In this conversation with Yaro Starak, we discuss the benefits of having remote teams and why many businesses are so reluctant to embrace the flexibility of working remotely outside of an office.
There are probably many factors involved in why companies are dragging their feet. Many business owners don’t want to give up control. Many are worried that their company culture will suffer.
But over the past 20 years, Yaro has proven that it IS possible to run a business remotely without losing any productivity. In fact, the way Yaro Starak sees it, he’s probably been even more productive due to the fact his employees have a greater degree of flexibility while working remotely.
nstead of tracking time spent at a desk, Yaro tracks the output of his remote teams. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Even company culture has continued to flourish despite the distance between his employees. With so many options available to remote workers these days, it speaks to the cohesiveness of the company that many of them have turned down offers to work elsewhere.
Remote teams seem to be the way of the digital age. Now, other companies are starting to catch on to what Yaro Starak realized a long time ago.
Pretty soon the morning commute could be a thing of the past.
Timestamps: 01:52 - Why companies want their employees to come back to the office 04:02 - Getting over the need to control people 07:58 - Working remotely & company culture 11:22 - The movement towards remote work 15:10 - Hiring challenges 17:12 - What is InboxDone?
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-------------------- ABOUT PETER BOOLKAH --------------------
Peter Boolkah (AKA The Transition Guy) is the World’s #1 Business Transition Coach whose main passion in life is to work with talented and high performing business owners who are in the process of creating exciting, high growth businesses.
Peter helps you to navigate and transition through the crucial growth pains that all growing businesses experience making it as painless and exciting as possible.
It is important to remember that businesses do not just grow and develo
-------------------- ABOUT PETER BOOLKAH --------------------
Peter Boolkah (AKA The Transition Guy) is the World’s #1 Business Transition Coach whose main passion in life is to work with talented and high performing business owners who are in the process of creating exciting, high growth businesses.
Peter helps you to navigate and transition through the crucial growth pains that all growing businesses experience making it as painless and exciting as possible.
It is important to remember that businesses do not just grow and develop on their own, it is up to us and our teams to make this happen by making every day purposeful.
As businesses grow some parts of the journey will be easier than others and most owners do not have all the answers. Starting a business is one of the most exciting things we get to do and we all have aspirations of achieving great things. In fact Peter is yet to meet someone who started a business with the intention of failing.
Peter’s ultimate life goal is to inspire and empower over 100,000 Entrepreneurs to create long term thriving businesses resulting in the creation of 1,000,000 jobs.
So if you are scaling up your business, you’re in a bu...
(Upbeat intro music)- Hi, Peter Boolkah here and welcome to today's edition of The Transition Guy. Now joining me in the studio today is Yaro Starak, co-founder of InboxDone.com as well as multiple other businesses. I mean, how many businesses have you been involved in? It must be 20 plus.- Oh, I won't say that many. I've tried to make them work, so I don't have another one to jump to so probably three really ones that work is the best answer and a few that haven't.- And I was thinking more of the angel investing as well, because you've put into other businesses.- Oh, if you count that, I'm not running them, I'm just investing in them. So, yeah there's 30 of those, yeah.- So you've been involved with 30 plus business, around 30 businesses.- Yeah, that'd be safe to say, yeah.- So one of the, what really drew drew me to having you on as a guest was the fact that actually one of your key topics is productivity. And one of the things that you've never done before is you've kind of always had remote offices. You've never sort of had, you've always been that remote worker with dispersed teams.- Yeah.- And I just thought it was really interesting from the point of view being there for 18 months people have been forced to sort of remote work mainly because there's been no travel, no way to get into the office. And we've kind of had to change the way we work. Yeah, my question for you is this, we've gone down the remote working route and people have adjusted to it. Not everybody, some people are just not suited for that kind of work. Now that we're coming back to some kind of opening up and a relative degree of normality, why is it that companies are wanting employees to come back to the office?