 Okay, cool. So welcome everybody to DrupalCon New Orleans. I know I'm very excited, hence all my pop dancing on the stage. So before we just get started, a quick poll in the room. I just wanted to find out who is all here. So let's start with agencies. So how many people here already work with a fully distributed company? How many people work with a company that is half distributed, half in office? Okay. How many people are looking to go to a distributed model that is currently brick and mortar? A few of you. Okay, cool. Now what's our audience like today? How many people here are developers? Okay, project managers, designers, UX designers, I guess, I won't say it's the same thing because it's not. But okay, cool. Any CEOs or sales people? Okay, we got a few business owners in here. All right, we know the lay of the land. All right, so you're in the right room if you're here to learn about how to live the dream, work remote and build a successful Drupal shop. My name's Ann Stefaniec. I'm the founding CEO of Canopy Studios. We're a fully distributed shop. I'm based out of San Francisco. I've been working in Drupal since 4.6 back in the days of Flexi-Node. I purposely, when I started Canopy Studios, it was a bit of an accident actually. But when I decided to start the company, I decided to start it fully distributed. I did this more because I needed some life work flexibility and I wasn't too keen on having a job at the time. So today we're going to talk about some of the things that I've learned over the last three and a half, four years on how to run a shop and how to manage team members. So first off, I want to start off with this slide because I believe that everybody has a why. And I mean everybody. This could be the reason why they get up in the morning. A lot of people, it's to feed their families. Some people, it's because they want to work so they have life style flexibility so they can write a novel or a screenplay. Personally, I want to go build tree houses. And I don't know very many companies that will just let me go and build tree houses. So if you want to check out that website, it's thinkabeavis.net. So why I bring this up is it's really important whether you're deciding yourself to work with a virtual company or if you're looking at turning into a virtual company, it's really important to understand the why. This is understanding your why as to why you want to do this and other people's why. Whenever I do interviews with talent and we're questioning them and going through all the technical processes and figuring out if they're a good fit, I always ask them what's their main passion in life. And if they say Drupal, I'm going to go, shit. Because everybody does something outside of the computer. And I love Drupal too. I run the Bay Area Drupal Company in San Francisco with a group of awesome volunteers and Drupal is definitely a large passion of mine. But ultimately, I really love building things with my hands and the trees. So let's talk a little bit more. As we think about this, we're going to talk a little bit more about how the rise of the digital workplace is coming to effect. There's about 30 million people today that work from home. And that person is expected to raise to about 43% over the next five years. So over half of our workforce will be distributed. There's the reality that the decentralized workforce knows that they no longer need a traditional job anymore. The old luxury was the corner office, the luxury car, the nice expense account. And then the new luxury, which being from San Francisco, I see a lot of this, is the free lunches, if you think of Google, for example, they've got the fancy chef, they've got the snack room, they've got the massage room, they have the ping-pong table. Ultimately, in the end, it's not much different than the old luxury, because they encourage endless hours at the office. Today, we want to talk about the new luxury, which is freedom of space and time. So now it's less and less about the nine to five. And it's more about delivering results. Full-time permanent jobs with large organizations are a thing of the past, like 50 years ago. So, long gone is the organizational guy. Very few, like my mom has had three different careers, even in her age. So the generation that we're dealing with here is that very few people hold a job for more than five to seven years. And it's very frequent that a person will reinvent themselves three times. So I wanted to show you this video. There's a company out there called Digital Nomads, and this is one of their recruiting videos. And I just wanted to say that this really vibes on the essence of what it is to kind of live and work the dream. So hopefully, if this all works. Oh, press on the button in the middle here. I'm going to do this for a second. I used to have to fly literally a million miles a year. You add that up, that's a lot of wasted time. My commute to work was actually quite laborious. I was living in London. I would have to walk to catch the tube and then I'd be squished on the tube like every single other person stuck in the rat race. And then I had to repeat it all on the way home, always in rush hour. It's exciting. Every day is a new adventure. Ten years ago, I never thought I'd be able to do this, but I can actually, we can be in the middle of the Arctic Circle in Greenland and doing our job. I would consider myself a digital nomad. Somebody who has the freedom to work anywhere in the world, where we want, when we want, based on digital tools. People need access to a computer and the internet to have an office and not so much to real estate. It's no longer about nine to five, it's about results. The more freedom my team had, the more work they got done. I do believe that you can build your work and your business around your lifestyle. I basically live out of my suitcase, travel the world and run my online business with the help of a virtual team around the world. I've been championing the world for over ten years straight and everything I own comes with me. The Eco-Romer is a huge hunk and truck that we live in the back of and it's also the global headquarters of my company, Fitmunkies. I left my traditional job when I had my son. Instead of going back, I wrote my goals and decided what my work-life balance would look like and what was best for me and my family and that's how I came up with being a digital nomad and being able to work for myself. It gives me the opportunity to work when I like to work and I can go surfing when I like to surf. And it shouldn't be that only the most innovative companies embrace this model. I think that ten years from now it absolutely will be the norm. There are so many reasons why this is a great way to work. In my world, means buying experiences, not stuff. And that makes you feel rich in ways that money can never ever buy. Okay, I think I have to figure it out here one second. So that's kind of the essence of why I wanted to work remote is I couldn't deal with the commute, I couldn't deal with the office. I'm a very early morning person and a very late person and at this time when I was looking for jobs there's very few