Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All right, guys, before we start, we got a special message from our sponsor. If you want to rank high on Google, you gotta look at your page speed time. The faster website loads, the better off you are with Google's Core Vital update that makes it super super important to optimize your site for low time. And one easy way to do it is use the host that Eric and I use, dream Hosts. So just go to dream host or Google it, find it, check it out, and it's a great way to improve your load time. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sue and I'm Neil Patel, and today we're going to talk about how to run a remote first business the right way. So let me explain what remote first means. So remote business means obviously you're working, maybe you don't have a central office. People are distributed, right, Remote first means that remotes a priority, but you do have offices as well. So as an example, let's use Neil's agency. He still has his offices, but maybe they're not necessarily coming into the office right now. They are kind of remote first, which is what it means exactly. And Neil, you guys are very much remote at the moment, right, we're very remote first. We do have an office still, but we are remote first, and no one really goes into the office. Cool, So let's talk about how to do this the right way. So I think the perspective here is Neil has worked remote for years and years. I've worked remotely for years and years, and so I think the way to run it the right way is I'll just start off first and we can kind of go back and forth. I think having a clear operating system, and I've talked about this quite a bit on this podcast, where you're running scaling up or you're running traction, which is the entrepreneurs operating system. I think if you have a system like that, you get everyone to read what the heck is EOS when they come into the company on understand how the company operating system works, and then you have a cadence. Right, maybe mondays you have a leadership meeting on Zoom ninety minutes, right. So I think it's clear that you need to have a cadence and you need to have the right tools as well, which we can kind of go into Neil. The other big thing too is when you're working remote, if you want, you can do things like putting time tracking software on people's computers and stuff like that. We don't really do that. The big thing is is you need to have a result base culture. People need to provide results. People need to get the work done. It's not about how many hours you're working. It's about what you're getting done within that day and the quality of the work. So if people have goals and those goals are specific tasks, and they're getting their task done on a daily basis, weekly basis, they're hitting deadlines, and they're going above and beyond it with quality, you're much more likely to be successful running a remote team because when you're in person, it's easier to manage them. When you're remote, you don't know what people are doing throughout their quote unquote eight or nine or seven or six or ten hour shift. So you want to make sure that you have tasks and people need a complete work on a daily basis, you don't want to just get to it where hey, at the end of the week, what'd you do? Did you get it done? Oh? No, that sucks. We're a week behind. It's too risky. It's really hard to change that and fix people when they're that delayed. It's easier to stay on top of it from a daily basis and break people's tasks down into what are you going to get done today and you know you need to do it, not just do you need to do amazing job at it? Yeah, and kind of to double down on that point. You know, we use a project management tool. There's a lot you can use. We use Asauna and so for our different teams we have a different Asauna board. So you might have THEE for Leadership team, you might have one for SEO team, whatever. But the key thing here is that we have a certain level of accountability, which is one of our core values. So yes, it's important to have core values so you can hire and fire based on those, especially in the remote world. But having a level of accountability where if Neil and I are sitting in a meeting right now, we have ASUNA open. Neil says he's going to do this. I say, Okay, Neil, let's get this written down. Neil to clean Eric's toilet. Okay, by what date? Because if you don't set a date, no one is going to be accountable for it. If you don't put a face on it, the person that's accountable for it, no one's going to be accountable if you have, especially a group on it. Right. So I think the key thing is you have that level of accountability built in and you're checking things off as a team, and you're feeling that. But going back to the core values, right, people think it's like, oh, it's raw, raw stuff, I don't need it. But the core values. So for example, Neil might be a very tenacious person, right, I might be a very growth oriented person. You know, we both might value accountability, whatever. But if we find someone not being tenacious, we find them not following through, or we find them not owning their mistakes, or we find them not having a growth oriented mindset, it's very easy to say, hey, that doesn't fit our core values. And unfortunately, you know, if we don't see the take up soon, we're going to have to let you go. So that's very important to establish that and to Neil's point reading entrepreneurs operating system traction. There's this concept called rocks, So every ninety days you set the rocks for the team, right, and you set annual rocks as well. Or you can use OKRs and recommend reading the book Measure what matters. And this is from a VC named John dor and he helped