403 – How To Build An Effective Remote Workforce

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A glimpse of the team

In this episode:

01:31 – A peek inside SuperFastBusiness
01:45 – Should you have full or part-time contractors?
08:26 – The structure of the SEO division
10:12 – Communication setup and tools
14:12 – The hiring process
16:00 – Thinking about hiring in the Philippines?
19:06 – Team management challenges and solutions
20:14 – Start with THIS to build your team
21:39 – When you have natural attrition
23:25 – Salary talk
24:31 – Some management tips
31:05 – How to be a great employer
34:15 – 3 T’s for ineffective employees
35:01 – Employment as apprenticeship

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Tweetables:

Train people to think. [Click To Tweet]
Let people appreciate their jobs. [Click To Tweet]
3 T’s for ineffective employees. [Click To Tweet]
Autonomy over micro-management. [Click To Tweet]

Transcription:

James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This episode is going into how to build an effective remote workforce. I have a lot of conversations both in SuperFastBusiness and in SilverCircle, my two membership communities where I help business owners with their business. And one of the things that inevitably comes up as you scale from a solopreneur, where it’s just you, into a real business is to build a team.

I know there’s a lot of talk about personal branding and being a solopreneur, but really, let’s face it. The goal should be to build a business, and that business should to some extent, work without you. You only have 180 hours per month, or a few hundred hours per month to dedicate to your business. So at some point, if you want to grow, you’re going to need a team.

Now that team might be in-house or it might be from contractors. So I’m going to give you a little bit of an overview of how SuperFastBusiness is structured, and I’m going to give you some of the tips that I’ve picked up along that way that might help you in the process of building your team. I encourage comments regarding this particular episode, both at the blog, SuperFastBusiness.com, and also inside SuperFastBusiness membership.

An overview of SuperFastBusiness

So SuperFastBusiness has currently around 43 full-time Filipino members and about four part-time contractors. Let’s start with the part-time contractors first, and I’ll explain why I chose to go outside for that.

Part-time contractors

One of the contractors is a Facebook advertising expert. I have very, very minor needs for Facebook advertising, so I get the help from a guy called Lenny. He’s really good. He helps me set up some remarketing campaigns when I run a live event and some specific campaigns from time to time for me and some of my family members. So it’s the kind of skill set that we don’t have in-house, but I want to find a specialist.

Something like Facebook or Google Adwords, you really should not be trying to do it yourself because unless you are a worldwide expert, you are going to pay too much, and you’re going to set things up incorrectly, you might even have your account shut down. So I do suggest you get a specialist.

For technology, I do have a contractor, Dave Wooding, who is a real genius at APIs and integrating anything. He’s the guy who sets up my forums and makes things talk to each other. Again, it’s not a skill set that we specialize in serving others with so it’s not something we have in-house. So when it comes to setting up an integration or updating forum software, etc., it’s easier to have Dave look after that, who has a team, and standard operating procedures, and I’ve worked with for almost my entire time online. You have to have someone you can trust when it comes to the high-level tech stuff, and Dave is that guy.

I also have help from a local guy, part-time, who helps me forum moderate. He compiles interesting topics for me to send in each week’s news update. He keeps an eye on things and makes sure that no one is out of control, or will give me a nudge if I need to be more participative or I need to put my attention somewhere. So it’s good to have a second pair of eyes looking after your community when you have such an invested part of your business, and that’s what Ken does. Ken also helps me with my live events each year. He’s a pretty tough guy so he’s there doing bouncing at the door and checking that people have the right to access the facility. He’s a good guy and great to have on board. He also facilitates local meetups. So I can’t have someone in the Philippines do that.

The fourth function is high-level design. I’ve always had help from high-level designers like James Dyson and lately, Greg Merrilees. These people are design gods, they really know their design. It’s something that is harder to hire for. We definitely have designers in our business, but I would say that they specialize more in their WordPress designs and infographics and illustrating cartoons. Really high-end designers are going to take a full brief, and they’re going to understand your entire brand. They’ll be able to work on any piece of collateral, whether it’s a T-shirt, a business card, or a merchandise gift or a PSD file for you to convert into a website.