- Yeah, it's a good question and I will have trouble answering because I've never wanted my people to be in an office except for a brief time where I was feeling lonely to be absolutely honest much earlier in my career. And that wasn't for any productivity reason, it was just I wanted that comradery and teamwork that you get, Friday afternoon drinks and so on. But besides that the goal was to be a digital nomad and therefore not have to keep going to the same place or even the same city. You wanted that freedom to work anywhere. I can only assume that the companies that are asking people or even forcing people to go back now, there's an element of habits that they don't wanna break. They're just used to that management that is uncomfortable with not controlling people in person. You know, that feels like management's job is to kind of direct the sheep at work. And if you don't see the sheep, maybe you don't feel like anything's happening. I don't know some maybe culture elements as well. Some people don't believe you can maintain a good culture without being in person and I've read a few books on that. I remember there was a great book from, the WordPress founding team and they've been a distributed company from day one as well, but they're quite large and they understood the need to have something in person but it was like a team retreat every three to six months for a little bit of cohesion, a little bit getting the sense of shared purpose, but then y'all go back home and you talk on slack most of the day anyway, to get things done. So the short answer is, I don't really know.- But you've managed to successfully operate remotely most of your work in life.- Yeah, 20 years.- And that was back in the day when technology wasn't necessarily great. So I mean, were probably living back 20 years ago, we were living out inboxes. So we had inbox overload managing by email. How did you get over the fact or how did you get over the need to control people?- I never maybe because I'm an introvert and I enjoyed being alone. I never saw business as controlling the other person. It was always are we making a step towards my goal? Like that to me, I cared the most about, so if I saw the output of a contractor or freelancer, or even like a semipermanent kind of contractor who keeps working with me over time, as long as the website was being built or the customer's emails were being answered, or sometimes, it might've been designing something creative, graphics, maintaining my community, developing software, as long as I saw the output of that. And that's it, that's all I needed to see. I mean it's funny because I didn't factor in sometimes the things that may have been important, which have been like the mental health of the person I was working with and how I was communicating with them. Because as one of my, Laura she would help me with hiring and still does with my current company. She would say, you're really lovely in person, but you're kind of very straight shooter on the slack chats. So sometimes people think maybe you're really kinda little bit mean on the slack. And I was like, well, it's not my intention I just, I'm focused on getting the work done. So it's like do this, do this, do this. It's not like how's your day, how you feeling? And so I kinda missed a bit of a niceties, which I overtime kind of added back in when I felt it was necessary. So, but at the end of the day, it's output that to me if the projects get done and the creative work is good that would be the reason why I'd let someone go. They don't show up and don't produce output or the creative work is not at a level I need it to be for whatever task I'm doing.- But how did you know that remotely? Because obviously you couldn't look over their shoulder so you can see how they were working. So how did you manage that?- Well, it's easier for certain things. Like, let's say I'm getting copywriting written they can just spend a day or two writing something and pass it back to me. If it takes a week or two, then clearly something's not working or they're very slow. It's interesting though if you fast forward to more recently when I've hired engineers for developing software type projects it gets a bit more challenging there because I don't, as a non-engineer, I don't understand how to assess the speed of their coding. Like how much they produce in a day or a week. So again I kind of try and look at the output in terms of can you show me some kind of working aspect of what we're building? But I don't know if like a button should take a day or a week, in an app or with some kind of web interface. So there I've struggled a bit more, and I'm assuming at that level, especially, very high level programming type companies, they must have managers who also have some kind of skillset to assess the team that they work with. You know, I've always been a solo entrepreneur. I wear a lot of hats, I can assess copywriting. I can assess graphic design. I can assess emails written back to my staff and customers,'cause I can just go into the inbox and see what happens during that day. So that has been, to be honest, I haven't done programming for most of my companies. It hasn't been needed. It's been services, it's been selling digital education, any software we get off the shelf and maybe customized. So it hasn't been too much of a problem. So that's how we do it. I mean for me it was mostly assessing the elements I was writing something like writing an e-book or an online course. And then I need the slides designed and I can easily assess the output of a slide designer 'cause every day they're gonna produce five to 10 slides. So if I want daily feedback, I can do that. But most of the time I trusted them enough to say,"Show me your 1.0 version." And I know that's going to take five days or something like that and that's how we work.- Cool. Did your culture, do you think in your organizations suffer as a result of being remote?