roll out OKRs, which is objectives and key results at Google. And these are very numbers focused and they're very difficult to achieve. But if you don't measure it, you're not going to be able to manage it. And that came from forgot who, that came from Neil. You'll also find out that even if you're doing remote based stuff, you'll have teams and people need to achieve goals as a team. You want to try to keep your teams really tiny. When you start getting into big teams six, seven, ten, fifteen, twenty people, they tend not to do well and you won't get as much productivity out of them or much accomplished as Facebook has a rule with right, your team should be able to feed off of a pizza pie. And if they can eat off of a pizza pie and that's enough, then you got the right sized team. So we tend to keep our teams really small when we find that we tend to get more out of them versus having massive teams as well. I think you're referring to Jeff Bezos. He had this concept called two pizza teams. Is that what you're referring to? No, one pizza, not two pizzas. Want to bet I'll bet you no, saying Jeff Bezos. I think facebookause of the rule with one pizza. So when they're developing a new product with engineers, yeah, you're probably right, small enough where they can eat off of one pizza. The moment it's two or three pizza is what ends up happening, is products take forever the ship. Yeah. I think Amazon's a little different. I think is a reason for two pizzas, but one pizza or two pizzas, the idea is keep it small. I think the final thing I'll say from my side is, you know, we talk about remote first, but the value of meeting in person will never go away. And I'll say for me right now, I definitely do miss being around the people because you actually get to build that rapport and if you're trying to do work and you want someone to help you and be at your side, you got to have a relationship with them, right. So Zapier does a very good job of this. If you look for their Remote Culture Handbook, they have all this stuff around remote work and they've got anywhere, I think three hundred and fifty or four hundred employees and so they've been remote since the very beginning, and they have a formula where, you know, pre pandemic they'll meet once or twice a year, and maybe their teams might meet, you know, more frequently. Right, But then you get just enough in person and then the rest of it is just heads down work and doing good stuff. You know. You get to save time from commutes as well. Yep, So make sure you guys check out marketing School dot io slash pro if you guys want to learn how to generate more traffic and join our community. And that's only starts a dollar. We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool dot io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. That's Marketingschool dot Io until next time. Class dismissed

Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All right, guys, before we start, we got a special message from our sponsor. If you want to rank high on Google, you gotta look at your page speed time. The faster website loads, the better off you are with Google's Core Vital update that makes it super super important to optimize your site for low time. And one easy way to do it is use the host that Eric and I use, dream Hosts. So just go to dream host or Google it, find it, check it out, and it's a great way to improve your load time. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sue and I'm Neil Patel, and today we're going to talk about how to run a remote first business the right way. So let me explain what remote first means. So remote business means obviously you're working, maybe you don't have a central office. People are distributed, right, Remote first means that remotes a priority, but you do have offices as well. So as an example, let's use Neil's agency. He still has his offices, but maybe they're not necessarily coming into the office right now. They are kind of remote first, which is what it means exactly. And Neil, you guys are very much remote at the moment, right, we're very remote first. We do have an office still, but we are remote first, and no one really goes into the office. Cool, So let's talk about how to do this the right way. So I think the perspective here is Neil has worked remote for years and years. I've worked remotely for years and years, and so I think the way to run it the right way is I'll just start off first and we can kind of go back and forth. I think having a clear operating system, and I've talked about this quite a bit on this podcast, where you're running scaling up or you're running traction, which is the entrepreneurs operating system. I think if you have a system like that, you get everyone to read what the heck is EOS when they come into the company on understand how the company operating system works, and then you have a cadence. Right, maybe mondays you have a leadership meeting on Zoom ninety minutes, right. So I think it's clear that you need to have a cadence and you need to have the right tools as well, which we can kind of go into Neil. The other big thing too is when you're working remote, if you want, you can do things like putting time tracking software on people's computers and stuff like that. We don't really do that. The big thing is is you need to have a result base culture. People need to provide results. People need to get the work done. It's not about how many hours you're working. It's about what you're getting done within that day and the quality of the work. So if people have goals and those goals are specific tasks, and they're getting their task done on a daily basis, weekly basis, they're hitting deadlines, and they're going above and beyond it with quality, you're