Mukul asks whether to keep working from home or get an office and hire locally. Evan suggests doing what you love, embracing both flexibility and growth simultaneously, and building a remote team instead. He shares his own shift from a Toronto office to a distributed team across continents.
Chapters
Hi, it's Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of #AskEvan. Today we're continuing with our challenge series where we're partnering up with TELUS Talks Business and looking at answering questions from their community to help them grow their business. The last one we did was here, how to know when to move out of the pilot and beta phase. That was from Jeremy who wrote in. Today we're going to answer another question from one of our Facebook fans here. It's from Mukul. He wrote in saying, "I have a question for Evan and the Challenge Series. I work from home and love the flex. However, we grow business, maybe get an office if we have staff. I prefer not to get an office, but it feels like we may have to. Also, with local staff, I have to lead by example and work 9 to 5. Should I keep the lifestyle I love or expand?" He is from mukulapps.com. Thanks for the question, Mukul. Great question. I think one that a lot of entrepreneurs face as they think about their business and how they want to to grow it up, and I'm going to give you 3 suggestions that I hope will help you make a decision. Number 1: Do what you love. Your question ended with, "Should I keep the lifestyle I love or expand?" You shouldn't have to pick between doing something you love and something else. Do what you love. You'll not only enjoy your business a lot more, you'll get much better results as well. If you're going to the office every day hating the commute, hating the fact that you have to be there for set times, Hating the extra overhead you have to pay. Do you think that's an environment that's going to bring out the best in you? Some people thrive in an office environment. They like feeding off the energy of others and they might be too lazy or unproductive if they stay home. But just because other people have an office to grow, it doesn't mean you have to. A lot of people struggle to search for what they love. If you've already found it, don't lose it. Number 2: Embrace the genius of the and. In Jim Collins's book Built to Last, he looked at companies that have stood the test of time and found a way to persevere when all their competition have fallen apart. These are companies that have thrived for an average age of 100 years, like 3M, Procter Gamble, Sony, Marriott, and so on. One of the characteristics that these companies had in common was that they embraced the genius of the and. What this basically means is that when these companies were faced with a question that seemed to pit one idea against another, they found a way to do both. Don't look at keeping the lifestyle you love or expand. Instead, keep the lifestyle you love and expand. Once you frame your thinking around solving that problem, new ideas and opportunities will come to you that you didn't consider before. #3 Build a remote team. Over the past few years, I've gone in the complete opposite direction of your thinking. I have an office in Toronto and used to have a team here. I thought it would be easier to manage a team when I could have them in front of me and the communication level would be much higher. My team was very young, hungry, and motivated, and as a result also had a desire to travel and see the world. We were faced with a choice: do I keep them on board, forcing them to stay in Toronto, or do I let them go and find a job somewhere else? We embraced the genius of the end: keep working for me and go travel and see the world. As a result, they love what they do, work hard to finish their assignments, and created a work-life balance that keeps them happy. Now I'm the only one in Toronto. My team is spread out across Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia. Communication is trickier but manageable, and it means that I don't have to be in the office either if I don't want to be. You can have a full-time team of remote workers who work just as passionately for you or more than a local set of workers. Good luck, Makul. I hope this has helped, and keep us posted with your progress. Thank you for joining me for another edition of Ask Evan and our TELUS Talks Business Challenge series. If you like the video, you want to see more, please give it a thumbs up. It makes me want to do more of these videos for you guys, and I'd love to hear what you have to think if you want to leave a comment. Comment under the video. I always check those out and try to respond to everybody who writes in. If you have a question and would like to be featured in our next challenge series, feel free to leave it in the comment section below, and I will consider you for the next challenge, and hopefully I can make a video to help you answer your business problem. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode. ¡Gracias!
