid off, and very soon I found myself hunting for jobs outside of manufacturing. Sometime, a year later, I joined a marketing agency in the Web3 sector and my journey in Web3 started. Working in Web3 I was immediately relieved to see that it was, at least at that time, a remote-first industry. It was an accepted fact that companies wanted to save on the overhead of renting offices and optimise performance by cutting out the social hours and the hour lunches inherent in the in-office environments. Moreover, no one wanted to be mired in daily work commutes, while so much could be accomplished by working remotely.
Within a year-and-a-half of me starting to work in Web3 I became successful enough to raise for my own start-up and create a company from scratch. Understanding the weaknesses of the in-office roles I held previously, I had decided to create a fully remote organization. What emerged was a company employing from 25 to 50 professionals globally, with technical, business development, marketing, community building, and executive departments, with everyone working cohesively. How did I manage to have an efficiently-working, remote, and fully distributed team? Here are a few strategies that helped me:
I always made sure that the KPIs were clear. While I never liked to do “hand-holding”, I made sure that the expectations and deliverables were never in question.
Due dates for deliverables were set in stone, unless there were major reasons why something could not be delivered on time. If the deliverables were not there at the due date, then explanation was required. Multiple failures of timely delivery led to a review of activities.
Managers always provided reports at the end of the week, with a complete overview of all accomplishments and activity from all employees under their purview.
Goals for development were set in a collegial way, with all managers expected to contribute. KPIs were developed as a team, and multiple layers of quality control were present in their execution.
Having been an employee of a FinTech company early in my career which was remote, but where I was expected to clock in and clock out, I decided not to micro-manage. Instead, I made sure that company goals, expectations, and culture were upheld through strict demands in deliverables and detailed communication.
There was a clear understanding within the team that working in the company was a privilege, and therefore, what was expected was everyone’s best at all times (whether in deliverables or behaviour and attitude).
Creating a fully remote and distributed team is only possible when the team managers are experienced and are good at managing at a distance. I believe that the maximum size of a remote team per manager should not exceed one manager per twenty remote workers. I also believe that a company over the size of one-hundred employees should not be fully remote, as it will become very difficult to manage such a team and to ensure quality.
It’s important to recognize quality and talent. When someone performs well, making sure they feel appreciated is paramount to keeping a culture of high quality performance in the team.
Allowing a culture of encouragement and appreciation into the team, while enforcing precise expectations and KPIs, will make the team members feel like they are doing an important work, and will ultimately cut down on any mundane tasks which may cut morale.
Working along these parameters with a remote and distributed team, a high quality of a result can be achieved consistently. As I mentioned earlier, highly efficient remote teams cut down on the overhead, the wasted time, and can accomplish a higher quality of product delivery as long as they are managed well. Employees that feel appreciated and respected enough to be provided with a company culture of strong life-work balance will ultimately out-perform those that feel under-appreciated and come from a culture of pure control. A strong company culture of quality product delivery and respect for the employee has to be established by the leadership team and starts from the very top of the organization. Working remotely, when applied to jobs and companies whose vision supports this lifestyle, can increase morale and heighten the culture of excellence of performance.