things that were available to me in that sense. So I'm going to try this opening again and slide this sucker over and then we should be good to go. Other side. Then go. Okay, great. Okay, let's talk a little bit about some of the company motivation. So if you're an agency that you're thinking about going to be a virtual team you're definitely going to save money on things like the large office, equipment, utilities, which allows you to reappropriate those cash to other things like bringing everybody to Drupalcon or doing other fun things. Also, there's a very real thing about talent. So the nice thing about being a totally virtual company is that we had a staff member, for example, that moved from one side of the country to the next and all we lost was we had to adjust to the time zone settings. But other than that, everything was business as normal. So we don't lose talent to family changes. We can hire good people that maybe can't move. San Francisco is an incredibly expensive city to come and live in so it allows us to access great talent at a reasonable price. We also have more flexibility as an agency. You can scale. You can hire more people. There's a bigger talent pool. And I do find that overall that one of the biggest benefits for running a distributed company is your team is happy and productive. When people get to work from home using their own tools, working at their own schedule, they tend to be very overall satisfied. And of course, what is important is that really the freedom of space and time. And if you're looking to kind of break free from some of the constraints of an office, it definitely going distributed gives you some more freedom. So today in our slides, we're going to talk a little bit about some common myths and issues throughout the course of the presentation. And these next two slides are what we're going to cover. So I would encourage you to think about other things that you may be, you know, concerned or worried about, about going distributed or working from home, some challenges. And if we don't cover them, we can talk about them in our Q&A period. Okay. So the first one, and there's some common myths. For example, if I don't see my employees, they're not working. Another one is hiring remote employee is the same as hiring in an office employee. Again, these are myths. These are not the truth. People will know what it's like at the office. They'll know. But really, how will they? And technology will solve all problems. And it's always better to meet face to face. But is it? So remember, these are myths that people think that why they have a hard time becoming a distributed company. Some other common issues and when working in building a distributed team or going from virtual or going from brick and mortar to a virtual team is, A, finding the right people and knowing what to look for. B, communication issues, how to overcome those. C, isolation. Isolation is a very real thing when you work from home. D, team bonding. How do you facilitate team bonding through the interwebs? E, burnout. Very, very, very real. And I don't think this matters if it's in office or out office, especially in really heavy brain activities like building Drupal sites, burnout's a really big thing. And of course, F, which is selling clients on what the distributed model looks like. So we're going to cover all of these and go over how you can actually tackle these as it is a reality and you can make it work. So let's just first off talk about some of the things to what you'll expect when you are changing from a brick and mortar or you're just starting your own agency and you're planning to go totally distributed. One, it is definitely more work than co-located employees. If everybody's co-located, it's much easier to have the in between the lines be read. You have kind of this stuff that goes on in the office that you miss, so making that actually a real thing in a distributed company can be very tricky. There's also a learning curve. One of my favorite friend agencies is Four Kitchens out of Austin and they recently have gone from a brick and mortar office to totally distributed. And I know one of the challenges that they faced was that if there was five people that were distributed and 10 that were in the office, instead of all huddling around in a conference room, everybody actually took the call on video from their desk, even if they were sitting side by side. You have to be a super ninja with mute because you can hear everybody else's voices, but it's overcoming and finding that learning curve and going down that learning curve because it is a real different environment and creating a different sense of culture. This directly leads into that. You may need to switch the process and the culture if you have a very in office team that's maybe different, they have different regiments and maybe there's a physical standup that everybody comes. How can you assimilate that same type of vibe online? And another big thing is your hiring processes may need to change. I highly recommend if you're hiring a team member to do remote work for you is use the tools that you're going to use that you actually work together. So for example, we like to use Zoom. Zoom is one of our wonderful video communication tools. So we actually get everybody to interview on that with their video on so they can get comfortable with what that looks like. Okay, there's some pillars to success in running a virtual agency and a lot of it comes down to organization, accountability, figuring out ways for personal interaction, but first and foremost, which is the most important is building trust. And trust is something that people when they say, oh, if I don't see them, they're not working. Well, that just violates all of it. You actually have to inherently trust the people that you hire or don't hire them. I love this quote because I feel like this is so true. For remote teams, there are no walls, there are no tribes, there are no executives on the fifth floor. There's no one watching over your shoulder. There's no one babysitting. It's simply individuals bound by trust by one common goal. So this comes back to the why. If you help explain the why, then we can all get around the same common goal. At Canopy Studios, freedom is one of our number one values. So when we come up to different things, we question like, does this facilitate more freedom or does this lock us down? And of course it's not black and white like that. That's a very ethereal thing to look at when it comes, but it really is some of our founding driving things. So when people come to Canopy, a lot of our team members are writers or they have young families and they wanna be at home and they wanna have that flexibility to make sure they can get to their daughter's recital and they wanna make sure they can spend that quality time instead of in a car. So I think trust is such an important part of this. I really wanted to dive a little bit more into trust. Now these two slides are a little bit heavy and I was at this really awesome conference called the Nonprofit and Technology Conference and I went to this really cool