8 Things I Did to Scale My 7-Figure Remote Team | Ep 75

So my first remote hire just celebrated five years with the company. And I was on a call with one of our clients and he was asking, well, how do you scale a remote team? And at this point We're a seven figure company and we have over 10 remote employees all over the world. We're obviously based in the US we have US team members and people all over the world. So in this video I've broken it down into eight different things that we do to make sure that one, everyone's on board with the mission, moving it forward. Like last year, we grew about 60% year over year. With remote team, fully remote, we don't have an office or anything like that. So these are the eight things that we've done to achieve that result and to build a great culture that people are staying here for a long time. Four or five, 10, six years, something like that. All right, so the first thing is we have a daily huddle. So every day at 9:30am Eastern Standard Time we have a team huddle. And the way that our company is structured is that people were in teams and pods. So people, people that are front end and back end teams, they're a team and they get put together and they get on a call every day. And then the leadership team also joins those calls throughout the week. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday we have these meetings and 9:30 to 10 we're getting on the calls talking about specific things that's going on with their clients and everyone's working on them in their specific teams or pods type of thing. So that's the first thing. If you are having a remote team, have a daily touch point that would be just a morning huddle to get everyone on the same page on what we're working on today issues, opening up the line of communication that you would normally have if you were in a business that you would be in front of every single person. The second thing that we do is weekly team meetings. So inside of these pods each, these are internal teams that meet on a daily basis, but we have bigger teams. Like for example, we have a consultants team and then we have a marketing coordinators team, we have a developer team, we have a marketing team. So we have all these different teams that are doing things. And so we have a weekly meeting with all of these individual teams where we go through and talk about wins, things that we've learned, new things coming down the pipeline, things that are changing inside of SOPs or processes and then just talking about issues that we're having that we can support each other. One Cool way that we've been implementing feedback is all of our calls are recorded. We use a tool called Fathom. And when we record the calls, then we can take all the calls and use Fathom and just say, hey, what are the common issues last week on all these calls? And then it will give us the common issues that were coming up and then we can talk about them on these sales meetings. So it's a lot of. It's not just like thinking about what is the issues right now, it's taking the actual issues that people are running into on calls and then turning them into lessons every single week. So having a weekly team meeting is great. The third thing we do is a weekly one to one. This one is very, very important if you have a remote team because you need to get one to one with people on your team, you need to build that relationship and make sure that you're supporting them. Because it's not like you can just pop into their office and say, hey, can you help me with this? Or I'm stuck here. You need to have that one to one dialogue that opens up that communication channel. And it's not just like, you know, hey, can we meet? It's every week we're getting on a call and we're talking about these things. So on our one to ones, the things that we go through is they have three quarterly goals. Within a quarter, there's three big goals that they're working on. And then we track in the status of those goals and we work together on them going into the next quarter. This is kind of like what you would hear in eos or traction of having these goals. This is important. Even if they're some just virtual assistant or executive assistant or someone that you just have on your team, it's important to have this because it gets, it builds the trust and the relationship that in a professionalism that like, hey, I'm going to help you reach these goals. And also these are things that we're working towards. So we get on the call, we talk about goals, we talk about what's changing in the company. This is going to, this is a common theme across all eight of these, is that as an owner you need to have clear and open communication. No one should be blindsided. And literally I'll get on call after call, after call and say the same thing to people because it's so important that they hear it from me directly on a one to one conversation so they can ask questions and talk through it. But it's like, hey, we're hiring this person, here's what they're going to do, here's how the role is going to look. So inside of our one to ones we'll have a section about new employees coming on board and what they're going to be doing and their roles and their names and how they're going to fit into this whole thing. We also implemented one to ones with team members. So we obviously have these one on ones with the manager and then the employee. But we've encouraged the team on a quarterly basis to just set up a one to one with someone else random in the company. Go to Slack and just pick someone and say hey, let's set up a one to one so they have that on their, on their one to one checklist. A really big one though is this, this question here is what are you having issues with or things that need to be fixed as general issues like is this software not working? Are you not able to do this? Are you having an issue with this person or this team or this process is not working. It gives them the floor to say, hey, this is what's going on. Here's the issues that we're having. Then we ask for feedback on how I can better support you. So we say is there anything I can do to better support you? Do you need me to do this? Do you need another touch point over here? Do you need me to fix this thing? Do you need this? Do you need that? And then we give them feedback after that. That's basically our one to one structure. It's so important because when you are remote you don't have that constant weekly communication unless you actually structure it into your weekly routine. And we have them already set every single week. These one