So a lot of our SuperFastBusiness stuff is done in-house. Our own website’s designed in-house. But specialist stuff like SilverCircle, I’ll have a hand designing that. Guys like Greg are more than happy to do it because he’s a very happy customer of Full-time contractors

So back to the team, there’s 43 people in the Philippines. The team structure, some of the things I’ve learned; that it’s good to keep your groups down to a maximum of three people. We call them pods. So we have two members who are actively working in the team and one team lead who reports to a manager. The team lead is also able to do any of the roles in that little pod. The good thing about small groups of three is that if someone doesn’t show up or they’re not available for any period of time beyond a day or two, you really start to notice it.

It’s harder to build inefficiencies into small groups like that because everyone’s doing their share and they know what needs to be done. But also they’re cross-trained, and everyone in that pod can do every role. So that two people doing the work can interchange, the manager or the team lead can interchange with those people in the pod, and the people in the pod can take on team leadership, and that’s how you find your leaders over time.

The manager who handles the department will report directly to me, so there’s a department manager for each part of our group. So as it stands at the moment, we have a manager who’s in charge of bookkeeping, finance, payroll and HR stuff. There’s a manager who looks after the affiliate division, who updates reviews, does shopping cart, updates, and integrations, and membership add-ons and PDFs and looks after the membership side of things.

There’s a website development business division manager who looks after our team of coders. There’s a support manager who looks after all of our tickets in support @ jamesschramko.com. There’s an SEO manager who looks after our biggest team, and I’ll break that down into smaller groups in a minute. There’s also a webmaster full-time just for SuperFastBusiness.com who looks after the website, all of the tagging, the analytics, the site speed optimization, the new themes that we put out for SuperFastBusiness are always being developed in advance. And a publishing manager who looks after the content, who actually listens to my podcast, curates information into bite-sized pieces for me to come along and make a show like this, and then we’ll manage it to be illustrated and published to our website.

There’s also a VA who is in charge of our content team who will actually coordinate our designer and our podcast editor, video editor. We have a little team of publishers I guess, in that side of the business. The VA will follow me up if I specifically ask her to chase me down for things like event follow-ups, etc. She’ll remind me to do things. She’s got full permission to be an extension of me with any of the other managers. She plays a role kind of like Switzerland where she has to be quite neutral and people understand when she’s asking for things that they’re pretty much dealing with me by default.

Our SEO division

So let’s break down the SEO division because it’s the largest one and just have a look at how that’s structured. There’s a research and development team in there because they always have to know what’s happening with links, and algorithms and updates because Google don’t publish their algorithm. We have to always understand what the impacts and implications are for search engine optimization.

There’s a content team of writers and editors who will research, write and edit fantastic content especially in the written form, which says a lot of with search engine optimization. But there’s also videos and there’s also infographics. So we have illustrators and video editors.

We have the content syndication team. Now in the old days, this team would have been called link builders. But these are people who specialize in knowing where to put the content, and how to structure the anchor text, how to write unique descriptions, which platforms require which layout, etc., and getting the optimized syndication of that good content.

And then there’s team leaders within there who are reporting back to the manager. That team has a couple of dozen people. So they almost take up half of our business, but it is also a substantial revenue generator, and it’s one of the longest term services we’ve had, and it’s highly successful.

You don’t often hear me talking about the SEO division, but it’s such a stable solid business. We pretty much provide search engine optimization services for a lot of agencies who are then selling it to end customers. So we’re a wholesale vendor in the marketplace. For that reason, we don’t really have salespeople. We can manage everything via our support tickets.

