Why Your Early-Stage Business Won't Survive Remote Work

Hello, hello! Welcome to today's episode of Black Belt Startup with Feras. Thank you for tuning in. What's new in the world of entrepreneurship? Remote work and why your small consulting and service business might not survive remote work. Have you ever had, or have you ever made a decision that feels like jumping off a cliff Hoping you'll grow wings on the way down. Well, that was me with remote work back in 2013. Remote work wasn't cool. It wasn't a perk. It was this weird, risky move that made people nervous. But I had a choice: either lose some of my best people, 2 senior consultants, because they had to move to be closer to their parents, or figure out how to make this work from anywhere thing actually work. And I know a lot has been written and said about this topic, especially for bigger companies and now for the federal government, but a lot of it doesn't really relate to you, the small business owner. And let me tell you, we did not get it right at first. It was really messy. We tripped. We hit a bunch of walls. And then if you're a business owner trying to make remote work work, you're probably feeling some of that right now. Whether you're trying to hire a contractor or a full-time employee across some time zones or across different oceans, you are going to run into some issues. And it's not just you. This is the hard truth. 16% of companies, that's worldwide, are fully remote. And it sounds promising that they're fully remote, but at the same— but on the flip side, 56% of remote workers say that they are struggling with collaboration and communication. And then over 40% of new remote employees, they feel unsupported. And that, of course, is going to cripple a growing business before it even takes off. So that's why so many early-stage businesses like yours, they don't survive remote work. They have issues in delivery, they have issues in pricing, they have issues in creating a culture, a great culture for their, for the, you know, with their team. And it's really not because remote work doesn't work, it's because most businesses treat it like an experiment Not— they don't treat it as a system. But here's what changed everything for me. I stopped guessing because my team and I, we built systems and we got really, really intentional about culture, accountability, and structure with thinking about remote workers first. And over time, As we got more intentional, as I got more intentional, that shift helped me scale 3 companies, including one to 8 figures, all with a fully remote team. So today I want to break down exactly how we made that happen, the mistakes, the breakthroughs, and then the systems that turned remote work from a headache into our biggest advantage. So if you're running a service or a consulting business and you're struggling to make remote work work, stick around. Let's fix that. But before we dive in, a few housekeeping items. One, if you're watching now, maybe listening in live or later, I'd love to hear from you. Leave me a comment. Ask me a question. Let me know about maybe small or big wins you're going through, you have, or some struggles you're going through. Or any thoughts that you might have. I, I helped a lady just a couple last week, actually. She left me a comment on, on YouTube saying, hey, I'm starting a business, it's been 3 months, no sales, I'm struggling, can you help? I sent her to our website at Ask Feras. I have these 20-minute sessions, no sales pitch. I'm not trying to sell you anything. This is my way of giving back to the community. I have these 2 or 3 slots every week where I ask— I answer questions for entrepreneurs. So if you are struggling, if you're not sure whether this is the right time to start a business, or if you started and you're struggling with sales, with marketing, with hiring, with remote work, do let me know on whichever platform you're on— on Facebook, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on YouTube. Email me at startupwithferas.com. Feras spelled F-E-R-A-S. I'll be more than happy to help you out or point you to a resource that can be of benefit to you. And a reminder that we have these sessions, these episodes, every Thursday. That's when we go live at, at 3 PM Pacific, 6 PM Eastern. So make sure you follow us wherever you get your podcasts or wherever you get your live streams and your, your entrepreneurship content. Follow us and you won't miss— this way you don't miss any, any of this content. And if you have a I a lot of times answer these questions in these episodes. So let's jump back in. So if you're struggling to manage people remotely, or maybe you're just new to it, or maybe you're about to start a business and you've identified talent anywhere, maybe from your network or maybe on Upwork, and you're not just sure what is this going to be like, let me first start start off with some challenges that I want you to be aware of. So this number one challenge, I think, that the lack of in-person communication typically leads to misunderstandings. Because without the ability— and I think we have some slides on this— so without the ability of quickly clarifying things in the office, you go over the desk and talk to your colleague or at the water cooler, Without that quick clarification, you know, the things— a lot of interpretations could happen and it could turn into— some small interpretations could— sorry, small misinterpretations can turn into major problems. And when expectations aren't crystal clear, deadlines get missed and then work quality drops. So that's the number one thing. The other challenge