to ones. Next number four. This one's very important for us in flash, we're a seven figure company and we have no meetings on Fridays. This is something that's set in stone in our company since I started the company was that we're not going to have meetings on Fridays. It's not just so like hey, we can cut out and you know, start the weekends early. Great. If we get to that point, great. What really is, is that we're going into the weekend and more importantly next week with everything clean. I used to work at companies where on Fridays it'd be up until 5pm just trying to bang stuff out, do meetings, get cleaned up and then go into the weekend and I feel rushed and overwhelmed and then I start the week behind and it's just this constant behind, behind, behind. So on Fridays we Don't have any meetings, no internal meetings, no external meetings. We try not to even get on calls together. It's just deep work time where we can focus and clean up our boards, get everything ready to go for the next week. So Fridays we have no meetings. Number five, we have a quarterly get together. Once we started to get around seven or eight employees. Before I used to run, I used to run local businesses that, you know, they had 15 team members and it was so easy to build the culture because it was just, you know, daily we have fun and weekly just do fun things. Well, with a remote team we have to make sure that we build in all these things. There's a common theme here of building these into the schedule so that they happen. So we do these quarterly meetings. Usually it's 30 minutes to an hour. We get on, we play some games, we interview people ahead of time and have, you know, two truths and a lie type things or fun things that bring people together to work on something other than work. We're not supposed to talk about work on there. For Christmas time we'll have like an ugly sweater party. And for spring, you know, we'll talk about summer activities that people like to do and then guest them or share pictures and just try to have as much fun as we can on these calls so that we can do things other than just work and build relationships like that. Number six, another thing that we implemented was this water cooler chats. Inside of our slack, we have a slack channel for water cooler. And every week on Thursday we have a question that's put into the water cooler chats that would be like, what's the best place that you visited in the last 12 months? What's your favorite show that you've been watched, binge watched lately? What's a movie that you could watch on repeat? If you were a wrestler and you had a theme song to come out to, what would it be? All these different things that's funny that everyone can share and laugh and comment on and talk about. And it allows people to express themselves, people to get to know each other and laugh about different things. Starts random conversations that people are like, oh wow, I didn't know that you like that or you like this or oh wow, in this area you do this kind of thing. What is this? What is that? It's a very fun way to build this relationship that is not just work related but it's built into our systems. Every Thursday we have the Slack message in water cooler chats. Number seven, we have an all team Slack channel. Where we put wins or other really good things into this all team Slack channel. This is everyone in the entire company where we share reviews, we share clips of customers saying good things about us, we praise other people, say hey, shout out to X, Y and Z. They came through clutch for this, this, this and this. And it's a place where we can all communicate in all team forum on a daily basis where we can share things. And it might go a couple days, maybe even a week where there's nothing in there, but, but we usually add things in there. One of the things we do in all team chat is we have a monthly Slack message from me, the owner that goes into this Slack and we talk about new people that came on board, anniversaries, birthdays, resources, wins for the month, what's coming up the next month. And it's just like a positive message from me that's going out to all team on a monthly basis. That way everyone knows what's going on and there's great communication and, and another touch point from the owner talking about the vision and where we're going as a company. And the last thing is we have Asana, which is a project management tool. So most of the times when you're running remote offices, and we've had Asana for literally five or six years now, when you run remote offices, it's hard to know what people are doing and you can't see work getting completed or stuff actually happening, which is why you would need a project management software. And that's why we use Asana. There's other tools like Trello, Monday.com and some other ones, but we like Asana. In Asana, you can set up different projects and then you can see, just by a click of a button, you can see what's past you, what's happening. You can comment on tasks, you can communicate on tasks that are happening and so on. Here you can set goals like this. You know, every single week I want to do 10x, y and z or 50 of x, y and Z. And when it's completed, hit this button and then it's going to complete and then you'll know that things are happening and you can have a dashboard. The reason Asana is so good is because we get, you know, a bunch of clients coming in. We have to have processes in order to track things and Asana allows us to do that in one place. Everyone can see all the projects that people are working on and communicate and comment. What it's not good for is communication externally, which is why we would use Slack. Asana is good for having a task like okay, we need to set up this Google Ads account, then you can comment on that specific task. But if there's hey, I need access to X, Y and Z, it's easier to do it in Slack where you can communicate more broadly and not specifically inside of tax tasks. That's why we would have Slack externally more of a general communication platform. So Those are the eight ways that we've been able to scale 7 figure company over 10 remote team members and I don't see us slowing down from a remote perspective. I think that we have, we're onto something here. Everyone loves working here. We have, you know, years and years and years people staying with us and this is exactly how we do it. So hope this video was helpful for you. If you'd like content like this, hit like and subscribe. Put a comment down below if you have a question and we'll see you in the next video.