session. Woo! Great, great, great. Awesome, they have a Drupal day, it's super cool. But there was this woman who did a presentation similar to this talk and she had these great slides and these are, again, they're a little text heavy so I'm gonna post these, but really there's some certain things that create and build trust and they're really important to look at. You know, just always assuming positive intent. I think that's absolutely super important when you're working in a digital space, things, text messages, Slack messages, emails, they cut really short sometimes. So avoid any snippy emails and this one here is really focused on positive contribution. Like how do you contribute trust? How do you show up every day and contribute? So I'm not gonna read them off, you can read them yourself, but I will also post the slides. I would say one thing that's been very encouraging for building and communicating trust is those group chats even though they can get really noisy, it's really important to create areas for people to be able to communicate as a group and we'll talk a little bit more about communication tactics in a bit. These are items that don't build trust. Things really, for example, if you CC everyone, it really, it's a weird thing, but if you CC everybody it starts to be getting noise and they don't know, it's not very organized, they don't know what to follow. Snippy replies, missing deadlines, you know, all of these things and while it may just be one thing or another, they all add up to, from taking away from that trust. So let's talk about collaboration and how to work together because it's a different space when working on the internet. First off, let's talk about some tactics. First off, rethink meetings. A, meet shorter times, shorter, because when you are distributed, it requires a lot of constant communication but with all the noise, if you stack on a bunch of meetings, nobody actually has time to think or do their work. So perhaps, what we've tried to do at Canopy is we've blocked off for developers we only meet between a certain block of time, between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., guaranteeing there's an hour for lunch. So really we have essentially a 10 o'clock and 11 o'clock and a one o'clock and we have three hours to meet with team members, if not nothing, because it helps block out time. There's also ways that we have meetings, we have a daily stand up for all of the people that are working actively on projects, so that means no CEO, no marketing, no, it's just the project managers and the developers and at 10 a.m. they do a daily stand up and we walk through all the projects. There's also really important, you need to have team meetings, we have two once a month, we have one that's like, hey, it's Friday we're gonna play virtual games and hang out and then we have one halfway through the month, that's in all hands where we talk about all the company things. Because you're right, they will not learn what is going on in the company unless you directly share and the only way to do that is through collaboration. So we have a set time once a month that each of the teams, we have a tech ops team, we have marketing, we have development and we have builds and support, they all come together and they present for seven minutes on what they're doing in the company. So that helps create like, oh cool, you're building that. And then when we sit down and do that Friday where it's called, we have a mantra at work, it's called Freedom Fridays, where we don't have deadlines, we never launch projects, neither should any of you, but we have no strong hard deliverables on a Friday. And because we foster freedom, it's Freedom Fridays, so if you actually don't wanna work on Friday, that's totally fine. You can maximize your schedule to work 10 hour days throughout Monday through Thursday and take Friday off. I'm okay with that, it's totally cool. We as a company know that Fridays are off limits. What that facilitates is the developers that want heads down time for a full day without interruption, they can legitimately turn off the world and focus, and then it doesn't bleed into their evenings and weekends. Another thing is its contribution. It's no longer about what you did today, it's show me what you did today. Take me on a tour, share and explain that type of thing. It's we try to be more engaging with screen shares or with when we have fun things that happen at work, we have a little channel where we can put cool things if there's a site launch. Another question that always comes up is how do you manage time zones and how do you manage that overlap? And a lot of it is about making it equally uncomfortable for all parties. We've got east coasters, we've got west coasters. Sometimes our west coasters are up at six, sometimes our east coasters are online at nine. So we try to make it equally uncomfortable. We try to find that time where we overlap and maximize that, but sometimes do the nature of client business, it doesn't always work out like that. So we try to make it equally uncomfortable so it's not always one team or the other off their schedule. How many people in this room use Slack? Yeah, you do, love that. Okay, cool. So we're a big fan of Slack as well and we tried to create that water cooler setting in Slack. So we have a bunch of fun channels. You can have notification settings. So each person when they get onboarded gets help with how to set their notifications on Slack so they don't miss something important but they can still participate when they wanna participate. So for example, we have a Musac channel which is just all music. You can put your Spotify playlist in there. You can put your YouTube favorite song. It's Friday night, everybody. People post stuff even on the weekends like here's my Saturday workout tunes. We have another fitness channel which is all the people that are trying to get out of their chairs and do certain things. They've got one of those Fitbit challenges in there and everybody posts pictures in the morning run and this has all been stuff that the team has organically created as that water cooler. And having those organic channels that are not just project-based or function-based, they're just kind of fun random stuff allows people to kind of check in and out when they have time. Also, another big thing is governance over documentation. This is something that we've struggled with because it's hard to know what you don't know but when we onboard new people we look for where the gaps are and then try to create process and checklists and expectation management. We even just created a communications charter to help people understand how to write effective emails because there's so much noise. And of course, we want to always seeing as believing. So if we can't have opportunities like this at DrupalCon then we can actually see each other and get to know each other and that creates a deeper sense of connection which is something that's really important in a virtual team. So I was doing my research and I have to say I added this in last minute because I just thought this was so rad and so on point. So first