that you're likely to run into You know, tracking progress. So some of us like to check in on their team every other hour. Others are totally hands-off. But the idea is, you know, if you track, if you want to track progress without micromanaging, it could be a bit tricky. So depending on your style, on your personality, you have to find a balance between micromanaging and giving people room to breathe and to be creative. So that balance is really important. So there has to be some oversight. There has to be some way to hold people accountable. And obviously, you want to allow people to have some autonomy so this way they can be creative and help you and help themselves succeed. We'll go over the how in a second, but I'm just highlighting some of the challenges I faced myself And I hear from founders who are building remote team, building remote teams. So the third challenge is, we talked— the first challenge, we talked about communication and lack of in-person communication that could lead to misunderstandings. And then we talked about tracking progress without micromanaging. And then the third one is about creating a strong company culture That, that, that, you know, when people are not next to you, when you're not going out to lunch with them, and when you're not maybe socializing with them, that takes effort. Because culture isn't built in Slack messages or on occasional Google Meet or Zoom calls. Without a conscious effort to foster engagement, remote employees can feel disconnected, which will obviously lower morale and will also cause some, you know, you'll have some retention issues on your hand. So there are 3 main factors that will make remote work succeed and help you overcome the challenges that I just mentioned. I'll go into each one of them in detail, in more detail, but here they are. One is clear expectations. It ensures everyone— clear expectations ensure everyone knows their role. 2, strong communication. Keeps everyone aligned. And 3, trust and accountability drive performance. And research shows that remote workers are 13% more productive than in-office employees. This is by Forbes, but only when they have clear goals and accountability and they have some sort of structure in place. So which is what I want to go over next. So let's just make sure If you have any questions, any comments, if you're again listening in live now or on whichever platform you're on, leave us a comment or send us a question and we will be more than happy to answer it before the end of this session. Establishing— so the first way that they're really the key element, major factor here in helping you set up a remote work structure or culture that works well for you It is establishing clear expectations for your remote teams. You need to have some structure. Without structure, confusion takes over. So I want to give you examples on how to set clear expectations. So instead of telling someone, I want you to increase sales, let's say that's your OKR, your goals, your objectives. You know, we use in all of my companies, we've used OKRs, objectives and key results. So I have this. OKR. This objective by the end of the quarter, and I have these key results that I want to track between now and then. So let's say in your goal here, when you're setting that up with a salesperson that you've hired and they're remote, instead of telling them, hey, I want you to increase sales, or if you're hiring a customer success person, I want you to improve customer service, that's just too vague. A better structured goal-setting framework like OKRs, or you could use any other goal-setting framework. It really doesn't matter. But be specific, be concrete, have, you know, make it time-bound, and give them a little bit more guidance and specifics. So for example, instead of saying improve client onboarding, right? When you have a new client, there's a process to get people onboarded into your systems. Say increase client onboarding efficiency by 20% in the second quarter. That's much better and much more concrete and much more trackable and measurable than saying improve client onboarding. The second part is you can say, for example, that's the goal. We want to increase our efficiency by 20%. We want to break it down into measurable key results. OKRs, objectives and key results. So create 10 onboarding tutorial videos and reduce onboarding time from 10 days to 7 days. So again, use whatever makes sense for your service, but the idea is to be specific with your objectives. And when you have this team member who's remote, who's not talking to you every other day, maybe he doesn't see you during lunch or during breakfast or during breaks or you know, you and he are, or you and she, you know, work in different time zones. So clarification of these expectations doesn't happen on a regular basis. So from the onset, from the get-go, make sure you have your OKRs defined for this individual so they know what they— they know their target and they can figure out how to get there, hopefully with your guidance as well. So that's one. The other thing is, Creating a detailed project roadmap for everything that you're doing. So we talked about having OKRs, objectives and key results, but also I think specific milestones, specific deadlines, even for internal projects. That is really important if you want certain things done. For example, today I was speaking with one of my colleagues about posting on social media. So we agreed to a cadence. We want to post twice a day on this specific platform. Then they know exactly what the cadence is. They know by the end of the week that we should have 14 assets