Communication setup

Let’s talk about how our team is setup for communication and what sort of tools were used because I get asked this one a lot. Of course, we’re using Slack in-house to manage our team. We split it up into some various channels and divisions. We’ve got a fun room where people can communicate and post fun links to things, memes and videos and stuff. It’s kind of like the water cooler discussion. There’s a support group where we can handle tickets between the support managers. If a customer asks for something that we haven’t seen before, that’s where it can be posted and then whoever knows the answer can answer it, and then it can be updated in our customer facing ticket system.

There’s a manager’s group of course, where we can coordinate weekly manager’s meetings, talk about things that implicate the entire business. So if I’m going to change something on the website, I’ll let everyone one the manager’s group know so that they can brief their teams.

There is a publishing group where we’ve got all of the updates. When we put a podcast like this out, I would post it into Dropbox and then let this publishing group know, and they’ll set about editing, adding an intro and outro, formatting it for iTunes, loading it to Amazon S3, putting it into our blog post, having it transcribed, having it illustrated, proofing it, editing it, and then publishing it. This will happen there.

There’s an approval group where they’ll post something before it goes live, and then I have a right to edit the information prior to it being published. If it gets published and I want to change something, I’ll still would just post it in the approval group. So you can have things going in there on a delay system. Kind of like a radio delay where they try and beep out swear words. This one is just to catch anything we don’t think is appropriate to publish or that we want to modify. And if there’s no amendments, it just gets published. This way, it’s vital because we’re removing the bottleneck of the business, which was me. Now it’s going to go out there regardless if I reply or not. It’s just that I do have the option to change it. So I highly recommend this system for anyone who is finding themselves the bottleneck in their own publishing situation.

Individual messages of course make up 70-something percent of our Slack communications. This is how younger generations and especially the Filipino team communicate via messages. Now using Slack means we don’t have to use Skype. It also means that we don’t have to use email to run the business. Slack is very powerful. I highly recommend it. We have done a review on it.

We also use Google docs or Google business apps for our business. That’s where we put all of the documents. So if I’m going to record a podcast like this, my publishing manager will actually put a document in Google docs and send me or share it with me and then tell me in Slack that it’s there. I’ll click on it and it will all be there. You can share documents in between people within the company, both individually and as groups. They also run spreadsheets where they can track search engine optimization jobs and they can also track website customers, all from Google docs. We no longer use anything like Podio, BaseCamp, Trello, TeamWork, any number of the other dozens of systems that people talk about. We don’t use any of those anymore. Just Google docs and Slack manage our business.

In terms of customer facing, we use Zendesk. There are more personalized solutions out there like HelpScout; however, what we found is with the type of business we have where customers have multiple tickets open at once because they’re wholesale buyers, we need something with an online portal. So Zendesk has been very good for that, and that’s our customer facing support desk. That is easy for our customers to use and it’s easy for us to manage virtually and from our device.

Hiring process

In terms of hiring, this is a question I get asked a lot. Where do we get people from? I’m sorry to say we don’t use job boards. We’ve never used Elance, or oDesk, or Craigslist or Jobstreet. What we have done is use word of mouth. I was very fortunate in the very beginning to have a friend who had a team in the Philippines. He actually arranged for two people to hop on Skype and for me to talk to them and I could pick one. From that first person, we built out the rest of the team via word of mouth. We simply brief down the type of person we’re looking for, and we put up a referral bonus, which is U.S.$100 payable after 30 days of someone starting with us.

We also hire based on attitude and then we’ll train them for the skill. We don’t necessarily need people who can already do the job that we need. We’d rather have someone with a good attitude and train them for a lot of the roles that we have. Now there are some exceptions. We’ve hired very good website developers from universities who had website development teachers. We’ve hired very good article writers from English teaching schools. We have hired fantastic graphic designers who already had the skill. You can’t really teach someone how to do that as easily. So we do hire skills from time to time. But in the beginning, we hire attitude and trained.

