The Office Comeback: Is Remote Work Over?

You know, I posted something to LinkedIn. I don't know if you saw this. The post said, the harsh reality, most people are coming back to the office, right? And oh my God, it has 600,000 impressions right now. You know, someone from a big agency responded. She has like 28,000 people at that agency, right? She was like, no, this is the harsh reality. People don't want to face the truth, right? People don't want to be accountable. It's like, well, you know, all these people that run these companies, they just want to control everything. They just want power. And then I responded. I didn't respond to all the comments. This is one I responded to. I was like, look, Do you think these people are starting a business just to have power? Like, or do you think they started a business to have good products and services? And they want to work with people and they want to produce, right? At the end of the day, do you think they really want to take the time to control? Like, do you even think they want to go to the office? Like, I don't want to go to the office. I love working in my shorts, right? But what matters at the end of the day is production. And if you're producing, then great. You don't need the office space, right? But if you're not producing as much as you could before, you're probably coming back to the office. And then I saw today, this morning, Morning Brew, Forbes, they're like, yep, 70% of employers are going to be bringing people back to the office, right? And that's a lot. And so, my point of saying all this is that it goes back to accountability again. Most people don't want to be accountable.

Now, here's a question for you. With going back to the work, have you guys got an office here locally? Because you used to have an office in downtown LA.

So, we did this. We have like a— right across from the Century City Mall, we were at that little WeWork, right? And we got a small one as a test. Oh my God, we're flying so fast in that office right now. And here's the thing. The people with me in the office, they're in their mid-20s. And I remember it was like a Thursday. I was like, hey, let's just work from home tomorrow, right? And they're like, nope, I'm coming in tomorrow. I was like, oh, wow. So then I ended up going in on Friday too. But the level of pacing, you just, you cannot beat that speed, right?

So let's go back and to give people context, Eric used to have an office in downtown LA. And I don't know what the square footage of the office was, but it was decent size, like 5,000 square feet, something like that.

Yeah. All right.

It was a beautiful office building, by the way. It was expensive.

Yeah, I like that office.

Great views. And then now he got a WeWork. I'm assuming it's much smaller than your downtown LA office.

It's smaller than this room. It's like a little entry-level room.

4 desks. And when you had your office in downtown LA, how many people used to come there on a daily basis? 20+?

Yeah.

And now how many people do you have coming to the WeWork?

Well, everyone's still remote. Like, we're largely remote first, right? So everyone's distributed, but we have, we don't have, we have like 4 people in LA.

And they all come to the office.

Uh-huh.

And when you started getting the 4 people coming to the office, you said you started flying fast. Let's give people some real context. What do you mean by flying fast? Not hypothetical, but what differences have you actually seen in the business?

I'll give you an example. We're right, so right about, right before we're going to go to lunch, I had said something. I was like, dude, I just saw this thing over here. And then my CTO's like, oh no, dude, we can just implement this immediately, blah, blah, blah. Like he immediately just implemented, like sent a message out and then we got that thing done. Literally it took like 5 minutes, right? And usually, like, you would think, it's like, oh my God, if you go to the office, oh, you're gonna get interrupted all the time, right? And I hate getting interrupted, but largely all the interruptions are positive. It's like, hey, what about this over here? What about this? Have you seen this over here? We just, we talk about ideas a lot faster. There's no waiting for next week to check on this or waiting another 3 days to get on a call, right? It just happens right there. And from conversations, 4 or 5 other ideas sprout out. It's like, oh, I should talk to this person over here. Like, it just— we get things done faster. And they said it themselves. I was like, hey, so guys, what do you think about the in-office, right? And it's only been a couple weeks of doing this. And they're like, this is what we need. And they're like, they don't believe that people graduating from college can work from home on their own. They just don't know how to work, right? And so—

That just graduated college.

Yeah, they're like, if you just graduated, even if you're in your mid-20s, you should be coming into the office. They said this, I didn't say this, right? And so that's why I do believe that the pendulum is swinging, that most, a lot of people are gonna come back to the office. And it's high performers will be high performers anywhere, and high performers can work anywhere. But let's face it, the vast majority of people unfortunately are not high performers.

That's true. I agree with that.

Yeah.

And I think for the younger generation, not going to the office means that you're not going to develop your skills as much, and it's going to hurt your career down the line.

It's going to stunt your growth.

Yeah.

Right? The last five, ten years or whatever. Like I think the people that really love it, and I see I've watched the comments, right? It's like who's commenting? Oh, it's the the employees that like, "Whoa, no, I don't like the commute." Whatever. Da da da da da. Right?

And it's like.

But then you have people that comment and are like, no, let's be honest. One person commented, it's like, I'm just going to be completely honest here. They're like, I've been in office the last 9 months. I've got more work done than the last 3 years combined during COVID I was like, wow, thank you for being honest. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that And when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find.

Dude, most people don't want to go to the office because they don't want to do the commute. And a lot of people— this is sad— I've met quite a few people who don't like going to the office because they can just travel the world and do whatever they want and work a lot less and cash the same paycheck.

And by the way, like, I, I understand where people that say that are coming from. Like, it's much better for you personally to be working from home. Like, you work well from anywhere. I work well from anywhere. I get it, right?

But that's not most people.

It isn't most people, but I think the argument that they make, it's like, look, it's good for you personally, but what's best for the business is best for the business. It's not about— you take care of the business first and then that takes care of the people. I think people have it reversed.

I also think it depends on the role that you're in. So for example, I have no direct reports going into office. I still think it helped quite a bit of people and myself, but because I have no direct reports, it's easier for me to work from home because I'm working independently majority.

You also have a lot of international work.

I have a lot of international work. The hours are crazy. And whether I go to an office or not, because we still have locations, I work 7 days a week and I have quite a bit of output on a daily basis that a lot of people see whether they interact with me or not.

Yeah. And plus you have a lot of leverage, right? There's your audiences and everything else. So, but also we've been working for a long time too. Yeah.

It also helps that people see I'm working 7 days a week. Yeah.

Yeah. It does set the tone for people too when they— you set an example and that's really important. That is it for today. Go to marketingschool.io/agency. By the way, that price keeps going up. It just doubled last yesterday actually. So yeah, go check it out and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.