201: Daniel Ramsey — Setting up for Remote Work During a Health Crisis.

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to docs of talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxataalent.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today.

Well, I don't know about you, but most of us suddenly have everyone working remotely and if you don't have it yet, you're about to all over the world in all kinds of companies, remote work is the new thing and yet most of us aren't set up for it. So today's show is all about all the things you need to do to address and get your workforce working remotely. Or if you're already doing it, doing it a better job of it. Hi, I'm Bill Gallagher, Scaling coach and host of the show. This episode is in a series of things dealing with the current crisis that we're all faced with right now. And you'll find this along with hundreds of other episodes on leadership and Scaling up at our website, scalingcoach.com you'll also find downloads of all the tools that we talk about and we'll even give you a free copy of the international best selling book Scaling up right there@scalingcoach.com all right, listen in now as we talk with this expert on the world of working remotely. Well, I'm joined now by Daniel Ramsey. He's founder and CEO of myoutdesk.com they're this huge virtual assistant company that, that takes care of all kinds of people doing this. And, and I thought Daniel had some great ideas to share with you about getting your staff remote. Right. We're all dealing with people who need to work from home across California. Now it's a shelter in place kind of world and we're all dealing with different variations of social distancing Right now that's necessitating homework. So welcome to the show, Daniel.

Thanks for having me.

Nice. So your company actually started back in 2008 just as the last downturn was hitting us.

Yeah, yeah. And it's a wild thing I love to tell people that my, this company was an accident, because what happened, you know, I got married. I'm on my honeymoon with my wife in Guatemala. We're at a Francis Ford Coppola resort. And it's this beautiful place in the jungle, in the trees, like monkeys around. We had a bungalow. Like, it was just kind of a crazy place and. Sounds nice. My, my wife and I had been there for a couple days and the bartender at night was making fun of me. I was on, on my laptop one in the morning doing work like every entrepreneur in the world, just trying to get through the day. And the bartender just looked at me and in Spanish, he's making fun of me like, stupid gringo, white guy, beautiful bride in the, in, in your room. And here you are working, you know, dumb American. And I knew at that moment something in my life had to shift and change.

Yeah, you needed to change some priorities, work a little differently. Totally get it. So talk to us about the creation of the company, the things that you did, what it was like starting back in 2008, 2009, paint a little more picture of that. That's great.

Yeah, sure. I mean, look at that moment. I realized I needed leverage. And the challenge is most entrepreneurs have everything in their brains. And we call it like tribal knowledge. We just know what needs to happen. We know how we want to serve our clients. We know how to build the widget or do the service. We know what the marketing needs to look like, how we want our clients served. And I realized if I wanted to grow and scale a company, I absolutely, absolutely had to pull everything out of my brain and document it. And back then there just wasn't the video quality stuff available that there is today. And so I literally, back then I just wrote everything down. Like, it's like I would vomit onto a Word document and try to be as detailed as possible. And that was my first step in really building a company. It was putting together what we now call standard operating procedures, SOPs, so that others could serve my clients and, and exactly the way I want them to.

And so you started adding clients. And what kinds of work did you do? What did. What lessons or hardships did you encounter at that time? That was a.

Well, yeah, so most of my, most of the entrepreneur clients that we have, we kind of primarily serve businesses, you know, at the half a million to $10 million mark. And we have some really big companies that are doing 20, 30, $40 million in revenue. But most of those entrepreneurs come to us because they want more time in their life and they need leverage. And so like me on my honeymoon, they're just overworking and you know, there. And at some point you start dropping balls or you, you have a key employee leave or you don't have time for the marketing campaign that you wanted to get done. And so at some point there's a, there's either a level of pain or there's an opportunity that comes up and the light bulb goes off for the entrepreneur. And they say, I need help. And so that's kind of how we were born. We're leverage, we're talent, and we're a staffing company to help small and medium sized businesses grow and, you know, get the things done that you just don't have time to do. And so we, we built a pretty big business, you know, being a, the easy button for talent.

So you started going in with that and along the way, I'm sure it wasn't easy for you to make it easy for them. And I'm guessing that that's what led to the checklist that we have to share with folks.