We are happy to invest time and energy into training people, which means that we have more loyalty. We can usually start people on a slightly low rate, and we can grow them into the role, and they stick around. The main requirements we have for hiring are that our employee will have a reliable internet connection, decent hardware and good English. If you can have those things, then there’s a lot that can be done.

Why hire from the Philippines?

Now there’s a few Western rules that you might want to reverse if you’re thinking about hiring in the Philippines. I’ll just go through some of the subtle differences.

For one thing, Filipinos are very family-oriented. They’re a very religious-based culture, very strong Catholic. There are also some Muslim sectors as well. But very traditional Catholic upbringing in many households, especially more up North. They’ve got a very strong pride. Some of that Asian face that we hear about. They’ll also sincerely recommend someone who’s good for the role. They’ll genuinely care if that person is good or not because of their pride. So they’re not just doing it for the hundred dollars. They’re doing it because they want someone to have an opportunity, and they want someone to go well.

So what we found, it’s actually been quite good to hire husband-and-wife teams, and sisters, and relatives, and brothers, and fathers, and uncles. The family network is very strong. They’re such a family-oriented culture. Many of them live in the same household. What you’ll find is if you have husband-and-wife team whose prime job is working for your business, they’re going to be so loyal. It’s also easier to communicate between them.

And here’s why the Filipinos are great choice for Australian employers, they really can do just about anything that can be done with a computer. You’ll find that big companies like Telstra in Australia are using Philippine workforce teams. So it really is quite accepted by your customers. The labor rate is substantially lower. You’re going to find that you’ll be able to hire people in the Philippines anywhere from $400 US per month up to around a thousand dollars US per month, depending if they’re more entry level or more managerial. These are just sort of guidelines. They’re going to have great English, it’s about the fourth or fifth most English-speaking country in the world. There’s a lot of English speaking Filipinos, far more than Australians, just quietly, and not far behind the U.K. itself.

They have incredible training from U.S.-based companies, especially if you manage to find someone who’s worked in call centers for American corporations. Some of our team members used to work for companies like Dell or AOL, so they’ve had good training.

And also, if you happen to be based in Australia, the time zone is phenomenally good. They’re only two to three hours apart, if you’re in the eastern side of Australia, and they’re on about the same time zone if you’re in the western part of Australia.

And overall, they’re a very good fit culturally, compared to some of the other choices you could make, mostly because they have such good English, and they have American culture at home, versus some of the more Eastern cultures. It can be more difficult hiring in other regions, where you have very different cultures and very different style and very different accents, etc.

So there are still some challenges that people have with Filipinos, and we should talk about a couple of those. One is, if you happen to be in North America, and let’s face it, it’s a big population there, so there’s a good chance you are. The time zone can be difficult, because you are working alternate time zones. You mightn’t have the chance to really bond or fortify the relationship because you’re not having a lot of discussion time, so I would say take steps to find out more about your Filipino. Find out where they’re from, find out a few words in their local language, whether that’s Tagalog or Visaya. You’ll want to eventually meet your team if you have a substantial team size as well. So get past the cultural differences.

I’ve also found that some people in Northern America don’t travel that much compared to other cultures. So it’s important to think about educating yourself, do some looking up of the culture, and go onto Google, have a look at Wikipedia, find out more about that region and the climate and the challenges, etc. of day-to-day life. But there’s nothing that substitutes visiting your team.

Nurture an offline relationship

So if you really want to build your online team, start an offline relationship with them. Any online business really can leverage themselves if you’re doing some stuff offline. It really promotes a stronger culture and tribe if you actually meet your people. I’ve started initially meeting my team, once I had a team of around 6 people, I started visiting. It’s especially good when you have 12 or more. I used to visit up to 4 times a year. I think I’ve been to the Philippines around 13 or 14 times at the time of recording this. And I now go around 3 times a year.