published on this platform, right? That's very, very clear for them. Our goal is to increase our fan base or our followers and our, you know, increase the size of our community. That's all great. Now we're breaking it down and we're giving them weekly milestones and specific deadlines to work with. Also, I think identifying responsibilities so everyone knows who owns what, especially when your work or the work of the remote worker depends on the work of other team members. And this gets really worse when you have different time zones. I'll talk about this in a few minutes. Yeah. But making sure everyone knows their responsibility when it comes to delivering this project. Again, internal projects or external projects. And then making sure everyone who is remote has access to the tools and resources needed to complete tasks effectively. In a lot of businesses now, we're all using some form of email, Gmail, Google Workspace, we're using task management tools. I'm hoping that you are. You know, we use— I use Notion here. I use Slack with my team. We use, obviously, I always talk about Gmail Workplace. So those systems, if you use them properly, they allow people to collaborate in their ways to share resources. So keep making sure if your team member who is remote needs access to certain things that are only available for the team in the office, make sure that they have that access, just like if someone is next to you. That's really important, and it's important to, you know, keep that top of mind. Now, the third factor here is, uh, is that's, that's really important, is from the get-go, when you hire people, when you bring people to be part of your team— full-timers, part-timers, freelancers, it doesn't really matter— you want to agree, have an agreement, have an understanding of the work schedule. So things like hours of the day and then days of the week and days of the month in terms of holidays, in terms of the schedule during the day. If you have people on the West Coast, in my case, and I have team members on the East Coast, I have some team members overseas for different businesses. So there has to be some overlap window. You can, you can be 100% asynchronous. I've seen it where it's done, but I I think it's more effective. It's more productive when there's some overlap window between team members who need each other because there's so much you can do more efficiently with a quick 5-minute call than a long email thread going back and forth between yourself and your team member across the ocean. So having a common calendar in terms of the hours of the day, the work hours, and the overlap, and then also in terms of response time. You know, if you're waiting on someone, if you send an email late at night yourself, late at night for your time zone, and then they don't get back to you till the next day, you know, it might be a day and a half before they actually, before you actually get your response. So there has to be some internal agreement on response time between people who work across different time zones. So it's really a good practice, I think, to have when you hire people, ahead of hiring them, put that in the job description so there are no surprises. And then also allow, take care of your team. It's not— the idea is not to see if they showed up at 9 o'clock in the morning and they're online. That's just not a good way to manage and lead people. You lead people by outcomes. You lead people by making sure they're delivering on what they committed to deliver. But making sure that there is this window where people can talk real time, can share, they can go maybe on a Google Meet and share screens and just sometimes like brainstorming is best done when people come prepared and they do it real time. So having a good understanding of the hours of the day that people work and also there's a bit of an overlap, And then also holiday schedules. The more you can align holiday schedules, and some people might have to make some sacrifices depending on where your clients are, especially if they're like client-facing requirements. Those all have to be agreed on and set up, you know, set up early on in your engagement with when you're interviewing and hiring people. Good. Next is, Some effective communication strategies for remote teams. So it's more, you know, communication isn't— it's more than just sending an email or sending a message on Slack. A lot of times people misunderstand emails, and emails is not the best medium to, you know, to express a lot of feelings. So I think between you and your team members, you want to make sure that you want to keep the communication clear and efficient. And clarify, as a business owner, as a leader, clarify which channels are used for what purpose. So for example, Slack is— it doesn't have— I don't get any kickbacks by mentioning Slack or Google Workspace. I, I— we use this and I use them as examples. Whatever works for you. If you, if you're like a Microsoft Office person, use their system. If you use third-party systems, that's totally fine. But if you use Slack, it could be— it's great for a lot of things including quick informal updates. You know, you have a lot of people maybe who are working on a specific project or a specific area of marketing, you have a channel, you're sharing information asynchronously, helps a lot. Then email could be more elaborate, maybe you have more to say, you don't need like an, you know, like a response right away, So set these guidelines that work for you and for your team. There are no, I think, hard rules on what Slack is better for, what email is better for, but you as the founder, you