off, video. So this is something that we advocate is that we prefer video but it's always optional. We always request that you knock. You don't just be like, hey, I'm gonna video chat with you right now because a lot of us don't wear pants, we work from home. B, it's very intrusive. But you're right, we can't just knock on the door and say, hey, I just have to chat with you for a minute. This one goes into the next one about reduced scheduling and that volleying back and forth. Like I said, you could usually go in an office and say, hey, can we just chat for a second and you have that little chat where you're having a coffee. Well, you don't really have that situation in a remote team. So if you feel like, if you can't just schedule something, pick up the phone and call. And a lot of developers are usually shy about this because they wanna just have heads down time. And I don't mean to pick on developers here because I know there's lots of people that don't like the phone, but typically it's very intrusive. So a quick message, hey, can we chat for a second? No, I'm heads down, but we can chat in 15. We don't need to send a bunch of emails back and forth. It gets fairly formal sometimes and it doesn't need to be. Another one is I really like to stop inline conversations. If you have to like go down and put bullets in and stuff like that, if it takes more than just a short synopsis to reply to, pick up the phone, you know, converse with your team members. This one I really like is make your internet faster. I think we've all been in those situations where something's wrong with your connection, you can't get your call to work, you can't download your stuff. I learned this Ninja Tech trick where you can actually download a VPN and then make it secure and then you can block out that noise when they find out where you are or trying to direct certain ads or whatnot. So there's lots of tips and tricks, but if you can find a way to make your internet faster, your life will be better. The last one, which is one that I learned the hard way, exercise. So Herman Miller talks about this turtle position and how it's so easy to slip into a bad position when you sit all day. And also there's been a much recently publicized talk about how sitting is the new smoking. Well, guess what? When you run a company and you work 14 hours a day and then you're building your patio but you're not carrying any bricks and you fall over, guess what? Someone's got weak ankles because she hasn't been walking enough and broke her ankle. So exercise is something that I've had to learn as a remote worker that I have to schedule in. Okay, so talent. Talent is a question on everybody's mind and especially in Drupal because it seems to be in a bit of a shortage so you say. So talented people really can work, they can choose what they wanna do and who they wanna work with. Remote workers tend to be inherently self-motivated. They have a passion for creating outstanding work and those are the type of people that will really strive and do well in a remote situation. It's very tricky to bring on a person who has never worked remote before. If you were bringing on someone to work remote before, you have to remember it's going to take a lot more training and time. So during your interview process, ask questions about what do you usually do on your lunch break? How do you spend your free time? How do you get, you know, like what do you think is your top three tips from working from home? And you would be surprised at what people say and my number one tip is get up and get showered and get ready because it's really awkward at 2 p.m. when the postman comes and you're like your messy bun and your sweat pants and you're like, hey, I have a job, really. So remote rock stars, again, we kinda talked a little bit about this but they contribute trust every day. Every day they show up and contribute trust. They keep things moving. They instantly contribute. They don't even just say like, hi, how's it going? They really over communicate. You remember when you had your first boyfriend and your first girlfriend and you fell asleep with the phone and you never wanted to let them go? Well, it's kind of like that, at least within nine to five of when you're online. It's that you really wanna let your coworkers know where you are when you step away from your desk. If you're not gonna meet a deadline, if you have free time and can help let people know, if you've learned about some cool new awesome framework or something cool about D8 or something, share those things. When you see someone committing bad code, when you see someone falling behind, because we can't all see each other, if you see something, it's important to surface it and if you've created a culture of acceptance and openness that allows those conversations to happen, it's okay. I tell everybody in the company, it's totally okay if you screw up and I expect you to screw up a ton, but if you're not learning from it, then we have an issue. That's when we have troubles. If we're repeating the same and mistake, then we've got some troubles, but most people, they learn from all their mistakes. So remote is really not for everyone and if you are thinking about remote, you have to really think about some of the main things is that you may miss being around people. I find what's really important is scheduling evening activities. Go and play, kickball, go outside, go and figure out how to have a Wednesday night book club at the library or connect with a community of people outside your home. You may miss playing ping pong or going out for lunches. So if you wanna create that, there is a whole bunch of lunchtime running clubs or there's different things that you can do. I know that some of our team members, they play, what is that, League of Legends, I think? They all play that and so they're like, lunch break! Yeah, they're all like, okay. We also try to coordinate lunch breaks for the same, the West Coasters. We all try to take it at noon, so we're all offline at the same time and then we're all online at the same time. Doesn't always work, but we try. And a very natural thing that will happen is you may lose the distinction between your life and your work. So we'll talk a little bit about how to overcome some of those challenges in a second. But I do think that some of the challenges are definitely some time zones and that comes to figuring out how to overlap. Prioritization, it's hard to know what to do next sometimes and when we don't have a constant place to check in, that's why we have our daily scrums because honestly, things move so fast that the client's like, no, don't actually do that or I need this by Friday now, Monday. And have a criteria for what prioritization looks like and help your team members prioritize. Another thing that's a really hard thing to do is measuring engagement. This is where as the CEO, and I'm always concerned and I'm always wanting to foster this culture of awesomeness and ensuring people contribute, Dave's a really funny guy. Dave's always laughing. Dave's always putting funny jokes in. Even in the most stressful times, Dave is