But when I meet with my managers and when I look them in the eye and talk to them about where the business is going, I know these people very well and it really helps the relationship, and I think that it’s far more effective, we’ve got that sustained relationship over 5 ½ years now, so they understand me and I understand them.

We also have an annual get together with the entire team, like a Christmas party, so we jam everyone into a restaurant, we share meals together, we intermingle different people. In our case, everyone works from home wherever they happen to be, which is spread all around the Philippines. So they often haven’t met each other, if they’ve only started in the last year, and it’s good for people to meet each other and to communicate and eyeball someone face to face.

Natural attrition

Now you might have some natural attrition. We had around about 60 people at our peak, and over 5 ½ years we’ve come down to around 43 people. And sometimes, our team member will go overseas. It’s not an uncommon path for a Filipino to study, go to college, get a degree, have a job, and then look for overseas work.

So some of my team members went to Australia, Canada and the U.S., and some of them have visited the U.K. as well. It’s pretty common because they have got family in other countries, and the opportunities to earn a big income are there, and the fact is that if they’ve got family roots in other countries, you know, they might want to travel and try a different lifestyle. So don’t be surprised if some move on. And that’s OK, you should celebrate that and look to them having an exciting change to their career. But put in some practices that protect your business from that as well.

Over time, your business model might change, and some people might not be a good fit. So every now and then, we’ve had a role that was no longer required. And in just about every case where that’s happened, I’ve actually found a new employer for my team member. I’ve gone out and found someone who needs the type of person that I have, I’ve arranged for them to meet, and then they’ve taken on the employee, so that the employee has literally changed bosses, and it’s worked out really well. Predominantly they go to SilverCircle students of mine who are growing their business and want someone who’s very experienced and steady. So that’s what I do, if someone’s not a perfect fit anymore, is I’ll find them a new place to work, and I can feel good about that.

In terms of salary, I gave you some benchmarks for starting and managerial levels. But the pay will generally be paid via PayPal, and I’ll do that twice per month. Salary would be paid in pesos. I don’t think it’s fair to make your employee a currency trader. Because if you’re in a Western society, you probably have more tolerance for fluctuations. They could end up 30% worse through no fault of their own, over time, if a currency takes a slide. By converting it into their currency of pesos, it makes it easier for them to get the money, also there’s less fees, and if you pay several days before they need the money, then it’s going to allow time to go into their bank account so they can withdraw.

And it’s not uncommon for employees or contractors to be running a fairly fine line with their finances. If you’ve ever had a job, you’ll know this. We tend to spend almost exactly what we earn, plus a little bit. So never ever, ever mess people around with their pay. You must pay it on time, every time.

Useful team management tips

I’ll give you a few team management tips that we’ve developed. One is the Noah principle. This really comes from Noah’s Ark, where there’s 2 of every type of animal. And it’s just making sure that you have 2 people in your business who can do every role. So if someone can’t make it, or they’re sick, or they leave, or there’s some other problem, then you have protection. This is a redundancy system.

So I actually ask my team members when we’re on a call, who’s your Noah? And they’ll tell me who else knows their role. The good thing about this is that people can actually take annual leave, they can rejuvenate, because they know someone’s got them covered. Also, they can progress and be promoted into a newer role because their role’s covered.

I’ve been in this situation before, and perhaps you have, where you’re the only person in your role, and this is called a black box. It works really well for not being sacked, in most cases, but it also holds you back. You can’t be promoted because you’re the only person who can do the job. And if you go away, then your workload’s 10 times more when you come back, because no one did it when you’re away. So I think the Noah principle’s a good idea for everybody.

We also encourage autonomy versus micro-management. I really don’t want to be micro-managing people, because as we grow our team, I don’t want my job to now become an adult day care babysitter. I just want the team to do their thing, I want them to be autonomous. So quite often, I’ll hear someone say, Oh, but you can’t have team members who can think for themselves. Well, you have to train people to think. And you do that by creating a risk-free environment. Allow them to be creative. Learn things on their own. Let them make a few mistakes. Tell them it’s OK and that you expect it, and that unless they steal from you, they’re not going to lose their job, because they tried something that they thought would be better for the business.