as the leader, you as the manager, put some general guidelines on how each technology used, how each communication channel should be used within your team. Excuse me. And then one thing I would definitely highlight is using video, not just— I'll talk about having video on, but things like Loom videos or potentially now you can do this with, if you have any, a bunch of software out there to help you record your screen and just go over a concept. So if you're going into maybe a brainstorming session and you want your team, you came up with an idea that is a bit maybe complex, maybe you just spend 3, 4 minutes explaining your assumptions and the considerations that you took into coming up with a specific decision and share that. Give people ample time. Don't share just 3 minutes before the meeting. Give it to them maybe a day ahead. Say, please, ahead of the meeting, just spend 3 minutes reviewing this. So at Amazon, according to what I've read, Jeff Bezos, in their meetings, they don't like slides. Maybe because slides are produced by Microsoft or by Google. But no, jokes aside, they allow time for people to come in and have a document that people read, and then they engage in a discussion. I'm not sure if that's still the culture, but I think providing information ahead of time is always helpful for meetings. So number 1, as we said here, is in terms of clarifying How to keep communication clear and effective, clarifying which channels are used for what. Number 2 is setting up structured check-ins. So that's really important as well. It has worked well for me with my team members. We have sometimes weekly, sometimes we have biweekly, sometimes we have monthly, depending on the support that I need, or maybe my team. my team members need. So without some sort of systematic or structured way for keeping in touch with your team, remote employees can feel disconnected very quickly, especially I think the more junior the team members are, and especially if they haven't worked in a remote environment before, they would require more attention from you, the business owner, the leader. So you can have, for example, again, these are just examples. Tweak them, customize them. For your own business. So for example, you can have daily asynchronous updates where employees share what they're working on on a specific channel, right? If you're using Slack or maybe a quick email, you can have weekly one-on-one meetings as I do for deeper conversations, you know, feedback for mentorship, or potentially you can have monthly one-on-ones where, like the way I do it, like Like we don't talk about, we talk about the tactical stuff right away, and then okay, let's the next, you know, for the next 30 minutes or the next 15 minutes, how are you doing? How are things going? How's life? Anything I can do to help? And then if you have some feedback, I like to call them glows and grows, this is the time to do it. So sometimes if you give feedback in the heat of the moment, it's not well received. People just might not take it. So if you have— If you have some feedback, you know, positive again, or maybe areas for improvements, jot those down. Create a shared Google document and just jot down your notes. And then when it's time for this weekly or this, sorry, monthly team, monthly one-on-one, you bring up the glows, all the great things that the team member has been doing. And then also you provide feedback on areas for them to grow. So again, adjust this to your schedule, adjust this to your team members, but stick to a rule. Say, I will have biweekly one-on-ones with my team members. Put it on the calendar for the rest of the year and execute on it. Now, of course, there's travel, there are vacations, people get busy. So you might not— you will miss one of those meetings every once in a while, but make it a habit to always connect with your team members. I mean, this applies even to your in-person teams because we get busy with the day-to-day. There are a lot of— sometimes a lot of friction, a lot of issues come up. So having setting aside time for these one-on-one calls and those meetings, I think it's really, really important. The third tip here is on encouraging a camera-on culture for video calls. I think video calls help create a stronger connection and make remote work communication feel more personal. There are— before you jump here and say, Yes, yes, there are situations where it's hard. Maybe you're working outside in a place where it's, you know, it's noisy. You want to keep camera off and you want to, you want to have the, the mic off. That's understandable. But as a general practice, having, um, as a general guideline for your team, having video on is, I think, is really important. So, so again, be flexible, but I think seeing facial expressions and body language leads to better engagement and better collaboration. Now, here's a pro tip, and this is on time management and delivery, you know, especially when you have, when you have a deadline, some sensitive deadline, maybe a customer is expecting a big audit or whatever you're delivering to them. So you have to think of you as a senior person, as the manager, the leader, the consultant, And again, this affects both local and remote teams, but setting well-planned expectations for deadlines is important. You don't want to look bad in front of the client. You want to deliver on your commitment. But I think people who are working remotely, they also need to understand the deadline, and sometimes they need more details from you before they can give you that, before they deliver that document, the audit, you know, whatever