light-hearted, upbeat. All of a sudden Dave's not so chatty anymore, all of a sudden Dave's not posting videos anymore. So we gotta call Dave, we gotta find out what's going on with Dave because it could be a work thing, it could be a personal thing, but it's really hard to measure engagement. But if everybody knows that we're kind of all looking out for each other and saying, oh, Dave's been really quiet on Slack lately, then we can ninja call him and say, hey, Dave, how are you doing, how's everything going? And he may or may not open, he may tell you, he may not, it may just, he's been heads down with his earphones on, actually just cranking out code and need some heads down time. Totally cool, now I know. But it's really hard to measure that without that eye-to-eye contact. That's also why we encourage video because video is something that doesn't only allow us to see each other, but when we see ourselves, when we see ourselves, we go, oh, I look really tense, so you can really read a lot of body language. So the more video that you can do, the better. And with Zoom, it's so affordable and so easy to use because honestly, Skype sucks. So it's a swear word in our company. All right, so another one here that's very challenging here is if you're looking at running a distributed shop and you're looking at hiring people out of country or out of state, you have to be mindful of your taxes and how you're gonna manage your healthcare. So I highly recommend Zen Payroll or with a Gusto Now and Zenifits and they help with our Florida because unemployment tax is very different in Florida than it is in Nevada, than it is in California. So managing multiple states and multiple taxes can get very complex. So either find a good accountant or we use Gusto and Zenifits, which we love as our online tool to help manage all those things and they help submit like whenever we need to submit on a quarterly basis and all the paperwork. Okay, so we're big fans. One of our things is we wanted to create this culture of awesomeness. Awesome people show up, do awesome work with awesome clients and we build awesome projects. That sounds so California of me, but it is super rad. And to do that, these are some of the things that we created at Canopy Studios personally to facilitate that culture of awesomeness. One, it was actually creating, you know, establishing goals and dreams. Everybody has their why and it's really important to stay close to that why. So when we get into the weeds, we can go, oh, right, I'm doing this because I really want to build tree houses and I really, really, really hate QA right now, but one day, you know, and I don't want to put it out there as a golden carrot, but there's things we're all working to. And so once a year, usually around New Years, we all set resolutions and they're more like goals and dreams. We set them for professional, personal goals and then we set them for what we would like to see in the company. And then we publicize them on our internal Trello board so we can all see them and then we can all help each other. So when, you know, Ricky says, I really want to make a great support process then Bikir goes, oh yeah, I'm going to build this virtual machine and I'm going to do this awesomeness and I'm like, oh cool, because he knows that his work can support Ricky's professional goals and dreams. So we check them on that twice a year. Another thing is this process and this is something again we've challenged, we've had both success and challenges but documenting the process to which you do things, documenting your onboarding process, documenting your pre-launch checklist, documenting your SEO checklist, like having all these things ready because it's some of that like, oh, did you get that? You don't get that when you're virtual. Everything's very direct. You don't have that in office. Like, oh, don't forget about that. Another way we do is when we're bringing on a new staff is that we pair them up with another person and that person is like their Sherpa for the first three months they work at the organization and they help them with how to do better time sheets, how to do, you know, where do you put in time for requesting time off? We have an employee handbook but like they read it once and they don't ever maybe look at it again but they know they can ask a trusted friend in the company to help them integrate into the process and the systems. We also have like a really small WordPress department and they feel very isolated and our Rails department is even smaller and they really feel isolated and they don't wanna come to Dev Scrum because they're all talking about Drupal and they don't care about that stuff. So we actually create an opportunity to pair those people into departments and collaborate on other projects, whether even it's a blog post or whether it's planning the next team game and we'll do like little micro assignments that helps blend the different people because ultimately I got feedback from some of my team members that they're like, I just don't know really what Bikir does. I'm like, oh, well, aren't you on Dev Scrum every day? Yeah, but I don't really, you know, I was like, oh, we need to create more avenues for people to kind of cross contaminate in different ways. We also, I think a lot of people that have a lot of good talent strive for excellent or perfection and we really say, let's all strive for excellence, not perfection and that's a really big motto is that we just try to do our best but to know that it's okay if we screw up or things don't go the way we thought, we're gonna learn from it. And then of course, if culture is a really big important part of what you do, so for us having that sense of freedom is really important so whatever you can do to create your own freedom Fridays. Okay, so communicate and communicate more. This is again, it came from this woman's slides that I really enjoyed so I wanted to include them in my presentation so they come up afterwards but these are the pros and cons between emails, phone and chat. So it's really when you wanna take a thinking, think for a second when you're trying to communicate something what's the best format to use it. So email that you get time to think about it, you can create that paper trail, you're not limited by time zones, the cons that you can lose context. Some people find email overwhelming, there's no tone, there's no facial expressions, phone works really well to clarify, it's immediate, it facilitates natural conversations about the daily life but it's sometimes, it's uncomfortable for some people, they don't wanna just be ninja called, they're like, oh, the phone's ringing, that's very jarring because we may hang out on our phones but we might not use them to talk all the time. And then chat, chat's wonderful, it's quick, it's short, it's a doorbell to check activity or availability, it's portable but it also is very interruptive. So when you're thinking about this, you wanna kinda think about the different avenues. And I just put this in here because everybody asks which I think everybody knows now but what are some of the tools that you could use? And I think