Yeah, I mean, look, our clients depend on us for primarily three or four positions. Like we help people in sales. So if you need more prospecting, if you need administrative support or operations support and then marketing assistance. So in today's day and age, every business needs to be out there kind of producing content and really great content. And so what you're referring to is one of our, I mean, because of what's going on right now in the world, we're all forced to work remotely a lot. And so we put together something we're calling the Fast Guide to Remote Work, which allows entrepreneurs, business people and even employees to have a quick checklist of all of the tools, systems, habits that you need in order to be successful remotely.

Interesting. So we're going to go into that checklist in just a second because I think it'll be really helpful to our listeners. But what are you hearing from people the last couple weeks? What are you hearing from people this week?

Yeah, this week has been, I mean, up until last week, literally in our business, absolutely nothing has changed. Zero. Like we were having a fantastic year. In fact, our business was on a 20% plus increase year over year. We were really excited about, you know, what the prospects of the future would have this week. Completely different world. This has been. Our clients are concerned, our clients are nervous. So we've been putting out a lot of content, a lot of information to help them through this temporary pause of, you know, what do you do when the entire workforce is now working from home, how do you add value to your clients, to your prospects without sounding cheesy? Like, if you call somebody right now and say, hey, I'd like your business, they're gonna be like, what are you talking about? I'm at home with my family, all right? Leave me alone. And so this week, we've been. I can't tell you, we've put out more content in this one week than the last 30 days to help our clients, our people that are in our sphere of influence and the people we care about. I mean, one great example is, you know, right now, people are wondering what's open in my local area? So everybody on this show is probably in some way involved in sales. And I think this is probably a tip that would be really valuable to your audience. You know, I'm in Sacramento, California. Bill, you and I are neighbors. You're in Oakland. We're an hour and a half away from each other. But what's open in Sacramento is completely different than what's open in Oakland. And what's open in, you know, around the country is just very widely varied right now. So we, as a company, we put together a little local guide for our folks that are local here in Sacramento and said, hey, look, these parks are closed. These parks are open. You can go hikes in this. In this federal land. It's okay. You're not going to get in trouble. These grocery stores are open. These gas stations are open. This is where if you need some. Let's say you need aspirin. This is who can deliver it. This is, you know, in my area, Instacart is the best delivery for groceries right now. So, you know, we put together this fast guide. I mean, I'm home. I'm right now. You'll love this, Bill. I'm home right now. I'm wearing three bracelets that my two little girls made for me because they knew I was going to be on this podcast with you. They're like, here, Daddy, we made this gift for you. This is a whole new realization for an entire country to be virtual. Before this happened, only 2 or 3% of the country worked remotely. And.

Right.

So anything that you can give your database, your clients, your sphere of influence, your vendors, your shoot, your own employees, anything you can give to them to give them ideas about how to live life remotely. I mean, I think that's how to deal. That's where we're at right now. So we're focused on adding value to our clients so that they can Add value to their clients. And that's what's happening this week.

All right, so let's get into the checklist. So the first step that you've got is about looking at what are your considerations. So talk us through that.

Well, here's the thing. I'm in a mastermind group with a lot of other entrepreneurs and together we all have 500 employees or more. And that means we're no longer small businesses. We're medium sized to large. We have one guy who has 6,000 employees. So we started three weeks ago when this happened. We started planning like, what are we going to do as companies? What are we going to tell our employees? What are we going to tell our clients? And, and so there's a lot of considerations. There's an economic outlook consideration, there's a public health and safety consideration. I mean, there's employees and customer consideration. We've communicated out to our employees, hey, we're here for you. Let us know what we can do as well as our customers, as well as our vendors. The reality is we are all in this together. And so step one is, who's my audience, who do I need to consider? And what are the different things that matter to them? That's step one.

So step one is figuring that out. Then what's next?

Well, step two is simply creating your remote checklist. And we've done that work for your audience. My understanding is we're going to have this in the show, we're going to.

Talk through it here, but we will put all this in the show notes and as a download here.