- Yeah, this one's a little more interesting for me today because I didn't think about culture for pretty much any of my early businesses. It's only my current one InboxDone, about four years old now. Because we have a stable team of about 25 people there is a culture. I'm not heavily involved with it'cause I'm more on the sales and marketing side. So I only work with a couple of our team members. Claire, my co-founder we actually were having a conversation recently about how much culture is playing a role. For example, we face situations sometimes where one of our staff might be asked to become a full-time employee of our client, thus leaving our company. We've had some situations where, that person, that assistant has said,"No we wanna stay within the InboxDone ecosystem We like the culture, we like the conditions and the flexibility of that." And I hadn't realized that had become an important part. And that's all because of what Claire, my co-founder has built. She does the nice things like asking how people are doing, She considers cause she used to be an Inbox manager she wasn't always a co-founder like me. So she understands the need for feeling like they're progressing towards a goal. If they're suffering something that they don't like about working with a client, she knows to surface those things early on before they become issues. So even just that kind of, we care about you first, before necessarily anything else, has become very important. So I didn't build that so I can't take credit for it, but I certainly see the importance of it now. And she maintains that virtually. That's the thing that really impresses me too. A lot of that's just asking the right questions and setting the right systems up for onboarding, for training, for just feedback, making sure we check in once a month. How is it going? What's like working with these clients? And she's built all that as a machine. So I'm very impressed with that.- We're talking about the fact that with some of them you don't even checking in frequently.- No we do encourage independence. We don't want to micromanage, we are matching a client with a dedicated EA who specializes in email, usually two. And we want those two EAs to work with the client and feel empowered to complete everything they can without needing to check with mum and dad on how things are going. So for that to work obviously we have to be super picky about who we hire and then super careful about how we train and onboard them in what we do. And then earlier days managed, but as time goes by, they get more comfortable. And ideally, yeah, we don't hear from them unless there's just a catch up once a month or maybe an odd question here and there, but it's not coming straight to us it's going to a group manager chat where everyone pitches in.- Now I'm sure there's people who also tuning in to today's episode in absolute horror because there's not where they used to. In fact probably prior to the pandemic breaking out, people were used to just watching over people there'll be judged on, okay what time did you walk up to your desk? How much time do you take off for lunch? And things like that, do you think.- I hate that. Yeah, it's interesting is it, do you think perhaps now that the reality is people having to sort of go back into the office or being told they have to go back into the office, that's causing people to come out of the workforce? We're seeing people just totally disappear. They were there before the pandemic. Okay there were job vacancies but it's like across the globe. I mean America have just gotten an unbelievable amount of vacancies. But these people just haven't been transported to a different planet. The people are still there, but it's like all of a sudden, well the jobs that they were doing, they don't wanna do that anymore. Or they don't wanna do it that way anymore. What's your thoughts on that?- I love it, oh my God Peter. I think I've been waiting for this movement. I'm sad that it happened because of a pandemic, but I'm so happy that that's an outcome we've gotten because I've been wanting this since almost day one. I was an entrepreneur or an adult when I was 18 I'm like, I don't wanna a boss, I don't wanna an alarm clock. I don't want my salary to be capped by a number of hours and I'd have to count my life based on, I worked this many hours and got this much money back. I want freedom to work when I work, when I want to work, how I want to work, where I want to work from, what I get to work on. And as an entrepreneur obviously that's the ultimate goal but even if you look at today with remote working, you're not necessarily an entrepreneur, you might be a freelancer. So you still kind of have a boss, you have clients. And even if you're working as an employee virtually under a company, that gives you that kind of freedom too. You're able to like work let's say you want two hour lunch, Ideally you have a two hour lunch and maybe you'll make up a little bit extra work in the afternoon. But it's the output that should matter. If you can do in four days in fact, I just heard, there was a company here in Montreal that switched permanently to four-day weeks. And that's gone from 40 hours to 32 hours a week, same pay, same conditions work. And I was like, they've obviously realized that, and this is why I love it. Rest and recuperation is a key component of performance. And I studied that early in my career. I was like, the foundation of output is the ability to rest and let your brain, even your subconscious digest and finances to problems. And if you're trying to push yourself to do a 10 hour working day, whatever, it might be five hours, five days a week, or even six or seven, there's no space for that recovery needed for peak performance. So I think this remote work lifestyle encourages that it also encourages, like you said, selectively choosing a role that gives you now what you know is possible, where before you did not. You didn't realize that, oh, I can work in a different format'cause so much of this