there's four main sections of tools that you can use and again, I more post these here so you can go ahead and look these up after. What I would encourage is that pick a tool and stick to it. It's very confusing for someone who knows that, oh, we're gonna use Zoom. And then someone's like, hey, here's this hangout link. Oh, can you meet me on Skype? Oh, maybe, so pick something that's, and we like Zoom because it's kind of like phone and it's video and it's screen sharing, it's all in one and then we like to use Slack. Okay, a big part of this is, well, we all wanna live the dream and work remote, but FaceTime is probably one of the most special times that we get together. And if you can have this FaceTime both even virtually, like I keep saying, this video is so important, but even people that are in the same city, we have a group of people that are in Victoria, British Columbia. So once a month they go out and they just hang out and have a cup of coffee or maybe go for five or 10 beers and have a really good time. There's an instigator in Victoria who's all about the beers. But the thing is that they create this microculture and then they come back, jazz, and excited. We also have regional Slack channels, so all the Vancouver people that are in Vancouver, so we've got 10 people in Vancouver, so they can just say, hey, did you hear about this thing that's happening specific to the region so it doesn't flood the whole communication channel but they feel connected as a micro community. Use events, all of those things to build and honestly, you can try even a co-working space. It's a great place to get out there and just be outside of your house. So that leads us into some of the life work boundary issues that definitely happen. So these are some tips and tricks. A, create a specific office space where you work and build that routine as well as what your routine is for a change of scenery. Find a coffee shop that has great wifi that's not too far away. Make sure that your data plan is enabled for tethering so if you do wanna work with the fishing pole in the water and you know there's cell phone reception there and that's actually feasible on Fridays or something, then go ahead and do that. But make sure that you're well-prepared because if you don't have internet, your life sucks. It's awful. Also try different computing devices. Some of our team members, they use an iPad to actually join on video so they're not distracted by anything else and then they'll just communicate through that. So you can choose different devices. Distractions are totally under your control if you're working from home. It's just a matter of having the discipline and this is where it comes if somebody's already worked remote and distributed before it's a lot easier. They know that they can't just turn on their favorite soap on at lunch and have lunch and then just sit there for the afternoon, right? That railroads are day, they're working in the night, it's not good. So you do have distractions under your control. We do find that one of the most effective ways because we all work too much is we block time and block time for lunch is one of the most important things when you work from home with a multi-time zone company is if you don't block for lunch and you don't eat lunch, three o'clock is not only gonna feel sleepy, it's gonna feel awful. So make sure you eat. Another thing is it's really important to block time to do personal things. So for example, Vanessa, she loves, she goes to the gym every day or Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4.30. It's in her calendar, nobody books over it, they know it and then she has that freedom and flexibility to do the things she wants. And block time to call your grandma, she needs calls. So call her or your grandpa or your mom or your kids. So and also give yourself the benefit of downtime. If you wanna work remote and build a remote company, then take advantage of it. It's something that you don't need to work 12 hours a day, it's not functional. So also beware of the dragons, you will get cabin fever. Your team members will get cabin fever. Encourage them to turn it off. Have a time where they check in and check out. Make sure you're well set up at home with the proper tools. And of course, the fridge is very accessible. So I would recommend cutting up healthy snacks to leave in the fridge, because you will wander over. Oh, I really don't wanna write that code. Oh, yeah, oh, look at that. So prepare yourself with healthy snacks. And when you're dealing with burnout, it's really important to force vacation for your team members. And it's absolutely important that if you see them online at late night, you poke up and you say, are you okay? Are you good? You wanna be like, what's going on? And make sure that they have good life work boundaries because if they burn out, you lose them and that's not good. Another thing that's really important is when you talk about setting priorities, you can't make everything ASAP. And it's so tempting just to send a Slack chat every time that you have a question as a project manager, but that's where if you can batch some of your conversations and your questions, we do that. That's why the morning scrum is there. So the PMs can all attack all the devs all at once. Okay, do you have this answer? I need an estimate, I need this out, I need this out, I need this out. But then they know they have to leave them alone after 2 p.m. And they have to save their questions unless it's an emergency and then put that to the next day. Because almost everything can wait 12 hours and if it can't, then that's the exception. And that as long as the exception doesn't become the norm, then you have that flexibility to reach out. There we go. So, so this again goes that if you're choosing a distributed team, you're choosing it because people want to have some lifestyle flexibility. You really need to be able to strike when the iron's hot. I'm really productive from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. and then I'm kind of motion till about three. Like I don't know what happens between 11 and three every day, but then from three to seven I'm really productive. So I really maximize that time. So that's what we work on. Now, as long as you guys, as long as your team members are on time and on budget and they're contributing trust every day and if they really, really, really, we have a couple of people that have small kids, they work from seven to nine, they do the kid routine, they're back from like 10 o'clock until two and then they do the kid routine and then they're back. They're choosing to jar their day like that and if they can manage it, all the power to them. When they start missing deadlines and stuff, then it becomes a problem. But you can do it. Okay, just a couple more things here is that client services and running a distributed company is something that I come across all the time. Well, you're not in our office, how do you see all your staff? How do you know they're working on our stuff? But you can often, when you're presenting your company as a digital agency, you have to learn how to sell it