much more likely to be successful running a remote team because when you're in person, it's easier to manage them. When you're remote, you don't know what people are doing throughout their quote unquote eight or nine or seven or six or ten hour shift. So you want to make sure that you have tasks and people need a complete work on a daily basis, you don't want to just get to it where hey, at the end of the week, what'd you do? Did you get it done? Oh? No, that sucks. We're a week behind. It's too risky. It's really hard to change that and fix people when they're that delayed. It's easier to stay on top of it from a daily basis and break people's tasks down into what are you going to get done today and you know you need to do it, not just do you need to do amazing job at it? Yeah, and kind of to double down on that point. You know, we use a project management tool. There's a lot you can use. We use Asauna and so for our different teams we have a different Asauna board. So you might have THEE for Leadership team, you might have one for SEO team, whatever. But the key thing here is that we have a certain level of accountability, which is one of our core values. So yes, it's important to have core values so you can hire and fire based on those, especially in the remote world. But having a level of accountability where if Neil and I are sitting in a meeting right now, we have ASUNA open. Neil says he's going to do this. I say, Okay, Neil, let's get this written down. Neil to clean Eric's toilet. Okay, by what date? Because if you don't set a date, no one is going to be accountable for it. If you don't put a face on it, the person that's accountable for it, no one's going to be accountable if you have, especially a group on it. Right. So I think the key thing is you have that level of accountability built in and you're checking things off as a team, and you're feeling that. But going back to the core values, right, people think it's like, oh, it's raw, raw stuff, I don't need it. But the core values. So for example, Neil might be a very tenacious person, right, I might be a very growth oriented person. You know, we both might value accountability, whatever. But if we find someone not being tenacious, we find them not following through, or we find them not owning their mistakes, or we find them not having a growth oriented mindset, it's very easy to say, hey, that doesn't fit our core values. And unfortunately, you know, if we don't see the take up soon, we're going to have to let you go. So that's very important to establish that and to Neil's point reading entrepreneurs operating system traction. There's this concept called rocks, So every ninety days you set the rocks for the team, right, and you set annual rocks as well. Or you can use OKRs and recommend reading the book Measure what matters. And this is from a VC named John dor and he helped roll out OKRs, which is objectives and key results at Google. And these are very numbers focused and they're very difficult to achieve. But if you don't measure it, you're not going to be able to manage it. And that came from forgot who, that came from Neil. You'll also find out that even if you're doing remote based stuff, you'll have teams and people need to achieve goals as a team. You want to try to keep your teams really tiny. When you start getting into big teams six, seven, ten, fifteen, twenty people, they tend not to do well and you won't get as much productivity out of them or much accomplished as Facebook has a rule with right, your team should be able to feed off of a pizza pie. And if they can eat off of a pizza pie and that's enough, then you got the right sized team. So we tend to keep our teams really small when we find that we tend to get more out of them versus having massive teams as well. I think you're referring to Jeff Bezos. He had this concept called two pizza teams. Is that what you're referring to? No, one pizza, not two pizzas. Want to bet I'll bet you no, saying Jeff Bezos. I think facebookause of the rule with one pizza. So when they're developing a new product with engineers, yeah, you're probably right, small enough where they can eat off of one pizza. The moment it's two or three pizza is what ends up happening, is products take forever the ship. Yeah. I think Amazon's a little different. I think is a reason for two pizzas, but one pizza or two pizzas, the idea is keep it small. I think the final thing I'll say from my side is, you know, we talk about remote first, but the value of meeting in person will never go away. And I'll say for me right now, I definitely do miss being around the people because you actually get to build that rapport and if you're trying to do work and you want someone to help you and be at your side, you got to have a relationship with them, right. So Zapier does a very good job of this. If you look for their Remote Culture Handbook, they have all this stuff around remote work and they've got anywhere, I think three hundred and fifty or four hundred employees and so they've been remote since the very beginning, and they have a formula where, you know, pre pandemic they'll meet once or twice a year, and maybe their teams might meet, you know, more frequently. Right, But then you get just enough in person and then the rest of it is just heads down work and doing good stuff. You know. You get to save time from commutes as well. Yep, So make sure you guys check out marketing School dot io slash pro if you guys want to learn how to generate more traffic and join our community. And that's only starts a dollar. We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool dot io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. That's Marketingschool dot Io until next time. Class dismissed