MBA1627 Do You Need an Office To Work Efficiently + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This week we're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for 500 doll over at EasyCourse co. Or you can win it for free. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thank you for showing us love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Heyo. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. The place to be to grow the business you want every single day with our D10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn do you need an office to work efficiently? This is something I've been really studying in the last few years, especially during the pandemic. Does a business actually need to have an office where everybody goes to the office in order to be efficient? Now the reason why I'm so curious about this is because for the last eight plus years our business has been 100% remote. All our team members are remote workers. They all work from home from different parts of the world. We don't have a physical office. So I know how that is. And sometimes I wonder, are we as efficient as we can be? Is our velocity not as fast as other companies that have an office? So I actually reached out to Chris Savage who is the founder of Wistia, Wistia.com, friend of the show. Amazing business that started and has a physical office all their team members work out of their office in Massachusetts. But since the pandemic, everybody had to work from home, work remotely. So I wanted to ask them, did efficiency go down? Were you more efficient in the office? Are you having a hard time now that they're remote getting things done? The things I learned from that conversation are pretty eye opening, and you might be surprised with some of the things I've learned. I can't wait to share with you so we can put this to bed. Is remote work inefficient? Is the cost of efficient work for the whole team having an office? Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, I had a chat with Chris Savage, the founder and CEO of Wistia, Wistia.com, one of the best, best companies out there when it comes to video. They are a shining example of great content marketing. So definitely check out their website, check out their BL if you're looking to host videos online. They are amazing. We use them and love them. And I'm not just saying that because Chris helped me out with some of this information today and that he's a friend. But I've been using Wistia for over seven years now, and well before I even got to know Chris. It's a great tool. Now, when I spoke to Chris, I was really curious because I was really envious of the fact that he had this amazing, talented team. They all are in one office, one amazing fun building in Massachusetts. I actually visited their office. They had a conference called Wistia Fest that I had the honor to speak at. And I thought, man, this must be really cool to work here. I wonder if it makes people more creative, more collaborative, more efficient. And I always just had that in the back of my head. You know, I was happy with the setup I had in my company as a remote team. But like in anything in life, you always think, maybe the grass is greener on the other side. So when the pandemic hit, I really wanted to find out from Chris. You know, when everybody was forced to work from home and everybody had to become a remote team, did he see a downfall in productivity? Do you see a downturn in efficiency? Were people taking longer to get things done? Were decisions taking forever to be made? Was collaboration being sacrificed? And Chris was really open and honest about this, and he said, initially we had a little bit of a slowdown, but things are at full speed, just like before, even though we are all working remotely and he has A pretty large team. Think around 100 employees. Now, the interesting thing is, is that the slowdown was not because they were working remotely, the slowdown just purely because, hey, everybody was going through a pandemic. There was a lot of stress and anxiety just in general. So as a company, even my company, as a remote company, I felt that we have to accommodate, that we got to make sure that employees feel supported. They feel like, hey, if you need to take some extra time off or take care of a few things for your family or your friends, we can understand. And I realized. So I really experienced pretty much the same thing he experienced. The other thing I realized a lot of the tools that companies, like we say, use at an office are applicable to remote teams. We use them anyway. So the learning curve is actually quite low. And they plan on staying remote for as long as needed until everything is totally under control, where there is really no risk and, you know, hopefully there's a vaccine. I then started to ask my friends that are in total different industries. They're in real estate, they're in marketing, they're in sales. Just my buddies I played basketball with who had to work from home because of the pandemic. And I asked them, hey, have things slowed down in your business? Are you feeling less connected? Are you feeling like you're not as efficient as you were before in the office? And flat out. And honestly, they all said no. In fact, things, if anything, have become more streamlined and less distractions and I'm able to get more done. Especially some of my friends that are introverted were like, I don't feel obliged to have to socialize and mingle and chit chat with people in the office because I'm working remotely, and therefore I have a little bit more time on my hands to get things done. I was like, wow, I never even thought about that. I then continued my research and found out that Basecamp, a company I really look up to, love what they do over there. Jason Fried and David Hahnemeier Hansen do a great job with the products and the branding they do. They have a distributed team around the world, but they had a physical office and they had a hybrid model where people can come in for meetings and talk and things like that. I found out that they actually were up for renewal for the release, and they decided not to renew and that they're going to remain totally officeless for the long term. The experience of the pandemic, the experience of having to work from home and drop the hybrid model, made them realize as much as they love having an office, the idea of that and, you know, the nice furnishings and all that kind of stuff, it's just not worth the extra expense. It's just not worth the worries of a lease. It also helped that the landlord was increasing the rent, probably one of the worst times to do that. So what I'm learning is, is that remote work is different. It has its challenges, but so does office work. They both have pluses and negatives. But the thing I learned is that efficiency is neither of those. Okay? You can be efficient in a remote team and you can be inefficient in an office, and vice versa. It's all about the culture, the standards, the values, and the practices you share in your company. Holding people accountable, having clear KPIs, celebrating wins, and motivating your team to be at their best. These are principles we all need to embody and practice in our businesses, regardless if we're in a physical space or we're working all from home. Personally, I started to realize the grass isn't any greener. My lawn is just as nice.

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To wrap up today's lesson, the efficiency of your company is up to you. Regardless of if you're working remotely or in an office, there are things that are going to help you with efficiency in the office. There are going to be things that are going to hurt your efficiency. Same thing goes with remote work. You need to make sure that your team maximizes the things that help minimize the things that hurt. The one thing I want to say though, because I've hired a lot of people along the way in the last few years, and as a remote company, it's important to understand the experience that new employee has to remote work. If you have somebody who's done it before, understands the culture of remote work, understands how to self manage themselves, how to be efficient, how, how to hit their targets. That's a huge advantage versus somebody who's coming in new. It's their first time. They've worked in an office all the time. There's a learning curve. It doesn't mean you don't hire them. It just means it's something to consider and understand. It's going to take them a little bit longer than somebody who has worked remotely to ramp up. I mention this because most people have worked in an office at some point in their life, so that's the standard. But of course, the opposite could be true too. So just be mindful of it when you're hiring. Thank you so much for listening. Today's episode's not over though, because it's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Mr. Five Stars. Mr. Five Stars, also known as Mandela78 says a very educational podcast. Keep it up, Omar Five Stars. Thank you, Mandala78, for that amazing review. Your mission is to email me over at Omar at 100 MBA net so I can hook you up with the free ride to easy course, our free ride that we give out on free Ride Fridays. So go ahead and do that right now so you can claim your free ride, a $500 value over at EasyCourse Co if you want to win as well, just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Just listen on a Friday to see if you want. It's that simple. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the things I've learned about myself and about building a business is that it's easy to point to other businesses, other companies and say, you know what? They're lucky because they have this. They're lucky because they have investors. They're lucky because they have a board. They're lucky because their product is, you know, just a natural viral product. It's not the resources, it's the resourcefulness. You need to be resourceful as a company. You need to find ways to win and not point fingers and say, oh, I don't have that. That's what makes a great leader. That's what makes a great entrepreneur. The best business owners I know that can make lemonade and any kind of lemons. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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