differently. The first one is, is let them know upfront right away. Be transparent, be honest. And also, since you can't meet them face to face, be like uber responsive when it comes to returning phone calls, emails, instant messages, the more responsive you are, the better that you build trust with your clients to know that you are always online. Also, you wanna share when you're working. Just because you work from home doesn't mean you work Saturdays. So if your client starts thinking, oh, she's working from home, I'm gonna message her on Saturdays, don't reply till Monday or reply, say great, I'll talk to you on Monday. You know, set those expectations to create your own work-life balance. And you can also set up a space to show the work in progress. I find a lot of these clients that are worried about having working with a distributed team is mostly because they've been burned somewhere else. So if you can help them contribute trust in your ways, then it all works out. And that's educating the client, letting them know that you get to hire some of the best talent because you're not just local. That time zone challenges are gone, we can service the whole country. And we often come to you. So I will fly my whole team that are all over the country into San Francisco for a meeting, not only do we get that face time, we get extended client time, and that really creates more of that awesomeness. And because lower overhead means that you can focus more on the client. Okay, so here we are at some Q and A, yes. Right, so are you looking for a company that's fully distributed? Yeah, so there's a couple of folks that are totally distributed. There is a conference called Yammer, which is not Yammer, no, yes. Yonder, yonder. So thank you. So Yonder, if you go and you look at all the people that participate in that, that one is a great resource to look at Ninja companies. Also there's a job site called weworkremotely.com and that often has only remote jobs posted. And then on Drupal.org, you can check off that telecommute exception. And then you kind of look around. We actually hired someone from DrupalCon last year because he found an old presentation of mine that was about running a distributed shop. And he was like, I wanna work with you guys because you're distributed. That was his main thing. The rest was secondary, but distributed was number one. So just stay steadfast. You'll find one. We're hiring by the way. That's my next slide. Yeah, just have fun? So am I fine? Yes, we do contract to hire. So we have some permalancers because they prefer that methodology of payment, but generally we find that full timers are down for the cause. So yes, we are mostly full timers. Contractors is totally optional though. Okay, I'll repeat the question for sure. So financials for like, is this more of a profitable business model? Is that what you're asking? I don't know. Cause I take all the money and put it right back in the company. So I think that we can distribute funds differently. So instead of paying the foreground for an office every month, I can take that foreground and send like micro bonuses to people or I can take them on trips or we can go on different things. So I would assume that yes, overall it is more financially profitable because you're able to have different, the reality is someone who lives in San Francisco needs a lot more of dollars per hour than somebody who doesn't. So there is some financial benefits to running this company this way for sure. Yeah, you answered that. Yes, that is a challenge that I've consciously chosen to hire only North American talent. And then we have this wonderful guy named Bakir show up and he lives in Turkey. So he is, we always ask if he's okay every day, but he is. So, but he conforms to our time zones a little bit and we know that we do not message him after 2 p.m. Cause that's his midnight. So we try to create a flexed like an actual blocked schedule for our one gentleman that's in Turkey. But generally it's, I know that's tricky and I feel like some of our clients that are in the UK we have that challenge. And really what we try to do is make it equally uncomfortable. So if you can know what your daily task is the day before and you can have clear direction and go ahead then sweet. If you need to engage with different people then there is gonna be maybe once a week your project manager has to get up at 6 a.m. or 4 a.m. to talk to you effectively. So you're still in your clear mental head space and you're not talking to them at midnight. So I think it's about making it equally uncomfortable and I know that global companies have a lot of this similar challenge. So I think there was a question in the back here. Okay, okay. So she's asking about some hiring tips and tricks and if there's some hiring best practices there was a situation where they hired someone and then he self-contracted his work. So I would think that you want to help lay out the expectations of what the job looks like and we ask that everybody contributes code every day or contributes something if maybe a designer they contribute an update or they contribute something and we do code review. So if somebody was subcontracting their work they would have to be really sneaky to get it through. It's a very tricky thing. We have a hiring process where we actually do, let's say we're hiring a developer, they send in their resume, they send in code samples. We take a look at their code samples. We look at their writing skills. In that time we're judging them on their responsiveness, on their professionalism, on their organizational skills. All of that is like the soft skills we're analyzing them on. If they pass code review then they go into a soft skills and we have a list of questions we ask that are specific to the role which includes things like what are your top three tips for working remote? And if they don't say, if they don't even think about, it depends on the answer but if we have some things that we know we can start weeding out candidates and then they kind of go through that and then we give them, okay, this sounds really harsh. I will take a long time to hire you but I will fire you very quickly. You have two weeks to deliver. Two weeks, not three months, two weeks. If you can show up in two weeks and kick some serious booty, we're good. And that also means if you go dark once in those two weeks without notification, immediate dismissal. Because it's absolutely important that everybody stays online when they're online. Totally fair. All of a sudden dog's gone and you gotta run outside. I'm gonna run, the dog's outside, I gotta go. And they're off the day. They told me we can manage that is when they don't communicate. So having some expectations that when people come into the job they know what to expect and they know how to interact with you and then give a metrics of whether they pass and fail. Yes. How to land business. I think that's a whole session on itself. And it says, I always say focus on your strengths and sales is my passion. I love that. I would definitely say networking has been the most lucrative form of business development getting to know