they're working on. So without, I think, having— we talked about culture earlier— without supporting the team, without creating that sense of accountability and trust, of course, and giving people leeway to work and be creative, if you don't have that strong culture of commitment, when you have people— you know, missing information, or they have people depend on other people's work for them to do their deliverables. I mean, you'll run into a lot of issues when you have, when you're driven, when you work, when you have deadlines for customers. So it's like people, it's easy for people to wait on someone else to let them know. It's easy for people to, I couldn't do my delivery because I don't have access to this drive. It's easy for people to say, this information wasn't clear for me. And when you have remote workers, especially across time zones, like when you lose half a day, this could be— it's half a day. You can't just go over to the next cubicle and ask someone, hey, I'm waiting on you. It's 5 o'clock, you know, end of day. I'm going to be working on this later tonight. me what I need. If you're— if it's your 5 PM and the remote worker that you rely on to give you what you need, you know, it could be 3 AM their morning, right? Or it could be, you know, 10 PM their time. So having that culture of, again, that trust, that culture of where expectations are clearly set, are clear and set, and then when we understand who's doing what, for a project, as we said earlier, all of those will help you meet your deadlines. And even if you're relying on 4 or 5 different team members, you know, across the country or across, you know, across the world. So that is on these effective ways to improve, to keep your communication clear and effective. Moving on here, and we have about maybe 5 more minutes to go here, on building trust and accountability, as I said earlier. And again, this is not really by micromanaging or by tracking hours and tracking when someone is online. I mean, overdoing this will lead to frustration. But at the same time, you as a business owner, you have to have some kind of system to hold people accountable, right? So it's a balance. How do you create accountability without micromanaging? I'll give you some examples. I don't care, I go online and I check if someone, if my team members are online at 9 AM. I never do that. But I look at what we agreed to deliver this week. Did they make the number of calls that we agreed that they will make if they're in sales? Did they take care of all the open tickets if you have issues, you know, customer support issues? Yeah. If you're working on marketing and they have content to produce, blog posts, Shorts, videos, what have you, did they complete what they agreed to? So setting those clear KPIs, as we said earlier, setting those clear objectives and then doing that follow-up, not micromanaging every hour and not micromanaging if someone is online, online, that, that is going to help. The other thing is, I think, um, using technology— and I always say this— technology is only part of it. We need technology, we rely on technology, technology heavily, but you want to use it, you want to train people on using it, you want to lead by example as a business owner in leveraging all the technology that you have and use asynchronous methods and check-ins instead of Again, having to do things manually. So if you use, we use Notion, for example, you can have, if you're using ClickUp or Basecamp or any of these systems, if there's a mechanism to automate handoffs, to automate when someone, or maybe that would be a manual piece, like I'm done with this, then I'm going to hand it off in Notion or in ClickUp or in Basecamp and say, this is the next person who takes on this deliverable. I mean, those asynchronous ways of keeping everyone updated on progress on tasks, I think is really important. And then always, always have set up maybe biweekly or maybe monthly review meetings on your processes to make sure that they are still efficient, they are still working well for all your team members. A lot of times when we start to hire, it's funny in business when you have maybe 2, 3 people, things work, and then you start to add a couple more people, and everything that was working stops working because you start to take a role from someone who was doing this role and maybe 3 other roles, and you start to branch out roles from people to other team members, right? So that creates all— you always have to re-examine, always re-examine, always examine and re-examine your processes, your checklists, your templates, and as you add more team members, or as, as you take on bigger projects. These checklists, these processes worked well for a phase of your business, and as you grow, you have to revisit them. And again, if you're hiring remote and you've never hired remote before, make sure the process you have works well for them as well. The other one here about trusting building trust and accountability and having this, really this culture of, you know, people caring about the business is you want to give ownership, not just tasks. I mean, delegating isn't about assigning work. It's about trusting your team members that they will take full ownership instead of relying, instead of saying, do this report. I want it by 5:00 PM. I said, you're in charge of our client success insights this quarter. I want you to develop a system of tracking the customer, the feedback we get from customers. And then I want you to report on key trends. And if you're stuck as you're developing this report, come to me. I'm more than happy to help or speak