Yeah, and it's really important for entrepreneurs business. I mean, shoot, this, this guy is good for employees too. I mean, if you find yourself, let's say you're a normal, you know, person making the average wage in the US and you know as well as I do, Bill, right now, staying highly productive and adding value to a business could be the way that you keep your job in this downturn. So this can be, this, this is valuable to anybody who is in the world of, you know, business right now. But you know, one of the things that the very first thing is find your communication hub as a business. Ours happens to be Ringcentral, which is like a zoom like platform where you can do instant messaging, you can do text messaging, phone calls, video conferences, assign tasks, send files. I mean, Ringcentral, I ought to buy shares in that company because we are using it like crazy right now. And I think the rest of the world is going to experience what zoom Ringcentral, all These other online platforms for communication. That's step one.

I think you're right there. Everyone's got a little bit different, and it's not usually just one. Right. So like one of our teams, they're on WhatsApp and Zoom. Other teams are using Google Hangouts or whatever they call it now. So they're using Google services, and some people have got Skype going nonstop. I think it depends on the country and the environment. But you're going to use some combination of things like chat and video, right? And phone.

Yeah. I mean, look, it's chat, video, phone. I'll give you an example. Our office is closed. I have a beautiful third story on Capitol Avenue building, you know, that nobody's at right now. And, but we still get mail there. So we've, we, we've been talking about this week installing a VoIP phone there, which if you don't know what a VoIP phone, it's voiceover Internet protocol, which is basically just a phone that travels through the Internet versus a phone that travels through phone line. Right. And so we talk about putting a VoIP phone there and saying, delivery guys, please pick this up and dial 1-800-Our phone number so that we know that there's mail or a delivery, so that we're not just leaving stuff in our front office. But those are the kind of considerations that we went through. Another thing is you could also probably.

Put a webcam of some kind that you could just dial in and look at, like the inbox. The inbox, yeah, absolutely.

Yep. And some other things, you know, before you could go over to somebody's office and just knock on the door and say, hey, can you get me X, Y and Z Now, you know, your employees, my daughters might need me at some point. Might have to go on lunch at 2 o' clock instead of 12 o'.

Clock.

Or, you know, something might come up where, you know, like yesterday I'm at home and I'm on the phone, just like you and I are right now. And the lawn guy comes to our house and starts mowing our lawn. Well, guess what? My office is right next to our backyard. So I'm like, this guy's got to stop. You know, so we have. Or you have to move or I have to move.

Yeah.

So we have a task management and assignment platform so that work can continue to go. And that's an important thing for leaders and for managers to have so that the flow of work continues to go so you can stay productive. That's the win here.

So first step, get Common agreement on what communication platforms, Voice, video chat. And then you're looking at getting your phone lines forwarded and then task management assignment. So you're tracking and looking at accountability collectively. Right?

Yeah.

And that there's a common way to do it. I mean, one of the steps is just. And we're kind of skipping one. But I'm start of day and end of day reports. This is a new thing. When you work remote, you know, you don't get to see what others are doing. So in our business, we start with a start of day report. Like, hey, these are the seven things that I'm going to accomplish today. And then at the end of the day, you do an end of day, hey, those seven things, five of them got knocked out today and I crushed it. But these two need to get pushed and they're going to be for Monday or Tuesday of next week. And that's, that's kind of another way that's different is just, you know, there's acronyms. Like when you leave your desk, you want to tell people, hey, I'm going to be right back. I'm going, you know, I'm taking a bio break, going to the bathroom, I'm going to lunch, I'll be back at 1:00'.

Clock.

And there's just some etiquette with working remote that most people just have never had to kind of experience before, had to think about.

Right. Well, most of our teams use a daily huddle, but I like this idea where you're doing like a beginning of day, which would be like the huddle. And normally the end of day, the recap would come in the next day's huddle. But in this case, it might be useful to send out something so people have a little heads up. I like it.

Yeah. Well, you know what's funny is we're also, I'm checking in with my leaders every morning and in the middle of the day. And then at the end of the day, like right after this call, we're towards the end of the day, I'm going to do the rounds with everybody who has anybody that reports to them. Why? Because the flow of communication up and down in a remote world is so much more critical to success than when you're physically in an office. So we suggest. The other thing is we suggest video conferences all day long, all the time. This is going to be a lonely time for some folks. I mean, you imagine those people who get energy from other people, you know, and so we were using video to connect with our clients with connect with Our vendors, we're not having tough conversations over phone like we normally would. We are doing face to face on a video chat. And that is also a new reality in, in today's world.