The other thing is to build out standard operating procedures. These should be created by the team where possible. I’ve heard business owners saying, “Oh, I’m still making the standard operating procedures so I can hand off the task.” Well, do it with someone. At least have them document it, if you can’t have them figure them out. And standard operating procedures are the structure that allow you to step back from the business. So our first standing order is, if something’s going to be done more than once, we have a standard operating procedure.

We also have some accountability systems to track progress. For example, we have end of day report, where each team member sends that to their manager, and I only see the managers’ ones. They just put it in Slack and they tell me what they did today. And they also give me a snapshot of the numbers from my VA, she compiles the numbers that tell me if the business is working.

And it’s not the usual numbers, probably not what you think. I’m not asking them to send me the daily sales. I’m not really interested in that so much as, how many people visited our site in the last 30 days, how many opt-ins have we had in the last 30 days to our free training, and how many recurring subscription customers do we have in our various programs, whether that’s search engine optimization, SuperFastBusiness forum, or SilverCircle, because these numbers tell me if the business is in good shape.

Also, remember to spread lots of appreciation. Rather than just incentivizing people with money, appreciate people. Let them know they’ve done a good job. Take some time out to look at what they’re doing and give them some praise when they’ve done a good job, because these people are working hard for you and you need to let them know they’ve done a good job.

You need to reward good behavior with a response that is something they’ll feel good about. Because it’s like a smile, you know, they’re free to give out, and they’re worth so much. If a stranger smiles at you and you smile back, that’s an exchange that was valuable without any financial transaction. You can do that with your team.

Also, we do get sales and profit reports, but I get them every 10 days. I get them on the 10th, the 20th and then at the end of the month. And our person in charge of that gets all the information from the managers and from our shopping cart systems and our accounting system and compiles them and I compare it to the previous month. So the 10th of this month versus the 10th of last month; The 20th of this month versus 20th of last month. And I can get a gauge on if we’re moving forward or staying the same.

Also, each person in the business gives a traffic light report, which is just capacity according to color. If they’re maxed out, they’ll say “red.” If they’re fairly busy but not out of control, they’ll put “orange,” and if they’ve got plenty of capacity, and they can handle more work, they put “green.” So I can glance at my end of day report from each manager and get a sense of where we’re under-capacity or over-capacity in the business. This single change has revolutionized a lot of my SilverCircle members in terms of knowing where their business is at.

We also have a daily meeting on GoToWebinar for all team members, and that’s run by the managers. And the managers also let people in the team run the meetings so that we can trial out new leaders. And I run a weekly meeting with my managers. I have 10 minutes per manager on a Wednesday, it takes about an hour, and I have a 10-minute meeting with all the managers on Thursday. It literally takes 10 minutes. So the business can be run via some Slack interaction and some GoToWebinar time. We use GoToMeeting for the weekly managers’ meeting.

In terms of corporate nonsense and bureaucracy, we really don’t like that stuff. Having actually worked in a corporate company, I despise a lot of that stuff. The only people who put those silly systems in place are generally people who are power and control freaks, or paranoid, or they’ve never worked in a corporate and they think that they have to corporatize their small business. But it’s such a huge mistake. Nobody likes that nonsense.

Take a minimalistic approach. See what reports and meetings you can cut out of all the stuff you’ve asked people to do, because they should be spending time doing what they do instead of spending time compiling pretty reports and attending meetings. We have very few meetings in our business, because we have such tight systems.