is habit. Like I was saying to you off air, we have this habit of driving to work all of us at the same time. And we all know it's stupid because we're sitting in our cars, beeping and frustrated, wasting our life. Not doing much any work, not seeing family. It's the hour in the commute. And that's only because we all do it at the same time. If even 25%, if we staggered it, like I used to say, why don't we, some of us go at eight, some of us go at nine, some of us go at 10 and then we'd all have a much better commute. So I'm glad that there's been a forcing mechanism. But like you said, this is, it's a transition that I think the companies themselves and certain people within them will struggle. And like you said, the best forcing function is the person saying I quit. And then because they have other opportunities, they have options. That's the important part here too, before if you quit you're not gonna find necessarily unless you became a freelancer or an entrepreneur, a role where you can get that freedom. Now you know there's so many companies that will offer a remote situation. So it's opened up the doors to so many people.- And do you have a challenge recruiting people?- I don't cause I don't do it but yes we do, Claire and Laura our two main hiring people. And it's a function of who we look for too. It is a certain skill set and a personality type. And also the fact that, I mean, I don't know this in terms of, I've looked at the numbers and said, this is true, but I have a hunch. There are options that these people are looking at as well, that weren't in place before. So we're going up against competing remote work situations so they can kind of pick and choose. Do I want to be an EA email manager with InboxDone and work this many hours, or do I wanna maybe freelance three days a week with another company? Do I wanna mix it up? Maybe I'll do a bit of InboxDone, maybe I'll do a bit of my own work, maybe I'll work for two companies at once. I mean, I think it's great. These options it's options and that's a beautiful thing.- And maybe we're now entering the era of options and actually companies are gonna have to get used to it and radically change. It may well be that a lot of our, I mean, I know that all my team is outsourced. So the reality is you might not have people directly as many people on your payroll as you once had, because it's gonna be more contract work because that's the lifestyle choice of people.- Did you used to work in an office Peter or have you always been virtual?- No, no I've worked in an office, I've worked in all kinds of environments.- Okay so you know the both, sides of the--- Both sides of the story. And I do and I will say that, yeah, I've been the manager in the past that's been watching Apple, I've done it all. But I suppose what the interesting thing is we moved out in the industrial age. We're now in the digital age yet we're still trying to operate in the digital age, using industrial age thinking and that's just outdated. Especially with the movement in technology over the last two years. We've had the greatest movement in innovation. That's in collaboration tools that I've seen ever.- I love it. I'm very happy to see it.- People are thinking, okay, well that's all well and good. I know that you do InboxDone.com, how does that help entrepreneurs?- Well we're I guess a quintessential digital company in a sense that, and I shoulda add, we're a digital company trying to solve a very old digital problem, which is too much time spent in the inbox. I always find it a little bit of an irony that we're providing a non digital solution a human being, an executive assistant usually two who are gonna step in and get you out of the oldest internet technology that most people are used to, which is email. So you can do whatever you want, your creative tasks, maybe write a book, maybe travel, maybe you spend time with family, maybe exercise. And we just go in there and reply to your emails manage your email. We still make sure you're updated with what you need to know. And if there's certain emails only you deal with there for you, but we try and get 90, 95% of those messages, off your plate and help you to stop treating email like a to-do list.'Cause it's kind of like this place where people have a boss it's whatever messages come into my inbox. That's what I make my day about. And that's not the smart way to do it because most of those messages will not be high priority, moving your business forward tasks. So for the right type of entrepreneur or founder or manager type person getting yourself a couple of InboxDone liaise just frees you up one, two, three hours a day. We do scheduling your calendar, we do social media inboxes, we do data entry, we do basic research, all the stuff you're used to with EA, but we especially hire and train for email management because as you can imagine, having someone step in and reply to your messages is a little confronting and you don't wanna outsource that to sort of $5 overseas labor'cause you're just not gonna get the quality you need, so.- Oh, perfect, thank you. Well, it's been really insightful, really appreciate your time. If anything's resonated with you today, you want a bit more information, maybe how you can start digitizing your business, start looking at the hybrid version of working, but you don't know quite how to move forward. Head over to booklah.com and get in touch. Once again Yaro, thank you very much for being a great guest. As I always say to my audience, failing to learn is learning to fail. So please stay safe and be awesome and once again Yaro thank you so much.- Thank you very much, Peter.(Outro music)