Yeah. So then we've got the, the equipment right now. Some companies are great. They already have laptops and stuff. But talk to us about the laptop program.

Yeah. Oh my goodness. So I've got a good friend of mine, he, he owns a manufacturing company and if you can think about manufacturing in, you know, in California right now, you know, it's not an essential program. And so, you know, managers who had desktops are like, well, what do you want me to work here where I'm in this or so, you know, we've got a lot of friends who are out there buying Chromebooks and you know, IBM pads, they thinkpads and these guys. I think what's important about this is just pulsing your, your employees are. We have a great HR person, her name is Megan and we call her our chief people officer because she takes care of our people. And you know, she did a survey when. And we did a remote day three weeks ago before all of this got crazy. We were like, look guys, we're going to have a remote workday. It's a test run. We want you to test your Internet speed. We want you to test your computer. We want you to have a quiet place. I have sales guys who are on the phone and they've got cats in the background and guitars in the background and you know, you've, you've got to, you've. The show must go on. Is my, is my kind of standing line right now.

Yeah.

So we're giving them pop up banners and so they can do video calls and have some semblance of.

Well, that's a nice idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They can put it up behind them.

Yeah. And then, you know. Yes, there's a cat there or maybe the kids. I don't know if you saw that video. The guy's on BBC and, and his daughter runs in the room and starts dancing on camera. You know, like, that's my seven year old. Like I have a seven year old who. She, that's, that's all she's going to do if she gets a chance to bust into my office right now at 7.

You hope they have their pants on.

Well, I'm, I'm. We're not on camera right now.

No.

That's.

You know what's funny? That's, that's another piece of it. You know, this whole working remote, you Know, I still get up early in the morning, I'm still exercising, I still have my morning routine. I'm still showering, doing my hair. I'm, I'm putting on regular work clothes. I'm, I'm. The thing about working remote is you can't treat it any different than showing up at an office. And I come and sit down at 8 o' clock every single morning because that's the culture at my company, you know.

You know, it's funny. So when I work from home and before all this I traveled and then I work from home and I have a formal office, but I rarely go into it and now it's getting no love at all. But. And I would always dress well from the top up, so I would wear a nice shirt or whatever. And then I might wear shorts or sweatpants, depending on the weather, but I often work at home. I would not, I would, I would do all the other things. You'd say, my morning routine, shower, exercise, that kind of thing. But the attire might be like sweatpants with a nice shirt.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that does get to be a problem, as you, like, get. If you're on a extended video call and you get up and you move around and that kind of thing. And I love the thought of having a backdrop or an appropriate place, thinking about how if you're going to be on camera a lot, having your seating position be lit so that people can see your face.

Yeah, for sure.

And not the bright window behind you.

Right. Well, and here, I mean, just some basic psychology. I mean, you know when, when you're on the phone with somebody, you know, the understanding level is 30, 37%. If you send an email, it's like 14%. When you're face to face, you get it up to a whopping 50%. Like it's 49% of the time. You can be understood clearly where there's not some misunderstanding in a directive or an interaction or a mutual commitment. Well, if you're in remote work and you've been in it like we have for 13 years, it's just standard operating procedure for us to be on video when we're having a conversation of any merit. Right, right. And so, but people, normal people haven't had to do that before. So it's really imperative that you get face to face when you're having important conversations. And the same rules exist. Let people finish, make sure you ask a lot of questions. Being remote doesn't change the fact that we're all human.

Yeah. Feeling very human right now. So Talk about the check in. How do you check in on your people? I used to. I have set times in my day where I'd be prompted to go walk around and go check in and what are people doing and how's it going and what's the vibe? How do you do that when you're remote?

I love it management by walking around.

One of my favorites.