How to be a great boss

Here’s a few other tips with being a great employer. Never mess with people’s pay. You must pay early or on time, every time, no excuses. Allow for annual leave for people to rejuvenate. Our annual leave expires each year. I don’t want people building up 3 years’ worth of annual leave, that means they’ve never taken it. People need to be off work. They need to recharge, and we need them to be off work to be able to have someone else have a chance to do their role, to see if we can have different eyes on it, to uncover bad practices if they’re there, and to let people appreciate the job. And sometimes, believe it or not, they actually miss us and they want to come back.

We follow the Philippines’ holidays, so if there’s Philippines’ holidays, and there’s quite a lot of them and many of them are ad hoc, and you can follow a government website to see what they are, then those Philippine holidays are what we observe. I don’t want people in my team working on a Philippine family holiday when they’re such a family-centric community. It’s not fair for them to be working for me when their whole family’s celebrating a special festivity, etc. I want them to be part of that, and to not resent their work.

There are people who volunteer for overtime or to work on those days, but they’re totally on a voluntary basis, and the same goes for weekends. This would generally be people who want a little bit of extra pay and they’re happy to do it. So you will find a nice balance.

Look for people in the job who need recognition, who are emerging talent, but you have to go and find. Ask your managers who’s doing a good job that we haven’t been letting them know enough? Go and look for them. Because I’ve been in that role before, where I was a talented employee but no one tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Great job.” And I actually left a few companies where I didn’t feel appreciated, and I went on to either their competitors or a different industry and dominated. So they really missed out.

In fact, Vodafone was one notable example. That was the company where I wanted to sell, and they wouldn’t let me sell because I was the only one who knew my job, and I left there and went to BMW, and within a year I was the number one salesperson in the country. So they missed that potential because they weren’t giving recognition and they weren’t looking out for the next batch of talented people.

You can also rotate people. Switch roles. If people get bored, or they’re not feeling challenged, switch them around a bit. We have a standing policy in our business, if someone’s not enjoying the work they do, tell us, find out what they’d like to do, and let’s see if we can create a role for them or move them into a different area. We’ve had article writers turn into illustrators. We’ve had a transcriptionist turn into a podcast editor. We have an amazing variety of people moving around the business. We’ve switched managers from one team to another, just to get a fresh set of eyes on it, and to re-overhaul our systems. And we’ve matched the job to the people.

So as you grow and scale, these are options you have at your disposal. There’s really 3 T’s that you can do if someone’s not working out. You can transfer them to a different department, you can train them into the role to do it better, or you can terminate. And that really is a last resort. In our case, we’ll usually find a new employer for that person, unless they’ve done something that’s dishonest, which is extremely rare, but it has happened very occasionally.

Only hire if you’ve got the ability to sustain that hire. It really is quite upsetting to me when people go and hire several people, and then stop paying them, and they can’t sustain them anymore. They’ve really mucked this person around. I don’t think that’s fair. So be responsible as an employer, and really care about your team members.

Employment as apprenticeship

In terms of entrepreneurial business, your employees if you set things up properly will really treat working with you like a high-level apprenticeship. Because aside from getting paid, the team is learning valuable skills that are in a sense like a high-level apprenticeship. Hundreds of people are paying me to teach them things that my team are learning directly from me on a daily basis. So not only do they learn these things, I pay them as well. And some of them have set up some entrepreneurial things from time to time. And I’m OK with that, because I did that when I had a job as well. But because they work from home, and because they get paid well, and because they’re doing their reports and the business is moving forward, then it works out for everyone.

So I hope this has been valuable for you if you were thinking of building a remote team. If you already have a team and maybe you’re not doing it right, maybe I’ve given you some suggestions. If you’ve got some questions, then this post and podcast will also be put inside SuperFastBusiness membership, and I would love to discuss any of the questions you have around this inside SuperFastBusiness, behind the walls there where our members are sharing best practice, best advertising sources, pay rates, what you can expect from someone in terms of deliverables, all of that information I’m happy to talk to you about inside SuperFastBusiness.

And thank you so much for listening. If you liked this podcast, please share it, give it an iTunes rating, and I appreciate you very much for listening.

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