if you're in your local community go and meet your marketing agencies in town that subcontract work. It's a big question. I wish, no. I spent a lot of my time doing HR operations and then strategic business development but I hired a sales person so I'm slowly getting out of my own way, hopefully. Yeah, in the back. So we have a technology plan that if they, we will, most people come with their own hardware and they're most comfortable with their own hardware but if not, we will pay for half of the laptop if they wanna keep it. If they don't wanna keep it then we'll pay for the whole thing but they have to return it. Now most people wanna keep it and most people either have a computer or not so it actually comes up not too often but we do have cell phone plans. We cover people's cell phone plans. Now we usually put their phone on ours because they don't wanna carry around two phones but we need them to be connected. When we work on more highly secure projects we'll actually provide the laptops and all of the secure connections and you have a security expert that prepares all of those but those are for specific use cases because most people wanna be able to have their own tools. I'm gonna switch it over here. This is a new question. Okay, so the question is how to deal with mentorship in a remote situation because this gentleman's brick and mortar and that's part of their onboarding process is bringing those juniors in. We find that having an onboarding checklist so you know that they have to do certain things we also put them on tasks that are maybe we'll have internal tasks like for example we work with bad camp and we help run so they can maybe do QA. We give them tasks that are low level and we do pairing. The most important thing about that is actually carving out space from the seniors to help the juniors because that to us is that we actually because they're railroaded with all the virtual stuff like you don't even know how much they get railroaded with so we really have to clear their schedules and create a process. Now we struggle with this. We struggle with this because it's mostly that we need to spend more time creating process around how to onboard or mentor more junior people. And a lot of it's the buddy system. Having someone that you pair with that person and that they almost like shadow that person through projects and so many projects as you know are different from project to project that if you have a standard process what is your tech stack? What are the tools that you need to install? How do we write our code? Having those documents I believe and I probably would even turn to you for some advice on that on how do you do your in office stuff because I have a feeling the big thing is is that if you can be on a device or you're on a video so if an iPad you've got your video open on both of those devices but you're still then coding on the computer together then you can maybe pair a program some way or you can collaborate in a way just by using another device so you still have the human because you need to see them, right? You need to kind of see them when you see their brow throw and they go yeah I understand and you're like you don't understand at all. Okay stop, wait a second, right? You can't see that over the phone so that video part is like the closest we can get to kind of putting people together. Yeah, yeah. So the big thing is that if they don't contribute trust within the first two weeks they won't contribute trust ever so I'm looking for them to contribute trust. So if they show up every day and say I don't know what's going on but I'm really excited to be here and what do I need to read and where's my next thing? That gets me really engaged when they haven't done anything in three days and nobody can get a hold of them or whatever then we get worried. So it's like we like to fire slow and fire fast but we're hoping that the hiring process is really thorough so that we very rarely get into those positions. Yeah, question over here? Sure, no yeah. So my mom got sick and I couldn't work so I started thinking that oh I'm just gonna take a project management contract job and what happened was I reached out to my team that I'd worked with in the career in the past which is a group of small contractors and they're about four guys, four guys and one girl that worked in and I said I'm looking for some type of gig and they magically through somehow had a project that was fairly large and they needed project management help and then they said well if you find us more work then we'll give you a commission on it and I literally lived at my mom's house and ate half a burrito a day and bootstrapped it because I had been in positions in the past where I took on business loans and personally I didn't wanna do that again. I'd rather like eat ramen for a year so and I hoarded cash. I hoarded cash for the first year. I put everything I possibly could away. I was really frugal. I flight economy with no upgrades ever, ever, ever. You know, I was never ordering cocktails on the plane ever. Because I really, it was a personal choice on lifestyle to gain more freedom over the long term but cash flow is king. So yeah. Yeah, so we try to make sure that we have a fair salary for wherever you are based on your cost of living. Like if you don't have state tax we don't have to pay you that much to cover your state tax but we wanna make sure that it's equitable and most importantly we find with salary is that there's a path for advancement based on performance. So we do like a three month how you do when are you gonna come full time? Yes and then we do a six month review and then they go annually and then they're based on performance but it's a collaborative process where they say these are my goals, this is my challenges, these are my opportunity areas. It definitely varies from country to country about half of our staff are in Canada and to accommodate those full timers I have to have a Canadian company because I can't employ them through my US company. It's very complicated. Yeah, no, no, no I don't. Video, yes, video, yes, 100% video and I try to fly as the business owners I try to fly to them within the first year of their employment but that's not always possible. So I definitely, when I first met Paul I was like, dude, you're so tall, no clue how tall someone is on a video chat, we're all floating heads, right? So yeah, it's definitely, it's a very expensive process to go and fly everywhere to meet every candidate and we figure after the first three months if that's gonna be solid then we'll probably fly them to a client meeting. Most often the way that people meet is we have a kickoff meeting and we'll fly all those team members to that location, have that kickoff meeting and that might be in Portland, that might be in New York, might be in San Francisco and they get really jazzed because they're going to a new city that work's gonna pay for and they get to meet their coworkers and then I try to moderate their liquor consumption but it's very challenging. They get very excited when they see each other. Oh, sorry guys, yeah, no worries, no worries. Thank you.