with such and such. They are the expert on this. So again, give ownership, allow people to be creative, and make yourself or maybe another expert, subject matter expert, available to support this person who has been now given the ownership to deliver their project. So I want to wrap it up with a quick list of some tools that I think will help you do this whole remote work and also delegation do it in a seamless way. I won't list all the tools. There's so many. I covered some earlier on in this episode, but I'll mention the categories of tools that you want to make sure you have in your workflow, in your business, and always checking for new technologies that help you automate things, make things more efficient. So, and research shows that companies who use remote collaboration tools they see 25% faster project completion and also 30% higher productivity. This is by McKinsey. Yes, McKinsey, big companies. Someone might say this doesn't apply to me. I'm a small business owner. Trust me, a lot of this works. Like what works for bigger companies in terms of, or the data that is collected and reported on by McKinsey, the concepts are applicable to smaller business. The scale is going to be different, but the The concepts still are still applicable. So the areas that I want you to be looking into for automation, for including some of the AI capabilities, think of project management tools, task management tools, file sharing and documentation. Look into systems for communication and meetings and scheduling. And also, if you're doing time tracking, obviously there's some tools out there about also will highlight productivity improvements and anything to do with automation, anything that you can, you're doing, you or your team members are doing manually that you can automate and have some AI capabilities in there. I think that would just help all along. So for example, if you're using a CRM, a lot of the CRMs today, they're injecting or they're adding AI capabilities where they'll surface like for this lead based on the history that you have for this lead, they might give you a proposed outreach message to this lead. You know, never click send. Don't let the machine control what you do, but take a look at that AI-crafted email template and you might want to tweak it a little bit because of something you know about the customer, but leverage these tools again across project management, file sharing, communication, and also time and productivity and, you know, back office, anything to do with the back office as well. Good. So that's what I wanted to cover in this episode. And really to summarize, it's all about Setting clear expectations for your team so everybody's aware what success looks like. It's about using structured communication to eliminate confusion and delays. It's also about focusing on results, not hours worked. And, you know, the idea here is to build accountability and motivation and then invest, as I just said, invest in the right tools to streamline collaboration. And you always have to think and prioritize work-life balance to prevent burnout. And you want to make sure people are there with you, you know, along the journey. So what I want you to do is pick one of the strategies, one of the tips we have covered today, and then implement it this week. Maybe a software you haven't done before, you haven't purchased before. Maybe it's a process you haven't done before. Maybe you haven't set up those one-on-one calls with your team. So take at least one of the tips we covered today and apply them to your business and let me know. Let me know in a week, in 2, how this is going, what challenges you came into implementing, and if you have tips for our community on what worked well for you for your remote team, do let me know again at startupwithferus.com or on YouTube. or whichever channel, or whichever platform you are on, and here's our channel, you see it here for those of you watching, it is @StartupWithFeras on YouTube, and Feras is spelled F-E-R-A-S, or if you go to startupwithferas.com, you can also see, you can read all the articles we publish on entrepreneurship, and you can sign up for our newsletter. Now, Before we depart, uh, our training and coaching program Black Belt Startup, and you can find it at blackbeltstartup.com, it is a complete curriculum to help entrepreneurs who want to start a business or they started and they're struggling. So we talk about every pillar of, of a business, from vetting your business idea to business planning to sales to marketing to hiring, you name it. And we include a sign up for that membership program, we include a personalized roadmap, and we also have a one-on-one coaching session with me so I can go into the specifics of your progress and what, what the challenges that you're facing are. And then, and then we do have weekly office hours where you can come in and come to me with your questions, and we address those questions, and you'll benefit from the community. So check out our training and coaching program. It is based on timeless, time-honored principles in martial arts and in business. And again, there's no, um, no long-term commitment. You sign up month to month. If you're getting the value, you stay. If you're not getting the value, you are welcome to, to move on. And we do offer for our, uh, podcast and livestream community members, we do have a 20% off on all things, all the products you see on blackbeltstartup.com, just enter the code BBSU20, BBSU20, and you'll get a 20% discount. That is it for today. Again, thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll see you next time. Bye.