Yeah, well, you know, in the virtual world there's not a lot of difference. I'll tell you. I have a list. I call it most people have a to do list. I actually have a to dominate list. I know that sounds kind of crazy to some, but in this changing market, in order to win as a leader and we. I talked about this again today. You have to have a CEO mindset. And that means adding value to people, staying empathetic, understanding what they're up to, managing emotions. And literally I have a list of all my managers, everybody who's revenue generation for our business, everybody who's in our marketing developing leads for the business. And I'm just touching base with them or making sure their managers are touching base. This is a very. We look, 911 was really a scary time. 2007 was a scary time. But, you know, all in one week, the entire world has gone remote. And as a leader, the most important thing you can do is just communicate. Communicate, communicate. We're sending daily communications out and people should not slow down the communication, but they should up it.

Yeah. I got a message the other day from my gardener who said he'd be working via Zoom video conference for the next few months.

You know what's funny is my wife and I were talking about, does this mean we have to clean our own house, like over the weekend? Does this, I mean, you know, and so horrors. Yes, the horrors. But, you know, the good news is I think companies, most companies, and I don't know if you saw that there was a report, I think it was JP Morgan or one of the large investment groups put a report out about. Most businesses have about 29 days of operating capital in the bank right now. Yeah. And so you start thinking about, well, you know, how many of those companies are going to stay strong, you know, like. And you know, the ones that are going to get through this and weather this are the ones with strong leaders who communicate at a high level. The people who are increasing their marketing budget, increasing their client, you know, conversations, adding value to the marketplace. These are the folks that are going to walk away from this scenario with more market share than the competition.

Yeah. Interesting. You're Right. When things pivot, as long as you can respond and be flexible, you can come out on top. And it includes not everything, maybe, but many things. And I've been speaking to people in restaurants and other businesses that have pivoted quickly to delivery service. Right. And one that I think was really great in the Arizona area that is using their own staff to deliver instead of the delivery services. So they're employing or engaging most of, if not all of their team instead of laying off the front of the house while they keep the back of the house employed and usually have more staff in the front. In the back.

So, yeah, I love that. And I think that's. That's another. I mean, that's why when we first started, you said, what are the considerations? One of the big considerations as an employer is our civic duty. Like.

Yeah.

To. To keep our people employed. Our. Our country is going to survive this. We're. We're going to come out fine. What's going to happen is we're going to have all of a sudden the realities of pandemic and, and, you know, these biohazards being part of our normal life. And I think moving forward, you're gonna see a government that strengthens their institutions and infrastructure in order to handle these things, because now we're. We're kind of caught with our biohazard down, so to speak.

Yeah. Well, things are gonna change for sure. And it's hard to predict what exactly, but. But the first thing is just learning to deal in this new environment, even whether it's short term or long term, is hard to say at this point. Some people are calling this a very long work from home, but others are saying it could be. So we don't know. But you got to deal with it here and now if you're going to continue operations. If you want to learn more about Daniel's company or his work, you find him@myoutdesk.com myuntdesk.com and we will put a link to a download of your ebook into the show notes as well, so people can go figure that out and get that there. And with lots of tips about outsourcing, going virtual, taking your stat, getting your team remote and so on, with more detail, obviously, than we cover in the show. I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing all this with us. Us.

Yeah, Bill, it's been my pleasure. And if you're listening right now and you want to go remote, like, we've got salespeople standing by who aren't selling right now, but are helping businesses like your audience just with step by step guides of how to use Zoom, for instance, and what does it mean to set up a, you know, instant chat feature that everybody's on? So if you're out there, we want to do our part in the community and we'd be happy to help you through this transition time.

Thanks so much. Daniel Ramsey myoutdesk.com We'll talk to everyone again soon.

Thanks Bill.

If this show helped you, please share it with somebody else right now so they can get all the benefits that you got like it and subscribe wherever you got it to get them every week. You can also email us with any feedback, questions, concerns or comments to infocalingcoach.com I want to give special thanks to Vern Harnish, the author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework. This show is produced by Lucy Summers. The audio was edited by Albert Burge at Podfly Productions and the show notes were written by Ein Kudina with proofreading by Tim McGowan. Thanks again for listening and keep Scaling Up.

Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align, it's the official software for Scaling Up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our Scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Aligned. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.